From the electric light bulb to the Internet, American innovations have made lives better for people in this country and all over the world.

The kind of work we’ve done to advance technology, communication and so many other aspects of people’s lives is about to get a jump start in health care, thanks to today’s announcement of 26 Health Care Innovation Awards. The awards are part of our We Can’t Wait initiative.

“What America does better than anyone else is spark the creativity and imagination of our people," said President Obama during his 2011 State of the Union address, and that’s exactly what the Health Care Innovation Awards aim to do.  These awards provide our most creative minds—whether they’re health care professionals, technology innovators, community-based organizations, patients’ advocacy groups, or others—with the backing they need to build the strong, effective, affordable health care system of the future.  These are 26 unique projects, tailored to the needs of patients by local doctors, hospitals, and other leaders in their communities.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today announced the first batch of organizations for Health Care Innovation awards. Made possible by the health care law – the Affordable Care Act – the awards will support 26 innovative projects nationwide that will save money, deliver high quality medical care and enhance the health care workforce.  The preliminary awardees announced today expect to reduce health spending by $254 million over the next 3 years. 

“We can’t wait to support innovative projects that will save money and make our health care system stronger,” said Secretary Sebelius. “It’s yet another way we are supporting local communities now in their efforts to provide better care and lower cost.”

The new projects include collaborations of leading hospitals, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, technology innovators, community-based organizations, and patients’ advocacy groups, among others, located in urban and rural areas that will begin work this year to address health care issues in local communities.  This initiative allows applicants to come up with their best ideas to test how we can quickly and efficiently improve the quality and affordability of health care.

The genomic data generated from next-generation sequencing machines doesn't amount to much more than alphabet soup if it's not subjected to significant computational processing and statistical analysis. For the data to be useful, the trick is to turn those As, Ts, Gs, and Cs into a manageable description of disease risks and other genetic predispositions. That requires a lot of computational power and time—already a significant bottleneck for some genomic analysis companies.

Several companies are looking to the cloud as a way to help them analyze all the data. The idea is that researchers can send their data to a Web-hosted analysis service that will process raw data into a genetic profile. However, the data files generated by sequencing machines are so massive that the mundane issue of uploading large files to the cloud becomes its own issue. The strategy of a Redwood City, California-based startup called Bina Technologies is to divide and conquer: give customers an in-house data-crunching machine that will turn a mountain of raw sequence into easily shared genetic profiles. Those profiles can then be quickly uploaded to Bina Technologies' cloud-hosted site for data management, sharing, and aggregation.

Supernus Pharmaceuticals Inc. capped off its first week on the Nasdaq up nearly $1 from its initial public offering price. With its IPO in the bag, the Rockville biotech now turns to a bigger gamble: seeing two drugs through Food and Drug Administration approval and onto the commercial market.

The modestly successful May 1 offering marks the first time a Washington-area biotech has gone public since 2007 and leaves Supernus with a pile of cash to shovel into its lead product candidates — epilepsy drugs SPN-538 and SPN-804.

A proposal to speed the approval of new prescription drugs has patient advocates and biotech firms — including many based in Maryland — hoping that Congress will deliver a rare dose of bipartisanship this year.

Lawmakers are proposing a 6 percent increase in the fees that pharmaceutical firms pay the Food and Drug Administration to offset the cost of approving new drugs. If the measure is not signed into law by the end of September, the FDA would lose the ability to charge any fees and be forced to lay off 2,000 workers, significantly slowing review times.

Last Friday, Forbes health care editor Matt Herper and I sat down to talk about my proposal, which I detailed in a paper for the Manhattan Institute, to encourage the FDA to approve more drugs after mid-stage phase II testing, using a process called “conditional approval.” (You can read my proposal, in three parts, here.) Matt put forth some very perceptive critiques of the idea, which I respond to in today’s dispatch.

As a refresher, my proposal builds on an existing FDA procedure called accelerated approval in which the FDA approves drugs that show great promise in phase II, with the caveat that the drug sponsor must still perform confirmatory phase III studies. If the phase III studies ultimately show that the drug doesn’t work as advertised, or has previously unknown safety issues, the FDA can revoke its approval. This is exactly what happened when the FDA revoked the approval of Avastin in breast cancer, after phase III tests did not reproduce the early signal of benefit that the drug had shown in phase II studies.

Last month, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), a trade association representing the U.S. venture capital industry, released the results of its MoneyTree Report on venture funding for the first quarter of 2012.  The report, which is prepared by NVCA and PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP using data from Thomson Reuters, indicates that venture capitalists invested $5.8 billion in 758 deals in the first quarter, which constituted a 19% decrease in dollars and a 15% decrease in deals as compared with the fourth quarter of 2011, when $7.1 billion was invested in 889 deals.

The report notes that the Life Sciences sector (biotechnology and medical device industries) and the Clean Technology sector saw marked decreases in both dollars and deals in the first quarter, with the drop in Life Sciences funding mostly due to decreased funding for the biotech industry.  While the biotechnology industry still managed to place second among the industries tracked by the NVCA in terms of dollars invested in the first quarter, with $780 million invested in 99 deals, this constituted a 43% drop in dollars and a 14% drop in deals over the fourth quarter.  The medical device industry picked up some of the slack for the Life Sciences sector, with $687 million invested in 72 deals, which constituted a 33% increase in dollars and a 6% drop in deals.  The number of deals in the Life Sciences sector dipped to its lowest point since the first quarter of 2009.  Overall, eleven of the seventeen sectors tracked by the NVCA saw decreases in dollars invested in the first quarter.

Yesterday at the New York Biotechnology Association’s 21st annual meeting, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins was beamed in by videoconference to a keynote lunch at the Times Square Marriott Marquis. Collins, who was the featured speaker, apologized for his virtual appearance at the event, but he had a good excuse: Just two hours earlier he was at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., making an announcement about an ambitious new program being undertaken by the NIH and drug giants Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly. The NIH said it will collaborate with the companies to make existing compounds available to outside scientists who want to find new uses for them.

Cambridge’s most prolific life sciences entrepreneur, Andy Richards, says the local cluster is attracting more cash and global kudos than at any time in its history.

Dr Richards says a number of ‘secret’ investments in the UK sector have created a far healthier funding environment than available figures would suggest.

A serial angel investor in Cambridge’s European-leading BiomedTech cluster, Dr Richards is also its most passionate evangelist and believes it has never ridden so high in its quarter-century evolution.

QIAGEN expands Point of Need portfolio with unique AmniSureassay to detect rupture of fetal membranes (ROM) - checked in up to 30% of U.S. pregnancies

Novel FDA-cleared test is highly synergistic with QIAGEN's clinical sales channels

QIAGEN N.V. QGEN -1.92% (frankfurt prime standard:QIA) today announced the acquisition of AmniSure International LLC, a privately owned Boston company that markets the AmniSure assay for determining whether a pregnant woman is suffering rupture of fetal membranes (ROM), a condition in which fluid leaks from the amniotic sac prematurely.