Innovators who have built companies with their bare hands, battled years of red tape to bring game-changing products to market, and institutions that continue to change the way healthcare is commercialized and managed made up the inaugural class Thursday of The Cities, MedCity Media’s awards honoring medical excellence in the life sciences.
A. Malachi Mixon, the longtime CEO of Invacare Corp., was honored as The Cities’ Medical Mayor — its person of the year award. Explorys, which has a cutting-edge approach to medical data that has won it millions in investment and top-flight customers within two years, was named Startup of the Year.
Others honored included Cleveland Clinic Innovations for its achievements in commercialization; MIM Software for bringing the first FDA-approved app to Apple’s App Store; and ChanTest for its role in supporting the goals of healthcare.
BioLabs Pegasus Park Cultivates Life Science Ecosystem
Gabby Everett, the site director for BioLabs Pegasus Park, offered a tour of the space and shared some examples of why early-stage life science companies should choose North Texas.
The Cities are national awards that honor innovation, entrepreneurship and achievement from America’s elite medical cities. The first round of awards were given in Cleveland. Additional Cities Awards will be handed out in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, as well as other select markets.
A representative from The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation presented the awards.
It’s exciting to honor invaluable members of Cleveland’s medical community. These companies and individuals were chosen among nominations submitted by readers of Medcitynews.com and our staff as the stand-outs among a community of impressive candidates. We are thrilled to partner with The Kauffman Foundation to present these trophies and to recognize their contributions.
The Cities awards were conceived because life sciences and healthcare have so many innovation hubs: places like Research Triangle Park, Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Cleveland and beyond. It’s easy for some of healthcare’s greatest contributors to go unnoticed. So The Cities, along with MedCityNews.com, will recognize these local superstars to our nationwide audience of healthcare stakeholders.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
A. Malachi Mixon of Invacare received Medical Mayor — the “person of the year” award recognizing the recipient’s insight, vision and contribution to healthcare. Mixon, recently retired CEO of Invacare Corp., was the driving force behind Invacare’s dramatic growth from wheelchair maker to the world’s largest home health products manufacturer.
Explorys, named The Cities Startup of the Year, was founded in 2009 and provides health data management, namely in the form of electronic medical records, an industry that is sure to see tremendous growth in the coming years. Explorys’ database not only manages the individual records, but is capable of scraping the files for trends and patterns that can be applied to improving patient safety and clinical effectiveness.
MIM Software was honored as The Disruptor — a company that has made a major breakthrough in the last 12 months. MIM Software is the developer of the first-ever mobile radiology application. MIM’s endless FDA-approval saga has helped pave the way for similar applications to be accepted by the agency. In uniting the traditionally conservative and slow-changing healthcare industry and the fast-paced and constantly-morphing technology world, MIM Software has provided critical innovation and a way forward.
ChanTest was named Healthcare Ally — honoring a service provider that has demonstrated extraordinary service to healthcare. ChanTest recently signed an agreement with the FDA that will facilitate collaboration on predicting the risk of cardiac arrest associated with various drugs and substances, which represents just a small part of ChanTest’s contribution to patient safety and pharmaceutical development.
Cleveland Clinic Innovations received The Paragon award for an organization, company or institution that demonstrates national or global excellence. Cleveland Clinic Innovations includes, among its vast projects, developing methods of medical device marketing in Europe, backing start-ups ImageIQ and SironRx and hosting an innovations summit for the most recent and important inventions in the industry.
