Israel Leads World In Medical Device Patents

"Israel Leads World In Medical Device Patents: A Cardio-Vascular SuperPower" (February 2005, Vol 5(10) BioIsrael.com)

Leading text: "Israel leads the world in patents for medical devices on a per capita basis according to data presented at the inaugural session of ILSI, Israel Life Science Industry, a new umbrella organization. Ruti Alon, one of ILSI's founders, pointed out that one of the reasons for founding the organization was to be able to gather accurate date that could be used to present a clear picture of the industry's assets. Her findings corroborate the notion that Israel is a leading player in the world life science arena, especially in the cardio-vascular area.

Among some of ILSI's findings: Israel has 466 life science companies, with 80 percent of them founded in the last ten years. Since 2000 about 50 companies have been founded each year. The industry remains in its formative stage with about thirty percent of the companies in the seed stage and only 20 percent in the clinical stage. The biggest area of industry focus is cardio-vascular with 67 companies active in this area. More than half of the industry is comprised of medical device companies (54 percent) biotech companies make up 21 percent. About a half of the medical device companies focus on therapeutic devices with the leading applications being in cardiovascular, oncology, neurology and neurodegenerative...."[FullText]

Bio-Tech Venture of Weizmann' Neurobiology Professor Attracts Investors

Ora Coren, "Proneuron spine treatment attracts investors" (18 February 2005, HaaretzDaily.com)

Leading text: "The Proneuron biotechnology company is receiving a lot of attention from investors nowadays. It currently has three therapies in relatively advanced stages of development. The most advanced is now being tested on humans, and is for the treatment of spinal cord injuries. The second therapy, for the treatment of brain injuries, is due to enter human trials this year in cooperation with Teva, and Proneuron plans to apply for permission to start testing its stroke treatment on humans in four months. The moving spirit behind Proneuron's development is Prof. Michal Schwartz of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, whose approach is to use the body's immune system to treat diseases of the central nervous system. The company believes that this approach could produce cures for diseases such as stroke, paralysis, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. CEO Nir Nimrodi is enthusiastic when describing the results of the first human trial of its ProCord therapy. "Five patients with total spinal injury regained the ability to feel throughout their body. Three of them are also capable of moving some of the principal muscle groups under the spinal column..."

Excerpt: "Proneuron has received $20 million from Teva in a combination of cash and shares and it has raised an additional $20 million from other investors since its founding in 1996. It is planning another financing round in the second half of this year; the funds are expected to come from existing shareholders for the most part, but it hopes to attract at least one new investor. "It's always good to inject new blood into the company in every financing round," Nimrodi says. The company's founding investor is the American investment firm Hudson Investment Group. In addition, each of the following holds less than 10 percent of Proneuron: AG Tech, Pitango, Infinity, Giza, Tamir Fishman, Teva, the Weizmann Institute and the company's employees. Its last financing round valued the company at more than $60 million. Benny Ze'evi of Tamir Fishman says that treatments like Proneuron's are generally paid for by insurance companies, so they are priced according to how much it would cost the insurer to care for the patient without using this treatment..." [FullText]

Israel based Scholar Journal welcomes NIH New Policy on Open Access

Based in Rehovot, Israel Scholar Journal Neurobiology of Lipids ISSN1683-5506) has issued a press release on the NIH public-access policy:

"Neurobiology of Lipids (NoL) welcomes the announcement by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) new "Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research" effective May 2, 2005. The NIH requests the Agency grant recipients to deposit resulting publications in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central (PMC, a free governmental archive of the life sciences literature) within 12 months since originally published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The article deposition in NIH archive will no doubt benefit the scholars themselves. This is because deposition in PMC archive will ensure the publication is preserved for future generations and gets maximum and barrier-free exposure to both peers and the public. For the Policy wording on these and other issues (such as reliability of article access at PMC site and their integration with other NIH Databases) please see original NIH document:

Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research.
Notice Number: NOT-OD-05-022 (Release Date: February 3, 2005; Effective Date: May 2, 2005).
Issued by National Institutes of Health (NIH) and freely available at this link.

