Monthly Archives: July 2009

Med Device Company Grabs $11 Million for Surgical Snake Robot

Late last week, a little company in Newport, R.I. made a big announcement; namely, that it had nabbed $11.6 million in a Series A funding round for its snake robot technology for minimally-invasive surgical procedures.  Given the severely sluggish VC market and what feels like a dearth of new deals the past two quarters, this [...]

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Non-Invasive Alternative Available for Kidney Function Post-Transplantation Studies

There’s good news today for the more than 30,000 people receiving life-saving kidney transplants globally each year. Carlsbad, California-based Invitrogen aims to improve life after transplant with a new biomarker tool that addresses two chronic and life-threatening challenges: kidney rejection triggered by the graft and the cumulative cell and tissue damage caused by immunosuppressive drugs [...]

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Serial Entrepreneur Focuses on Hydrogels; Nabs New Funding

Waltham, MA-based medical device company Augmenix has allegedly sealed up $4.7 million of a planned $7.5 million round of funding this week, according to Mass High Tech. The company, while still rather under the radar given its sparse website, sounds promising: begun by serial life sciences entrepreneur Amar Sawhney, it is developing space-filling hydrogels [...]

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Pharma for Pets and New Cambridge-based CRO in MHT's Startup Spotlight

Life sciences took two of the five spots in this week’s Startup Watch from Mass High Tech. The first company spotlighted as one to watch is a unique pharmaceutical company out of Maine called Putney that specializes in drugs for pets. The company says it focuses on developing generics for frequently used drugs where cost [...]

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Stem Cell Start-ups Unite

As the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) kicked off its annual meeting in Barcelona today, stem cell technology start-up iZumi Bio, a recent Fierce 15 finalist, grabbed headlines with the announcement that it had merged with Pierian, another stem cell technology start-up whose founders include three Harvard faculty members.
The newly formed company, called [...]

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Life Sciences Looking to the Cloud

We’ve seen a lot of ink dedicated to cloud computing in the life sciences press over the past six months, so it seems like it is past time to acknowledge the buzz and take a closer look at some of the issues surrounding this latest movement. Genome Technology’s overview of the trend, published today [...]

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