Science in the Triangle

Micell Technologies receives $15 million from St. Jude Medical, GlaxoSmithKline curbs its funding educational programs that bring doctors up-to-date, Duke Genome Center gets a $19.5 million grant and a consortium of area universities and nonprofit organizations are chasing a piece of the $63 billion the Obama Administration wants to spend over the next six years on global health care programs.

Money going to companies

A drug-eluting stent that Micell Technologies, a Raleigh company with 10 employees, is working on has captured the interest of St. Jude Medical, a St. Paul, Minn.-based medical device giant with more than 10,000 employees.

St. Jude bought a $15 million stake in Micell to help the small company develop the stent. A special coating on the stent controls the release of drugs to keep diseased coronary arteries from clogging. But unlike other drug-eluting stents, Micell’s product promises to carry a lower risk of causing blood clots.

The stent is in the early stages of development and will require years of additional testing.

In other company news:

• Icagen, a Durham drug development company, renewed its research partnership with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer for one year. The partners are looking for new painkillers. The renewal means Icagen will receive a $5 million payment from Pfizer and will remain eligible to receive up to $359 million in milestone payments and royalties.
• Talecris Biotherapeutics is scheduled to go public Sept. 30 and raise nearly $800 million, excluding fees.

  About two-thirds of the proceeds, or $514.8 million, would go to the Research Triangle Park-based company to pay back loans. The remainder, about $281.5 million, would go to Cerberus, the New York buyout firm that bought the company four years ago for $303.5 million.

  Cerberus financed the deal with about $200 million in loans. A year later, the buyout fund pulled out an $800 million dividend, which brought Talecris’ debt to more than $1 billion.

• GlaxoSmithKline announced it will limit its funding for medical education programs that bring doctors up-to-date to academic medical centers. The drugmaker will stop paying commercial providers at a time when the pharmaceutical industry is under scrutiny for having to much influence on doctors.

Research money

A group of RTP-area universities, research institutes and nonprofit organizations banded together as the Triangle Global Health Consortium to chase a piece of the $63 billion the Obama Administration wants to spend over the next six years to revamp global health programs.

Congress has yet to approve spending the money, but representatives of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Global Health Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank, came to RTP to gather ideas that can be presented in a report due next year.

More information here.

Also, the Duke Genome Center received $19.5 million to develop a portable device that detects upper respiratory viruses before they cause symptoms.