Bionic hands for U.S. veteran from new South Street office [VIDEO] : Links

Court to tweet and Facebook trial reminders [Metro]

Working Separately, Together [New York Times] – a coworking piece we missed, featuring heavy attribution from Indy Hall’s Alex Hillman

Monetate Raises $15 Million For Realtime Ad Testing And Targeting Platform [Tech Crunch]

Introducing Timepiece: my first app on the Android market [Arpit Online] — Comcast software engineer Arpit Mathur introduces on his personal blog a tool showing international timezones, smartly displaying Philadelphia as the East Coast representative.

Bionic hands arrive in Philadelphia [Metro] — South Street office for Advanced Arm Dynamics, a California-based company. H/T Tek Lado

Temple University physicist can thin human blood with a magnetic field to fight heart attacks

Rongjia Tao

Powerful news from Temple University that could help prevent heart attacks:

If a person’s blood becomes too thick it can damage blood vessels and increase the risk of heart attacks. But a Temple University physicist has discovered that he can thin the human blood by subjecting it to a magnetic field. Rongjia Tao, professor and chair of physics at Temple University, has pioneered the use of electric or magnetic fields to decrease the viscosity of oil in engines and pipelines. Now, he is using the same magnetic fields to thin human blood in the circulation system.

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In 2008, Tao developed a mechanism that uses an electrical field to boost fuel efficiency, which has begun drawing licensing fees.

Penn, Chinese academics collaborate in neuroimaging: Links

• Penn, Chinese working on brain mapping [Philadelphia Business Journal] — The University of Pennsylvania signs an agreement with the “Chinese Academy of Sciences to develop a joint center of excellence in brain mapping, through which the two organizations will conduct research and education in neuroimaging.”
• Philadelphia, meet your taxes [It's Our Money: Daily News] — All the taxes in the city and how they could be raised.
• In Case you’re wondering: Why Phila.’s not in key index [Philadelphia Business Journal] — “The reason why the Philadelphia metropolitan area is excluded on the S&P/Case-Shiller [HomePrice Index], but other cities including Detroit, Las Vegas and Tampa are included, is simple and frustrating. The S&P/Case-Shiller indexes use data from filings in county tax offices for property tax purposes…” and Philadelphia’s data isn’t share timely enough.
• Chamber questions Council candidates [Chamber blog] — Giving more recommendations for November’s elections
• Geek of the Week: Randy Schmidt of Forge38 [Geekadelphia] — Of iSEPTA and Lose it or Lose it fame
• A penny saved may be what some majors earn [PhillyInc: Inquirer] — If you’re a math, sciences or engineering graduate, your lifetime earnings should be plentiful, if you’re not, you’re screwed.
• Student-started USM fetches $255M from Emcor [PhillyInc: Inquirer] Two West Chester graduates cash out on USM Services Holdings, a Norristown-based commercial cleaning business.

New $20 million Drexel University endowment to build businesses around biomedical research

Portion of less invasive breast cancer screening technology that is similar to what has been developed in part because of an existing Drexel University-Coulter Foundation partnership. A new $20 million endowment between the two is meant to bolster businesses around biomedical research.

Another announcement that came during Philly Tech Week featured funding for an initiative that would better integrate business plans and biomedical research.

Drexel University was awarded $10 million by the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation to endow the Coulter Translational Research Partnership program. The University matched the Coulter Foundation’s grant creating a $20 million endowment to bring life saving solutions to clinical practice by moving promising biomedical discoveries to commercialization… The new endowment will help Drexel enable the Philadelphia region to become a national hotbed of medical device development and build a global network of collaboration between academia and business.

This endowment is an extension of an existing Coulter-Drexel relationship, featuring projects that “have produced more than 40 full patent applications, three issued patents and one copyright registration,” including a wound monitor and a breast cancer screening device.

At the Philly Tech Week One Great Idea event from the Philadelphia Media Network, Ben Franklin Technology Partners President RoseAnn Rosenthal addressed the obstacle this program is meant to combat.

“Across the country we’ve seen a disruption in the innovation pipeline post-World War II,” she said. “We’ve gone from a time when there was a close connect between the technology and those who would develop it for market to now when innovation has moved back to the universities, without much of a market function, and we’ve seen big companies reduce their R&D.”

During the event, Coulter Project Director followed by Davood Tashayyod highlighted his work:

“This is an opportunity to create jobs and innovation that can go around the world but start here in Philadelphia,” he said.

Links: Scientist entrepreneurs, a Delaware cell phone ban and more

• Keystone Edge reports on the growing trend of regional scientists foraying into business startups, amidst the region being ranked the second densest collection of bioscience companies in the country — behind Boston.
• The Inquirer reports on another startup trying to offer residents the solar-power-by-lease option.
• The Philadelphia Business Journal reports that two Philadelphia University laboratories, one of ‘engineered human protection’ and another of biomedical textile structures, have received nearly $1.8 million in federal funds.

• The Wilmington News Journal reports that long-delayed legislation banning the use of cell phones while driving is expected to pass.
• Fox 29 reports on an entrepreneur that says video gaming helped develop his business savvy. Watch the video below.

