New York Institute of Technology

It’s been an amazing first half of the year here at Endpoints News . Our company is 50% bigger than it was at the start of 2023, with growth in our news team, our business side and our support group — all built around our mission of being the most vital source of journalism about the biopharma industry. In the last few months, we’ve brought our readers scoops on the exit of Illumina’s CEO and a controversial board pick at Biogen , a look ahead at the demand for IPOs and M&A later this year , analysis of the FDA’s use of adcomms , and smart coverage, every day, about the most important news in biopharma . Today we’re announcing a further expansion of our newsroom, as well as an exciting leader for our events group as we enhance our in-person and virtual offerings. All of the news, delivered with full-text to your inbox. For professionals discovering, developing, and marketing biopharmaceutical drugs. A pillar of our expansion here at Endpoints has been to not only bring you exclusive news you can’t get anywhere else but also make sure you never miss important stories on trial readouts, financings, M&A, people changes and more. Our Early Edition is in your inbox each US morning and relies on a dedicated team of early-rising journalists to produce it. To strengthen that coverage, we’re adding three new journalists who will be based in the UK. They’ll be led by Reynald Castañeda in London, who will work closely with Amber Tong in Hong Kong to oversee our morning and overnight news. In the coming weeks, Reynald and Amber will be joined by Ayisha Sharma and Anna Brown as breaking news reporters in London, who will help start our day earlier and bring their expertise to you. Reynald has a decade of experience as a healthcare journalist, most recently as Reuters Insight’s head of pharma research. Prior to that, he was an editor for Clinical Trials Arena and wrote long-form features and scoops as an investigative journalist for GlobalData Insights . Ayisha comes to us from Scrip and is based in London. She’s spent the last two years covering the commercial implications of clinical trials, deals and drug approvals and will report on developing business and science news out of Europe and early in the US day. Anna joins us from Informa Connect , where she was a senior digital producer developing and moderating events for BioProcess International. The production of complex new therapies is one of the most important stories in biotech, and in addition to breaking news, she will help grow our coverage of the manufacturing side of the industry. She has a master’s degree in biomedical sciences from the University of Bristol and is also based in London. As Endpoints has grown, we’ve also begun to think about parts of healthcare that look similar to biotech. We’re interested in innovation and change, how it gets funded and incentivized, who regulates and gate-keeps it, and how it affects the lives of customers and patients. To lead that expansion, we’ve hired Lydia Ramsey Pflanzer , and she’ll focus on growing our coverage in the world of health tech. In the same way that the world of pharmaceuticals is always being changed by biological innovation, we plan to launch new coverage of how the broader world of healthcare is being changed by tech and business innovation. Lydia comes to us from Insider , where she helped build the publication’s healthcare coverage, breaking news on drug-pricing debates, chronicling the fall of Theranos and covering biopharma. She then helped launch their health tech coverage, focusing on how companies ranging from startups to the biggest tech companies in the world were trying to make their mark in healthcare. Lydia joins us in August, working from Denver, and will start to build out this exciting new area of coverage for us. As part of our expansion, we’ve also invested more in our Washington team, which has long been led by Zach Brennan. Earlier this month, we hired Lia DeGroot to add to our coverage of the FDA and health policy and legislation on Capitol Hill. Lia joins Endpoints from Inside Health Policy , where she covered the FDA, and will work closely with Zach and the rest of our biopharma team. As Endpoints News has grown, so have the ways in which we connect with readers outside our stories. We now have a thriving events business, with major gatherings in Boston, San Francisco and London, as well as our robust online events business. We often talk here about the global community in biopharma and the power of our publication to connect our readers with each other through in-depth, sophisticated conversation and networking opportunities. This month, Carrie Cliggett joined us as our new VP of events to lead the growth of this part of our content and our business into the next phase of its growth. Carrie joins us from Wolters Kluwer, where she was VP, global event management, after a career that has spanned Bloomberg , New York Institute of Technology and Fortune . Over the next several years, you can expect to see more stand-alone events from us, more high-profile interviews with newsmakers, more opportunities for connection and networking with peers in the industry, and a continuation of the expertly produced, deeply intelligent content and conversation that our readers and business partners have long trusted us to create. Carrie will work with Ryan McRae, our chief revenue officer, as well as the stellar Endpoints events and partnership teams that many of you already know. This is an exciting time at Endpoints, and our partners at the Financial Times have helped make possible many of these new hires, as well as our hires from earlier in the year who are already thriving inside the (virtual) newsroom. In addition to adding great people, we’re also continuously thinking about how we serve our readers better, getting you the information you need when you need it. You can expect more improvements to our site and our newsletter in the months to come. In the meantime, keep an eye out for more breaking news, more great reporting and analysis, and more chances to convene and hear from the biggest names in the industry. We’re glad to have you as our readers!

