A San Francisco biopharmaceutical company developing small molecule products for use in organ transplants and metabolic diseases including diabetes has raised $480,000, presumably to advance its lead candidates toward commercialization.The first of Limerick BioPharma’s lead candidates, LIM-0705, is designed to improve the safety of existing immunosuppressive drugs used to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients. [...]

SoftTech VC, a seed-stage tech fund that has invested in digital health company Fitbit, has closed a $55 million fund and is looking for a handful of new consumer tech startups.With priorities in mobile cloud and web commerce services, the firm plans to invest in 60 early stage tech companies over the next three years. [...]

GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK) is adding to its cancer drug discovery capabilities by picking up the epigenetics research program from drug partner Astex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ASTX).Oncology drug discovery and development company Astex will end its work on the the “Climb” collaboration and transfer the research work and assets to British pharma giant GSK, which has its U.S. headquarters [...]

The biggest new healthcare product unveiled at CES this week was undoubtedly Life Technologies Corp.’s (NASDAQ:LIFE) new Ion Proton Sequencer, a bench-top machine that the company says will be able to sequence the entire human genome for $1,000 by the end of the year. (A side note: Illumina Inc. announced the release of a similar [...]

Thefts of portable digital health devices, like smartphones and tablets, accounted for half of data breaches in 2011. That kind of mobility is hurting the adoption of mobile health products.Russell Dollinger has been working on strategies around the problem. Dollinger’s California startup Ingenuitor, which produces books and digital devices to overcome language barriers in hospital [...]

Will digital health apps and devices for smartphones become so indispensable that we wonder how we functioned without them? Or do they risk becoming part of an enormous data avalanche? Those questions were raised in a recent article examining digital health by Fast Company that maps smartphone apps and devices across a human body.AliveCor has [...]

GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK) is strengthening its drug pipeline with an experimental arthritis treatment from drug partner ChemoCentryx.The pharmaceutical giant has exercised an option for an exclusive license to develop ChemoCentryx’s investigational drug CCX354, which recently produced positive phase 2 clinical trial results in a study of patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Under terms of the collaboration agreement, [...]

How are physicians using social media and to what extent do they recommend it for their patients? A compilation of surveys by a social media strategy firm reveals that physicians’ use of social media groups such as Twitter and YouTube for professional and personal use has surged in the past three years. Although physicians are [...]

ViroPharma (NASDAQ:VPHM) has entered into an exclusive option to acquire Meritage Pharma, a San Diego, California-based company developing an orphan drug, in a deal valued at more than $69 million.Meritage is focused on using oral budesonide suspension as a treatment for eosinophilic esophagitis, a chronic inflammatory disorder of the esophagus. Eosinophilic esophagitis is a newly [...]

A social media strategy firm has created a useful graphic that charts a brief history of medical technology, from the invention of the stethoscope in 1816 to the development of the commercial hybrid PET/MRI scanner to more recent advances.Designed by Samantha Sanders of Murrieta, California-based oBizmedia.com, the infographic was created for SmallCellLungCancer.net to boost its [...]