Jim Shamp

German conglomerate Bayer AG’s agreement to sell crop science businesses for $7 billion to BASF includes its R&D employees and campus in the Research Triangle Park. Both of the German agricultural giants have major facilities in North Carolina, contributing to North Carolina’s reputation as a global capital of agricultural biotechnology. The purchase by BASF includes an agreement that the buyer will retain, for at least three years, Bayer’s RTP campus and the approximately 300 employees working in the company’s seeds business. The sale is subject to successful closing of Bayer’s previously announced $57 billion acquisition of U.S. agricultural heavyweight...

​The North Carolina Biotechnology Center is hosting the second annual VaccinatioNCelebration flu shot clinic all day Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2017, to highlight North Carolinians’ production of the newest generation of flu vaccine. The vaccine, Flucelvax Quadrivalent, is made at the $1 billion Seqirus biomanufacturing facility in Holly Springs from a cell culture process rather than the traditional growing of the key component in chicken eggs. The process allows unusually high-speed, efficient vaccine production. It’s a result of nearly two decades of partnerships involving NCBiotech and other local, state and federal entities. The evolution of this vaccine involved three successive corporate...

TransEnterix, a Morrisville medical device company that uses robotics to improve minimally invasive surgery, is making big news by going small. The company, founded in 2006, by Synecor, a Chapel Hill business accelerator that spun out of Duke University in 2001 to commercialize medical device inventions, says European surgeons have performed the first 3-millimeter micro laparoscopic robotic surgeries in the world using the Senhance Surgical Robot. The 3mm instruments enable so-called micro laparoscopy procedures, allowing surgeons to make tiny incisions that leave virtually no scars for patients. Senhance is a multi-port robotic system that allows multiple arms to control...

Editor’s note: Jim Shamp writes and edits news and other Web copy, brochures and other internal and external Biotechnology Center materials, and supports the Corporate Communications unit’s marketing and media relations activities. He also is a frequent contributor to WRAL TechWire. RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – A sow and a soybean walk into a lab. It might be the start of a good joke. I don’t know. But Tim Xtreme Lee has done the due diligence to extract the funny from the corn. He’s a Californian with a Ph.D. in biology and the equivalent in comedy. It probably helped that...

The billion-dollar cell culture Seqirus vaccine factory in Holly Springs has hit yet another milestone. The 550 highly skilled workers at the sprawling factory southeast of Raleigh successfully produced the world’s first cell-based influenza vaccine at commercial scale using a candidate vaccine virus (CVV) that has been isolated and grown in cells, rather than in eggs. CVVs are prepared by the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS) and associated laboratories, and are used by manufacturers to develop and produce influenza vaccines. The use of cell-derived CVVs, rather than egg-derived CVVs, has the potential to...

​G1 Therapeutics, a clinical-stage oncology company based in Research Triangle Park, became a publicly traded entity today with a $105 million initial public offering of seven million shares of stock priced at $15 a share. The IPO also gives underwriters a 30-day window to buy up to 1,050,000 additional shares at the same $15 apiece. [Shares opened at $14.83, dipped to as low as $14.10, then rebounded to close the day at $15.] G1, a spinout from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is developing novel therapies that address significant unmet needs in people with various cancers....

A California surgeon has performed the first U.S. bone graft using a pliable foam produced by Research Triangle Park–based medical biomaterials company CURASAN Inc. Divakar Krishnareddy, M.D., used CURASAN’s CERASORB Ortho Foam bone graft product in a knee fusion procedure, technically called knee arthrodesis, at Los Angeles Community Hospital. It was the first surgery using CERASORB since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it in December 2016. “It’s exciting to see a product that has both excellent handling and strong clinical evidence become available in the U.S.A.,” said Krishnareddy. “CERASORB Ortho Foam’s handling is very easy to adapt...

​Ticket sales close Wednesday, May 10, for a May 17 event featuring a talk by the immediate past U.S. FDA commissioner, Robert Califf, M.D., MACC. Califf, now the Donald F. Fortin, M.D. professor of cardiology at the Duke University School of Medicine, will address the spring symposium of the North Carolina Regulatory Affairs Forum, one of the 20 exchange groups supported by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. EVENT INFORMATION: http://www.ncraf.org/ It provides an information exchange eight or 10 times a year on regulatory affairs involving research, development or the manufacture of drugs, biologics or medical devices. The upcoming meeting,...