MADISON â?? For people who suffer from epilepsy, current drugs donâ??t always control seizures. A startup company with ties to UW-Madison technology, NeuroGenomex Inc., is trying to provide a breakthrough medication.
Epilepsy affects more than 3 million Americans every year, with most new cases developing in children and elderly. Epilepsy is a central nervous system disorder whose main symptom is seizure caused by electric activity in the brain.
Cellular Dynamics International, founded by world-renowned UW-Madison stem-cell researcher James Thomson, announced a merger Monday with sister companies Stem Cell Products Inc. and iPS Cells Inc.
One of the stateâ??s largest stem cell research companies, founded in part by stem cell pioneer James Thomson, announced a merger with two other Madison-based corporations, finalizing $18 million in funding.
What if doctors could take a strand of your hair and use it to find out which drugs could best treat you for high cholesterol, for example, without giving you a bad reaction?
That may be just a few years away, says an official of Cellular Dynamics International (CDI), 525 Science Drive.
The Madison stem-cell company, founded by UW-Madison researcher James Thomson, has landed $18 million in financing that will help CDI expand operations and add staff, as it works to become a world leader in the field, said chief commercial officer Chris Kendrick-Parker.
Cellular Dynamics International, the Madison-based research company founded by stem cell pioneer Dr. James Thomson and three fellow UW-Madison professors, has merged with two sister companies and is getting $18 million in new financing.
The two companies merging with CDI are Stem Cell Products Inc. and iPS Cells, Inc.
Three companies founded by star University of Wisconsin-Madison stem cell researcher James Thomson are merging into a single entity that aspires to be a world leader in the field.
Under a deal announced Monday, Cellular Dynamics International is joining forces with Stem Cell Products Inc. and iPS Cells Inc. Backed by $18 million in private venture capital, the new company is keeping CDI (nyse: CDI – news – people )’s name and its headquarters in Madison.
Cellular Dynamics International Inc., a firm co-founded by stem cell pioneer and University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher James Thomson, has absorbed a pair of sister companies and raised $18 million in financing, the firm said Monday.
CDIâ??s sister companies, Stem Cell Products Inc. and iPS Cells Inc., merged into the company, placing the intellectual property and commercial, research, and production capabilities of the predecessor companies under a unified management team.
Three Wisconsin companies focused on stem cell research are merging.
The companies are joining under the banner of Cellular Dynamics International (CDI), based in Madison. Stem Cell pioneer, Dr. James Thomson, says they’re looking at the commercial use of stem cell technology.
We’re glad to hear that UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin is working on a constructive relationship with the board of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business group. Martin said she has had separate meetings with the WMC’s board of directors and WMC president Jim Haney and is hoping they can focus on common interests.
Quoted: Michael Knetter, dean of the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Also sponsoring MGE’s new green energy Web site are UW-Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, and 1,000 Friends of Wisconsin, an environmental group.
University of Wisconsin-Madison students and staff are preparing to move into the new the 250,000-square-foot Student Services Tower, a “one-stop shop” for a range of services and activities.
Courtesy of the Wilson Law Group, an excellent estate-planning firm here in Madison, one of your correspondents attended a fascinating talk last night. The speaker was the Dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Business, Michael M. Knetter (yes, the “k” gets a little enunciation).
Knetter spoke for nearly an hour on a broad range of topics, from international trade to the credit bubble to tax policy. Here are a few highlights, in no particular order, from last night’s event:
Madison, Wis. – A few days before he willingly stepped down as president and chief executive officer of the alternative energy company he helped to launch, Eric Apfelbach told a crowd of entrepreneurs they were probably a little bit crazy.
….Thanks to the twin pillars of the University of Wisconsin and state government, Madison has historically enjoyed a leg up on the rest of the Badger State when it comes to riding out economic hard times.
But with the national economy facing unprecedented challenges and government no longer the biggest employer in town, can the region avoid the pain of this latest downturn?
“No doubt Madison and Dane County have been insulated but eventually this is going to catch up to everybody,” warned Ken Harwood, a business consultant from Verona and publisher of Wisconsin Development News.