While the new Policy calls for the voluntary submission of final author manuscripts and does not affect the ability to copyright, all NIH grantees now have a new issue to consider when selecting the journal to publish at. To fulfill the NIH request, authors publishing in the majority of the traditional journals (i.e. those where authors transfer copyright to the publisher) will have to go through a process of resubmitting their papers to the PubMed Central archive. Moreover, the authors will often need to select for PMC archive the manuscript version with the changes introduced during the publication procedure, because many publishers (ex. Elsevier) allow archiving of the author's version of the manuscript only.

Neurobiology of Lipids has met the National Library of Medicine quality requirement for PubMed Central archiving and is presently successfully working on bringing its' prior publications' collection into the Extensible Markup Language (XML) files' format (suitable for deposition in PMC) using just released latest version 2.0 of the National Library of Medicine XML Document Type Definition (DTD) for journal publishing.

While taking the advantage of an irreversible Internet and desktop publishing technology development and their end user availability at almost no cost, Neurobiology of Lipids is also originating the research project aiming to develop the software tool that will make direct publishing (to an appropriate XML file compliant with NIH DTD) as simple, as web form submission (that anyone uses while performing on-line bank transaction, interlibrary loan request, an Institution internal services operation or thousand other purposes). Such tool will be essential for independent journals (encouraged by Neurobiology of Lipids and similarly built on a concept of a non-profit model for cost-effective independent scholar journals), their authors, Academic Institutions setting their own archives, and individual scientists, willing to deposit their articles in a modern XML file format. NoL is open for partnership by any interested party and has open opportunities for Graduate students to participate in this and other projects.

Therefore, when Neurobiology of Lipids archiving in PMC is implemented, any article published in the journal will meet the NIH new Policy, immediately and without any need for additional archiving works by authors.

Starting this week XML files for NoL articles will be also available at NoL (as an additional link at articles' web pages) and offered for syndication (as it was earlier implemented for NoL Global Newsstand, indexing NoL articles' abstracts and NoL noteworthy articles published in other journals). Our authors will thus save the time and effort of going through the deposition process themselves. They can also freely use their articles in XML format for Institutional archives or other purposes. The other benefits of publishing in NoL include the rapid, fair and quality peer review, fast publication and high visibility of Neurobiology of Lipids among those working in the filed (as verified by NoL readership of about 1/3-1/4 of the readership of the major Journal of Lipid Research published since 1959) and wide geographical distribution of NoL readers (Neurobiol Lipids World Reader's Map can be viewed by clicking on a map logo at the bottom of the journal home page).

Another opportunity offered by NIH PMC archiving is to link an article to any other publication via related article feature of the DTD. This feature creates an important technical background for NoL call for commentaries and letters to the editor on related/noteworthy articles appeared in other journals. The NIH DTD feature will make sure such communication arising matters when published in NoL are linked in NIH databases to original publications in other journals.

Surely, Neurobiology of Lipids welcomes researchers in the field of neuroscience of fats to consider publishing in the Neurobiology of Lipids all types of articles, and to consider for publication other journals depositing full text articles (not just abstracts!) in PubMed Central. NoL also welcomes industry members to consider establishing funds to support authors publishing in NoL.

Neurobiology of Lipids urges funding bodies worldwide to follow the pioneering NIH policy, and calls for other scholar scientific technical and medical (STM) journals to comply with the NIH request on behalf of their authors.


Further info/contact:
Alexei Koudinov, MD, PhD
Editor
Neurobiology of Lipids
P.O.Box 1665
Rehovot 76100
Israel"

Source: Neurobiology of Lipids welcomes the new National Institutes of Health Public Access policy Neurobiology of Lipids Newsstand (7 February 2005) [Full Text].