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TraceLink Adds More than 130 New Customers in Q2 2018 with 255 Companies Now Live in Production, Exchanging Serialized Product Data on the Life Sciences Cloud

NORTH READING, Mass. — TraceLink Inc., the World’s Largest Track and Trace Network for connecting the life sciences supply chain and providing real-time information sharing for better patient outcomes, today announced it added more than 130 new customers in the second quarter of 2018, up 124 percent annually in quarterly customer growth, for a total of 939 customers in 39 countries. Additionally during the second quarter, 42 new pharmaceutical companies and contract manufacturing organizations (CMO) were configured for data exchange on the TraceLink network, for a total of 255 manufacturers that are now live in production, delivering serialized prescription medicines to markets around the world.

“I am extremely proud of the entire team at TraceLink and our continued success to meet the serialization and track and trace needs of the industry. Every department is integral to our momentum, helping TraceLink to considerably widen its position as the global market share leader, and meeting the high standard of service excellence that our customers have come to expect,” said Shabbir Dahod, president and CEO, TraceLink. “Companies we’re engaged with are telling us that most serialization projects with other solution providers are taking more than a year to implement and are over budget – whereas TraceLink’s average implementation time for serialization is less than eight months and comes with no hidden costs. Our unique network-tenant approach enables TraceLink to implement the fastest and most comprehensive integration with trade partners, ensuring that business can achieve their serialization goals on time and on budget.”

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Centivo, a New Type of Health Plan, Raises $34 Million in Series A Funding

Next Generation Self-Funded Health Plan Launched to Help Employers Deliver Affordable, Sustainable Healthcare for Their Employees

NEW YORK, July 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Centivo, a new type of self-funded health plan, has raised $34 million in Series A funding.  The capital will be deployed to build the company’s technology and infrastructure, develop local partnerships, and support market launch.  Bain Capital Ventures led the financing round, with additional investments from F-Prime Capital Partners, Maverick Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Ingleside Investors, Rand Capital (NASDAQ: RAND), Grand Central Tech Ventures, Oxeon Investments, and several individual investors, including industry veterans Jim Foreman, Ken Goulet, and Kevin Hill.

Centivo was founded to bring cost sustainability to employers and affordable, high-quality healthcare to the millions of Americans who struggle to pay their healthcare bills.  “After nearly 20 years of ‘consumerism,’ healthcare remains as unaffordable and inefficient as ever,” noted Centivo CEO and co-founder Ashok Subramanian.  “Employers are tired of apologizing to their employees for rising costs and diminishing benefits.  It is time to turn the page on the failed era of high deductibles and implement a new solution that produces better results for individuals, employers, and providers.”

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Consumers Demand Patient Data Protection as Black Book Names Protenus as Leading-Edge Innovator

BALTIMORE — In an effort to look forward to the future of healthcare innovation, Black Book Research recently performed a survey that examined consumer preferences about which innovative healthcare technologies piqued their curiosity in four key areas:

“(1) immediate demand from them as an active consumer (meaning they had used or interacted with a healthcare technology, product or service within the last six months);

“(2) most likely drive an improvement in their healthcare status, choices or delivery in the next six months;

“(3) highly innovative and/or disruptive for the healthcare industry;

and (4) immediate value to them.”

With the explosion of electronic health records over the past decade has come an attendant vulnerability of protected health information (PHI). Patient awareness of this issue continues to increase, as demonstrated by such recent surveys as Aetna’s Health Ambitions Survey, where 80 percent of consumers highly rated privacy as an important aspect of healthcare. This consumer fear is well-founded, with at least one public data breach occurring in healthcare every day, and millions of records breached per year, according to the Protenus Breach Barometer.

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Tradier Brokerage, Inc. Teams Up With Ticker Tocker For Partnership That Grants Clients Access To Unlimited Commission Free Equity Trading

DANBURY, Conn. — Ticker Tocker, a new integrated trading productivity platform to support both institutional and novice traders to quickly find, test, learn, share, and/or execute trades, announced today that it has signed an exclusive partnership with Tradier Brokerage, Inc. This partnership will allow all subscribers that link their Tradier accounts with Ticker Tocker to receive an unlimited amount of commission free equity trades for the duration of their active membership with the new Ticker Tocker platform.

Through this collaboration, Tradier clients will have no limitations on the number of equity shares that can be traded per trade and/or on the number of trades that can be placed per day, week, and/or month. The partnership benefits both new and existing clients of Tradier as long as they are active subscribers of Ticker Tocker with their accounts linked for trading through the platform.

Typically, the average commission per equity trade order through Tradier is $3.49. This new partnership with Ticker Tocker will allow Tradier clients to actively make equity trades without worrying about these out of pocket commission costs.

“You often hear of eye-catching deals to attract new customers, but at Tradier we believe that all customers, new and old, should be rewarded – and that is what our partnership with Ticker Tocker is all about,” said Dan Raju, Co-Founder, Chairman of the Board, and CEO, Tradier Brokerage, Inc.

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Compass Therapeutics Closes on Series A Financing Totaling $132 Million

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Compass Therapeutics closed on the final $49 million of its $132 million Series A financing. The round was led by OrbiMed Advisors and included F-Prime Capital, Cowen Healthcare Investments, Thiel Capital, Biomatics Capital, Ulysses Holdings, Borealis Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments and Biomed Realty Ventures.