One year to the day after a downtown fire left one young man dead and three others in the hospital, members of the City Council introduced an ordinance to help prevent a fire like that from ever happening again.
Sponsor Ald. Mike Verveer said the motivation to work with the fire department on the ordinance, which tightens restrictions on smoke alarms in city housing, came in particular after seeing the wreckage of the house at 123 N. Bedford St. Peter Talen, 23, a UW-La Crosse student in town visiting his brother on Nov. 18, 2007, died in a fire that spread from the porch throughout the nearly 100-year-old house.
A large stockholder is urging the board of TomoTherapy Inc. to consider selling the medical technology company or seek other alternatives to boost its stock price.
TomoTherapy, which was founded by two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, sells a device that uses imaging technology to increase the accuracy of radiation treatments.
Chancellor Biddy Martin said Monday she will aim to develop a relationship between the university and Wisconsinâ??s largest business interest group that will benefit the state.
University of Wisconsin Chancellor Biddy Martin said Monday she will continue to work with the stateâ??s largest business group, three months after her predecessor condemned the organizationâ??s policies.
Just when you thought everything was perfect with the new basketball floor at the Kohl Center … it has to get replaced.
The new floor, purchased by the University of Wisconsin athletic department with money given for the project by Andy and Susan North, was painted the wrong shade of red and will be replaced with another new floor sometime in December, according to Associate Athletic Director Vince Sweeney.
The University of Wisconsin is marking Global Entrepreneurship Week this week.
Online holiday shopping is in full swing, according to the associate dean at the University of Wisconsin Business School.
Deborah Mitchell, associate dean of enterprise MBA programs, said this season’s tight economic times are driving retailers to ramp up their online deals earlier. Other experts said it’s a way to get consumers into the shopping mood, although the success of the season is still up in the air, WISC-TV reported.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin said Monday she’s building a relationship with the state’s largest business group, which her predecessor has slammed as an impediment to economic development.
Martin said she’s had separate meetings in recent weeks with the board of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and its president, Jim Haney. She said she’s tried to focus on common interests of improving the state’s economy.
Just weeks before Martin took over for John Wiley on Sept. 1, Wiley published an essay in Madison Magazine saying WMC had been taken over by “political extremists” who know little about creating high-wage jobs.
UW-Madison senior Catherine Matloub is frequenting the new American Apparel store downtown not only for what she calls great basic clothing, but to support the company’s powerful immigration stance.
“Madison is a liberal city with ideas and beliefs similar to that of American Apparel in issues concerning the outsourcing of jobs,” Matloub said. “I think that alone will contribute greatly to the overall success of this particular store.”
The Los Angeles-based company is the largest clothing manufacturer in the United States, offering comfortable and versatile clothing and known for its issue advocacy as much as the new looks featured in Web advertisements and display windows.
Filling the retail space in the largest mixed-use development in city history has been slowed by the economy, but a grocery store still is in the plans at University Square.
Officials with the $140 million Downtown project say they have filled about 55 percent of the project’s 140,000 square feet of retail space and it likely will be full by the end of 2009.
And the biggest tenant could be a grocery store ranging in size from 17,0000 to 28,000 square feet at the corner of Lake Street and University Avenue.
Officials with Executive Management Inc., the developer of the project, say they are pursuing a grocery store to serve the more than 800 residents that live upstairs in the Lucky apartments tower and the thousands of others who live and work around the development.
It’s also in the center of more than $400 million worth of building and redevelopment projects in UW-Madison’s East Campus Gateway development plan.
University Square may be the most costly mixed-use project in city history, but hundreds of millions of dollars more are being spent by UW-Madison to develop the East Campus Gateway.
The more than $428 million project stretches from Regent Street to Lake Mendota and is part of a seven-block pedestrian mall first proposed as part of the 1908 master plan. UW-Madison officials hope the improvements will make East Campus Mall a campus centerpiece, much like Library Mall and Bascom Hill.
In the previous blog I marveled at the UW-Madisonâ??s ability to find jobs for out-of-work liberals. I noted that Louis Butler, twice unseated by the voters of Wisconsin after two gubernatorial appointments to the Supreme Court, got a nice gig at the Law School. Time to mention that Paul Soglin also sinks his jowls into the UWâ??s feed trough.
