「Video of the Week」First FDA-Approved Gene Therapy by Spark And Its First Patient in US (Spark being acquired today)

Roche to acquire Spark with a 122% premium of it previous closing price, with a deal valued of ~$4.3 billion.

Spark won FDA’s first approval on gene therapy for genetic disease more than one year ago, treating retinal dystrophy (by mutations on the RPE65 gene) with LUXTURNA. The treatment carries a list price of $850,000, or $425,000 per eye.

Besides, Spark Therapeutics has SPK-8011 in clinical trials, a novel gene therapy for the treatment of haemophilia A, which is expected to start Phase 3 in 2019.

Here is a brief video of the procedure for it first patient in US last March.

On President’s Day, California Attorney General With a 16-state Coalition Filed Lawsuit Against President Trump

California Governor Gavin and Attorney General Xavier Becerra today filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California challenging President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency and his attempt to divert funding appropriated by Congress for other purposes.

Joining Attorney General Becerra in filing the lawsuit are the attorneys general of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Virginia.

Trump anticipated lawsuits – “We will have a national emergency, and we will then be sued. And they will sue us in the Ninth Circuit, even though it shouldn’t be there,” the president said, referring to the nation’s largest circuit court whose area encompasses California. “And we’ll possibly get a bad ruling and then we’ll get another bad ruling and then we’ll end up the Supreme Court, and then hopefully we’ll get a fair shake and we’ll win in the Supreme Court, just like the ban.”


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Smart Building (2): IoT Startups Roundup

To start with, Siemens made 2 acquisitions in 2018 – Enlightened Inc. and J2 Innovations – before acquiring Comfy, mentioned in the previous post.

Enlightened – Iot: lightening sensors and more

Three main applications: lightening, HVAC system (heating, a ventilation, and air-conditioning), space utilization.

For example the lightening system, built on IoT architecture, consists of a network of LED lights and their patented sensors connected together to form a sensor and analytics platform. Data is collected 65 times/second to detect environmental and occupancy changes and take action on lighting needs in real-time.

Source: enlightedinc.com
Smart Sensor | Source: enlightedinc.com
J2 Innovations – iot: framework

Created FIN (Fluid INtegration) Framework, an open framework for building automation and IoT applications. It is used as an integration layer and itself doesn’t design/manufacture IoT devices.

According to its website, it employs an applications server technology with tagging and data modeling. FIN is a HTML5 browser based unified toolset optimized for efficient workflows.

View – iot: glass

A dynamic glass company, View raised $1.1 billion from SoftBank Vision Fund in November 2018.

Source: view.com
Source: view.com

With touch displays available..

Source: view.com/assets/pdfs/wall-interface-brochure.pdf

Yes, it is the Age of Glass

Kinestral – IOT: Glass

In the same space, we have another company Kinestral raising $100 million Series D in Jan 2019 (two weeks ago).

Latch – IoT: Door

Famous for its early-stage collaboration with UPS – delivery indoor while occupants are out, Latch raised $70 million in August 2018.

Latch + UPS is competing with Amazon Key (then with its $1 billion acquisition of Ring in Feb 2018) in the same field.

Before Amazon’s move,  in Oct 2017, Assa Abloy, the $23 billion Swedish lock giant that owns Yale and many other brands — announced that it is buying US-based smart lock maker August Home to double down on new technology. (TechCrunch)

Sigfox – IoT: Platform

Based in Europe, Sigfox is designing a Low Power Wide Area network (Ultra Narrow Band radio operating in the unlicensed bands) for IoT connectivity.

And of course the products to centralize data from big tech companies with Amazon and Google the most aggressive ones.

Source: the New York Times
Source: Cnet