Compass Therapeutics focuses on identifying antibody drug candidates, with an initial focus on T cells, NK cells and macrophages. It has antibody discovery and bispecific engineering platforms, including StitchMabs, its proprietary high-throughput bispecific screening platform that allows for rapid identification of synergistic bispecific activity.

The company’s lead product is CTX-471, which is currently in late IND-enabling studies. Compass plans to take the compound into the clinic in the first half of 2019. The company states, “It has been tested across multiple in vitro and in vivo models and has consistently shown potent and durable curative activity as a single agent, in combination with other immune-modulatory agents and with tumor-targeting therapies. In addition, in stringent high tumor burden therapeutic models, CTX-471 has led to complete tumor rejections and the generation of long-term, protective immunological memory.”

The funds raised will be used to push CTX-471 into the clinic as well as to identify two more clinical candidates by the end of this year. They hope to take the second and third compounds into the clinic by early 2020.

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TraceLink Unveils Product Information Manager, a Standards-Based Network Application for Its Industry-Leading Digital Information Sharing Platform

NORTH READING, Mass. — TraceLink Inc., the World’s Largest Track and Trace Network for connecting the life sciences supply chain and providing real-time information sharing for better patient outcomes, today announced Product Information Manager, a standards-based network application built on TraceLink’s end-to-end information-sharing platform. Designed to leverage serialized product information and address a range of business use cases such as rich media product education, patient engagement, and digital recalls, Product Information Manager will first deliver capabilities for master data sharing, verification routing and verification responses, in order to help companies meet the 2019 U.S. Drug Supply Chain and Security Act (DSCSA) saleable returns verification requirement.

As a notable contributor to 15 industry standards workgroups, including the Healthcare Distribution Alliance (HDA) Verification Router Service Task Force, and co-chair positions on two GS1 workgroups, TraceLink has leveraged interoperable standards defined in partnership with these organizations to ensure that Product Information Manager meets the interoperability requirements for saleable returns mandated by the DSCSA. More than 195 TraceLink customers from 93 companies spanning pharmaceutical manufacturers to healthcare organizations have also participated in a Product Information Manager solution innovation group to provide input into the application development process and ensure that their critical challenges associated with saleable returns verification and master data sharing are being addressed.

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US FDA Approves Adagene IO program IND for Solid Tumor and Non-Hodgkin Lympoma Ph1 trial

SUZHOU, China — Adagene, Inc., an innovative antibody engineering and discovery company, has received notification from the FDA to proceed on its Investigational New Drug (IND) application to study its lead product (ADG-106) in patients with advanced solid tumors and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

CD137 or 4-1BB, a member of the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) receptor superfamily is a promising immune-oncology target. Ligation of CD137 induces a co-stimulatory signal on activated CD8+ T cells and natural killer (NK) cells, resulting in proliferation, increased pro-inflammatory cytokine secretion and, cytolytic function. CD137 is also thought of as an attractive target for autoimmune disease as T regulatory cells (Tregs) also express 4-1BB. ADG-106 is a fully human agonistic mAb targeting a novel epitope of CD137. Adagene will investigate the safety and efficacy of ADG-106 therapy as a single agent across a range of solid tumor and non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients in a Phase I clinical study expected to commence in the second half of 2018.

“ADG-106 is targeting a different epitope of CD137 compared with the other two therapeutic antibodies against this target in early clinical trials”, said Peter Luo, CEO and Co-Founder of Adagene. “Our proprietary Dynamic Precision Library was able to generate an antibody that targets a unique epitope with cross-reactivity, enabling robust translational studies in both efficacy and safety. ADG-106 is the only monoclonal antibody against this target that has demonstrated potent single agent efficacy in multiple tumor models with intact immune system and work in synergy with other therapeutics, while maintaining an excellent safety profile at extremely high dose. We look forward to starting our clinical trial in the United States soon.”

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UMMC Selects Kyruus’ ProviderMatch for Access Centers to Improve Call Center Operations

Kyruus, a patient-provider matching health ITcompany, announced that the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) has selected the company’s ProviderMatch for Access Centers solution to improve call center operations and enhance patient access to UMMC’s network of 800+ providers in 170 locations across the state of Mississippi.

ProviderMatch for Access Centers will make it easier for call center agents to identify the right provider for patients’ needs, enabling more precise patient-provider matching to support both patient and provider satisfaction.With its network of providers delivering care to over 600,000 patients a year across 82 counties, UMMC first needed a modern solution that would enable it to gain a single point of access to provider information and a deeper level of insight into providers’ areas of expertise.

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Biotech Startup Innovent Files for Hong Kong Debut

Innovent Biologics, a Chinese biomedical developer backed by Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong after the bourse opened the door for pre-profit biotech startups to list.

Innovent didn’t disclose the size of the planned IPO in its prospectus submitted to the Hong Kong stock exchange last week. Reuters reported earlier that the company is looking to raise between $300 million and $500 million. Innovent said funds raised from the IPO will be used to accelerate its clinical trial work and commercialization of drugs.

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