The former president of Monster.comâ??s North American division told a University of Wisconsin student crowd Thursday night their generation will have â??more
The former president of Monster.comâ??s North American division told a University of Wisconsin student crowd Thursday night their generation will have â??more
Local vaccine research and development firm FluGen Inc. is getting a $250,000 loan from the state to help in the development of a bird flu vaccine. Gov. Jim Doyle announced the Technology Venture Fund loan to FluGen on Wednesday.
(UW-Madison professor of virology Yoshi Kawaoka was a co-founder of FluGen, along with Gabriele Neumann, an associate scientist at the School of Veterinary Medicine)
When the original MGE Innovation Center opened at University Research Park in 1989, Novagen was one of its first tenants.
The local startup had three employees, including co-founder Robert Mierendorf, and was a subsidiary of Pel-Freez, a Rogers, Ark., company that processes rabbit meat and manufactures biological products for scientific research.
Dropping out of college to make homemade beer didn’t look like a very good career move initially.
But Shane Welch, founder and brewmaster of Sixpoint Craft Ales, followed his passion, even though his parents were unenthusiastic about his plans to quit the University of Wisconsin-Madison to concentrate on brewing beer in the basement of his student apartment on Vilas Avenue.
….Sixpoint brews created by Welch and former college roommate Aaron Stumpf, 29, have become the toast of New York City.
UW-Madison professors said Monday the current state of the world economy will affect the future of studentsâ?? loans.
A UW-Madison senior killed in Hong Kong by a drunken driver Friday is being remembered as a “tremendous student” who was very easygoing and cared about others.
Kurt Leswing, 21, of Milwaukee was in Hong Kong traveling in the 15-week Semester at Sea program, a shipboard study abroad program administered by the Institute for Shipboard Education, with the University of Virginia as the academic sponsor.
The recent acquisition of Mad City Broadband by Atlanta-based Xiocom indicates that the company sees value in the struggling municipal Wi-Fi system.
Quoted: Barry Orton, UW-Madison professor of telecommunications
A University of Wisconsin-Madison student was struck and killed while studying abroad.
Authorities say 21-year-old Kurt Leswing of Milwaukee was hit by a drunken driver in Hong Kong. The driver was arrested.
Leswing was a senior business major traveling as part of the Semester at Sea program. It sends students on a 15-week voyage that circles the globe.
Hooper’s employees also travel across the nation, working on wind-farm projects from New York to New Mexico. And its custom metal fabricators fashioned stainless-steel tubing and wires for the inner structure of a rippled glass waterfall sculpture created in 2006 by UW-Madison art professor Truman Lowe and installed in Indianapolis.
For an example of what does work, take a look at Dane County, where several hundred new businesses and thousands of new jobs have been created because of a hot entrepreneurial climate. Academic research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is being turned into patents, licenses and business start-ups. The University Research Park, now 25 years old, is being doubled in size to raise the number of companies to 200 from 115 now.
MADISON, Wis. — Growers interested in selling vegetables at Wisconsin farmers markets can learn more about the business at a January workshop hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Wisconsin School for Beginning Market Growers will run Jan. 16 to 18. It costs $275.
The school’s coordinator, John Hendrickson, said demand for fresh, locally grown vegetables has never been greater and many farmers markets are seeking vendors. Community-supported agriculture programs, in which families buy shares of farmers’ harvests, also are growing.
A wealthy financier who says he learned everything he needed to know about making money at the University of Chicago has given its business school a record-breaking $300 million donationâ??and a new name.
The gift from David Booth moves the school closer to competing top programs that have enjoyed greater endowments, but it still lags the leading Harvard Business School’s nearly $3 billion in funds.
Angel investing in Wisconsin will be dented by the global economic crisis, but not obliterated.
That’s the opinion of several investors attending the two-day Early Stage Symposium that finishes up today in Madison. Mentions the University Research Park’s 25th year.
Many meetings aren’t worth their salt, but a meeting coming up at UW-Madison could be worth its salt and much more.
