How A Breast Cancer Pioneer Finally Turned A Profit

J.J. Colao, Forbes Staff. This story appears in the November 5, 2012 issue of Forbes.

First-mover advantage is no guarantee of early success. Myriad Genetics, which makes diagnostic tests to detect predisposition to cancers, burned through more than $500 million over 17 years before turning a profit.

Founded in 1991, Myriad began auspiciously enough. Three years later it isolated the BRCA1 gene, a segment of DNA that marks 600,000 American women with a greater than one-in-two chance of developing breast cancer. To the victor go the patents, and that discovery earned the team, led by CEO Peter Meldrum, the exclusive right to sell tests that flag mutations of the gene, a $1 billion annual market.

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Challenge to Solve Polio

InnoCentive, Inc., the global leader in open innovation, crowd-sourcing, and prize competitions, and Beyond Polio, an initiative of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation and the investment firm Spencer Trask, announced in November the solutions of its first Innovation Challenge which sought to identify ways to reduce the cost and facilitate the use of the inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) in low- and middle-income countries.

This Challenge achieved BeyondPolio’s desired result of identifying promising solution paths that could help complete the eradication of polio at a global level, building on the success of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative which has used oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) to nearly wipe out the virus in the remaining countries where it has been circulating.

Additional information is available on Innocentive.com  and BeyondPolio.org.

Langer Wins White House Award

Dr. Robert Langer was among 11 extraordinary inventors recently awared the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Obama at the White House on February 1. The award is the highest honors bestowed by the United States Government upon scientists, engineers, and inventors.

Langer Awarded National Medal

Inventor of InVivo Therapeutics' scafolding to treat spinal cord injuries and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Langer was cited "for inventions and discoveries that led to the development of controlled drug release systems, engineered tissues, angiogenesis inhibitors, and new biomaterials."

Read the press release.