The Seasoned Healthcare Executive Brings 30+ Years of Clinical, Administrative, and Operations Experience NEW YORK, Jan. 25, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Stephen & Christine Schwarzman Animal Medical Center Board of Trustees has announced Helen Irving, RN, MBA, as its incoming President and Chief Executive Officer. Ms. Irving joins AMC, the largest non-profit animal hospital in the world, on January 30, 2023, during a pivotal time for the 113-year-old Upper East Side institution. The hospital is currently undergoing a $100 Million expansion and modernization project to accommodate unprecedented demand for its veterinary care. Continue Reading Helen Irving, RN, MBA An accomplished leader and healthcare executive, Helen Irving has devoted her 30-year career to operational excellence in the delivery of healthcare services. As a trained RN with an MBA and over a decade as a healthcare CEO, her wealth of experience and expertise includes hospital operations, clinical care and management, and leadership in healthcare administration. "Helen is an inspiring leader with deep clinical experience and a proven track record," said Robert Liberman, Chairman of AMC's Board of Trustees. "We are confident she will chart a successful course with the opportunities that lie ahead, ensuring AMC remains at the forefront of excellence and ingenuity." Prior to joining AMC, Helen served for ten years as President and CEO of LiveOnNY, a federally designated organ procurement non-profit organization serving the New York metropolitan area, and one of the largest organ procurement organizations in the country. Prior to joining LiveOnNY, Ms. Irving served as Vice President of Hospital Operations at Mount Sinai Medical Center for five years, where she oversaw a broad range of hospital services. She also has held positions as Transplant Operations Manager at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Clinical Manager at New York Organ Donor Network. She maintains her nursing license after earlier staff nurse positions at hospitals in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Ms. Irving holds an MBA in Healthcare Administration from Fairleigh Dickinson University and serves on the boards of the New York State Hemophilia Consortium, the Medical Advisory Board for NYIT, and until recently, the National Cancer Center. "Leading the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center is such an exciting opportunity given my deep roots in New York's healthcare system," said Ms. Irving. "I am honored to have the opportunity to work with AMC's world class clinical team in serving the region's families and their beloved pets and look forward to getting to know everyone in the AMC family, whose dedication to the best veterinary care possible is truly an inspiration." "I am so pleased to leave AMC in such wonderful hands," said Kathryn Coyne, who will retire after a 12-year tenure as AMC's President and CEO and will join AMC's Board of Trustees. "I will do everything possible to ensure this transition is a success, and I look forward to continuing to serve AMC on the Board." Ms. Irving is a native of London but has called New York home for over 30 years. She is a passionate animal lover with a Welsh terrier and a rescue tabby included in her family. About the Stephen & Christine Schwarzman Animal Medical Center The Stephen & Christine Schwarzman Animal Medical Center is the world's largest non-profit animal hospital, with 130+ veterinarians providing the highest quality medical care across more than 20 specialties and services, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Our mission to provide the best in care, research, and education has been the foundation of our work for over a century. Learn more at: . CONTACT: Barbara Ross, [email protected], 845-659-9810 SOURCE Schwarzman Animal Medical Center

A COVID surge is coming. Will new treatments and vaccines beat it back? We’re heading into a fall and winter COVID-19 surge, most medical experts agree. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical advisor, warned about this in April. The crucial question is how bad will it be? We have vaccines. We have new treatments. The hospitalization and death rates from COVID-19 have been plummeting for more than a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), although they seem to have plateaued lately. The daily death rate hovers between 400 and 500 individuals, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center. Specifically, last Friday 402 people died from the disease, while 52,800 new cases were reported. But as President Joe Biden said recently the pandemic seems to be over, though COVID-19 must still be closely monitored. And the Biden administration also says that about 100 million people could get COVID-19 this fall and winter. If COVID-19 continues to kill 400 individuals a day, that would come to about 145,000 deaths in a year. Influenza killed between 12,000 to 52,000 Americans each year between 2010 and 2020. (The range represents the uncertainty about whether someone dies from the flu, or from underlying conditions.) Of course, there’s always the fear of what epidemiologists refer to as frankenviruses: A COVID-19 variant as deadly as Delta, and as transmissible as Omicron. Transmissibility matters. Even though Delta is epidemiologically deadlier than Omicron, the fact that Omicron can infect so many more people made it the biggest killer in the United States, according to the CDC. Perhaps the most worrisome sign of all is that subvariants and sub-subvariants of Omicron are being reproduced “exponentially,” as Fortune magazine reports. Two sub-subvariants of Omicron that raise concerns are BF.7 (also known as BA.2.75.2), and BQ.1.1. Preliminary data suggest that BF.7 evades antibodies caused by vaccines and prior infection better than any other iteration of the disease. Except for, possibly, the newest kid on the block, BQ.1.1, which is so new that not much is known about it yet. These observations were made in preprint studies released last week: one by Swedish researchers, the other by Chinese researchers.   Raj Rajnarayanan, Ph.D., assistant dean of research and associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology campus in Jonesboro, Ark., tells Fortune that these and other emerging subvariants and sub-subvariants have the potential to render ineffective current treatments and vaccines.   Stuart Ray, M.D., vice chair of medicine for data integrity and analytics at Johns Hopkins Department of Medicine, tells Fortune that what makes BF.7 particularly worrisome involves a spike protein different than what’s been seen in other Omicron variants, as well as a change in the nucleotide sequence. “The same growth advantage in multiple countries makes it reasonable to think that BF.7 is gaining a foothold,” Ray tells Fortune. The Biden administration encourages everybody to get the new booster that targets not only original COVID but the Omicron version as well. However, some experts question the research used to develop the new booster. Monica Gandhi, M.D., an infectious disease expert and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, pointed out to Fierce Healthcare several weeks ago that “although there is absolutely biologic plausibility that the BA.4/BA.5 plus ancestral strain booster shots will increase neutralizing antibody data in humans, we only have mice data at this point (in <10 mice) that neutralizing antibody titers to BA.5 are increased above the original booster shot,” Gandhi tells Fierce Healthcare. “We also have clinical data from the BA.1/bivalent vaccines in humans from which the CDC is extrapolating. Although we do use mice data for updating flu shots every year, this is the first time that the mRNA booster has been updated [using mice data]. So, getting human data with the BA.4/BA.5/ancestral strain bivalent vaccine may increase confidence in the vaccine.” Rajnarayanan uttered the soundbite when it comes to what worries healthcare experts: That the new variants might be invulnerable to new treatments and vaccines. It was such a money quote that Fortune used it in its headline. “We used to say we have the tools,” Rajnarayanan said. “The tools are getting picked off.”