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Friday Q&A: Pennsylvania Bio President Mickey Flynn

Mickey Flynn wants to talk about entrepreneurship.

In an industry and a region dominated by major players and corporate standbys, the president of Pennsylvania Bio, a statewide trade association for the biosciences with headquarters in Malvern, seems to brighten when startup talk comes to the fore.

He’s gone that route himself. Before taking the chief seat with PA Bio four years ago, Flynn, 68, grew tiny Puresyn, which develops purification services for gene-based drugs and vaccines, from three employees to 25.

But he’s no outsider to PA Bio, rather, he’s a steady hand in the region’s bioscience scene. He was a founding board chairman of the group 20 years ago and, all told, he has just shy of four decades in the industry.

Now, the resident of Downingtown is recovering from his group’s Biotech 2009 Symposium, which drew last month to the Convention Center more than 900 attendees, better than double what it did when he first became president and the largest in its nine years of existence.

Below, Flynn gives us a recap of the conference, handicaps the region’s bioscience-entrepreneurship ecosystem and explains why Mickey isn’t really his name but you ought not call him anything else.

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Shop Talk: Interphase Systems CEO John Biglin on Ready-IT BioPharma

A year ago, John Biglin, the CEO of Interphase Systems, was talking to the CFO of an emerging Center City pharmaceutical company.

The CFO, intent on keeping in order the financial house of his blue-chip invested life sciences startup, had a problem.

“Is it normal that sometimes you don’t get e-mails, or e-mails take a couple days to arrive or when you do get them, they come in triplicate?” Biglin remembers the CFO asking.

John Biglin

“Our IT has been cobbled together by an employee or by his nephew or uncle,” Biglin recalls the CFO and others in his position saying. “Someone just shows up in a truck and sets stuff up in our office. If the FDA came in here and we say we can’t produce this lab data or that, we are out of business.”

The CFO talked about multiple versions of contracts lost, emergency Best Buy trips for whatever hardware is on sale and documents that are never seen again.

That conversation last January set into motion the long-discussed plans for Interphase, which does 60 percent of its business in the life sciences, to develop a turn-key, managed IT platform targeted for small and medium-sized emerging pharmaceutical and biomedical companies that need top-level security, guaranteed disaster recovery, FDA compliance and flexibility. Biglin says that Ready-IT BioPharma, which launched late last month, just might be the only system of its kind.

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Friday Q&A: Jane Hollingsworth of NuPathe on Zelrix, migraines and more

The Zelrix acute-migraine patch introduced by Conshohocken-based NuPathe. Will it fight upstream to market?

Updated 9/18/09 @ 2:42 p.m. Name in title

When Jane Hollingsworth takes a pill to help fight a headache, she might get nauseous or sicker still.

More than half of American adults suffer similarly, she says, which is a bear of a nuisance for anyone with an acute migraine and a problem with the most common medicinal cure. Still many just put up with the pain.

Because it’s affecting millions of people who just might happily pay for a solution, there is admitted industry buzz swarming NuPathe, the Conshohocken-based specialty pharmaceutical company that says it could help everyone with a pain in their head who doesn’t want a pill to swallow. After a scheduled new drug application is filed next year, you just might know someone who uses Zelrix, a NuPathe-manufactured patch that secretes migraine-fighting medication into the bloodstream.

Jane Hollingsworth

“There is no patch for migraines now. There has never been,” says Hollingsworth, 50, the 25-employee company’s CEO who helped launch it in 2005. “It’s very difficult to get drugs through the skin quickly, which is important for migraines especially.”

Difficult for everybody else, she must mean. Because, as the company’s comprehensive phase-III trial data summary presentation suggested at last week’s 14th Congress of the International Headache Society held at the Convention Center, things for NuPathe are going, as Hollingsworth says, “exceedingly well.”

After the jump, the Ardmore native tells us how technology makes Zelrix work, why biomedical entrepreneurship in Philadelphia lags behind smaller hubs like Boston, why she has to cheer for the Flyers and more.

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Friday Q&A: Russell Greig of GlaxoSmithKline’s SR One

Russell Greig has come a long way.

The 57-year-old Scotsman, who still carries that signature and recognizable accent, rode a Fulbright scholarship and a nearly three-decades-long career with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to head SR One, the company’s corporate venture capital arm that is no small part of this region’s VC scene, last year.

Greig himself is a fine personification of GSK’s history, now a London-based multinational that grew through several mergers and acquisitions from a 19th-century Philadelphia research laboratory.

GSK still has Philadelphia offices, but it is decidedly an international affair now, neatly represented by Greig and his resume stuffed with international datelines.

SR One itself has, perhaps like Greig who assumed his new leadership role in June 2008, moved. It was launched 24 years ago in Center City but now is a suburban venture, nestled in Conshohocken, like what regional biomedical companies in which they invest.

The University of Manchester alumnus seems to like it here though, raving about the schools and calling those Philadelphia suburbs home to more beautiful trees and seasons than most anywhere he’s seen.

But our life sciences he says, just might not be as distinctive as we’d like to think, no matter the recent attention we’ve gotten for them.

Below, Greig explains why SR One is so Philadelphia, what he would do if he was king and why he “carefully” calls our region’s biomedical innovation disappointing.

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