A trio of proposed Medicare drug payment models that made a Feb. 14 debut in the U.S. is playing to mixed reviews. Two of the models to be tested by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center seem to “address the real problems underlying prescription drug pricing – patient out-of-pocket expenses and better payment systems that reward the value a medicine brings to the patient and the overall health care system,” said John Murphy, chief policy officer for the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. But he called the third model, which is expected to restrict Medicare payment for some Part B drugs that have indications with accelerated approval, “an attack on the accelerated approval pathway,” which Congress mandated to spur investment and innovation in areas of unmet medical need.

The science that led Garuda Therapeutics Inc. to a $62 million series B financing was a combination of hard work, luck and serendipity, according to co-founder and CEO Dhvanit Shah. At the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Shah and his fellow researchers found that endothelial cells go through significant modifications before becoming hematopoietic stem cells. That simple discovery, as Shah told BioWorld, brought on research leading to the possibility that patients would not need a marrow donor before receiving a stem cell treatment.

A combination of bioengineering techniques on normal cell binding proteins could be the method of the future for selective cell binding. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have created a synthetic glue based on the expression of membrane receptors to establish the desired connection between cells. The results may be applied in different fields of cell biology or biomedicine, such as regeneration and wound repair, including the nervous system, or cancer.