More than 20 food and ingredient companies will gather on campus Thursday to see what could be used in processed foods that works as well as salt as a preservative, with the goal being cutting down American salt intake without cutting down on flavor.
HEC in Paris is increasing its links with US business schools through a partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to develop and teach a real estate programme at HEC. Wisconsin School of Business is one of the leaders in the US in teaching real estate programmes.
Chancellor Biddy Martin spoke to Madison business leaders at a luncheon Monday to candidly address issues of affordability and funding facing the University of Wisconsin in the coming years.
Chancellor Biddy Martin spoke to Madison business leaders at a luncheon Monday to candidly address issues of affordability and funding facing the University of Wisconsin in the coming years.
Martin, who took the reins of chancellor in September, answered questions from guests and members of WisBusiness.com and Madison Magazine, who co-sponsored the event at the Madison Club.
MADISON — UW-Madison Chancellor Carolyn â??Biddyâ? Martin declared Monday that the university was a statewide economic driver that could do even more to foster small and big businesses alike during tough times.
Martin called the financial stress facing the state â??unprecedentedâ? but said that cutting the UW too much in the next budget would diminish the universityâ??s stature and harm economic development in the long term.
So you think you have a great idea for a business, but the extent of your plan is a few notes scribbled on the back of a fast-food bag.
Maybe you need someone with experience to guide you.
That’s the goal of a new group called MERLIN Mentors. MERLIN stands for Madison Entrepreneur Resource, Learning and Innovation Network, and it’s issuing a call for both mentors and would-be entrepreneurs.
To help mark its 150th anniversary, the F. Dohmen Co. Foundation is contributing $500,000 to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Pharmacy for scholarships and $250,000 to the Wisconsin Historical Society.
The F. Dohmen Co. was founded in 1858 as a pharmacy wholesale business in Milwaukee by Frederick Dohmen and is now in its fifth generation as a family-owned business.
It took 25 police officers to quell a disturbance and clear out the bar at the Madison Avenue Bar, 624 University Ave., according to police reports.
The initial officers were sent to the bar to assist a woman who was drunk and unconscious.
The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin is hoping that a controversial report siding with the tribeâ??s plan to open a grandiose $808 million off-reservation casino and entertainment complex at Dairyland Greyhound Park in Kenosha will help push the federal government to approve the proposal.
The $50,000 report, funded entirely by the tribe, has at least one Kenosha-area lawmaker and longtime Kenosha casino opponent, the Forest County Potawatomi Community, raising questions about the reportâ??s validity. The controversy is heightened by the fact that the study came out of the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s La Follette School of Public Affairs, which is known as an objective institution.
With the stock market fluctuating daily and many peopleâ??s portfolios shaken, the University of Wisconsin and other nonprofit organizations are concerned whether money will continue to pour in from private donors.
Near west side Ald. Robbie Webber isn’t a huge Badger football fan. So when the UW hosted Penn State in a night game at Camp Randall two weeks ago, Webber decided to spend the weekend out of town with friends.
But when Webber returned home Sunday and checked her voice mail, there was a strange call from someone asking “why do you hate local business” and another fuming “you’re a joke.”
At first, Webber thought the calls were leftovers from her support for the citywide smoking ban. Upon further review, however, it turns out they came from patrons of the Stadium Bar.
The classic three-legged stool approach to retirement security of employer pension, Social Security and personal savings is looking wobblier than ever these days.
Traditional pensions are fast disappearing, the long-term outlook for Social Security is cloudy and retirement accounts have been walloped by stocks’ steep decline. The turmoil in financial markets has wiped out some $2 trillion from Americans’ retirement accounts since the middle of 2007, the Congressional Budget Office said earlier this month – more than 20 percent of their value.
“This is certainly the most uncertain time in many decades for people approaching retirement,” said John Nelson, co-author of “What Color Is Your Parachute? For Retirement” with Richard Bolles of the best-selling “What Color Is Your Parachute” career guide.
Nelson, 49, a retirement researcher and lecturer in consumer science at the University of Wisconsin, created a retirement model that has been selected for the retirement readiness program for federal employees. His Retirement Well-Being Model is a research- and philosophically based tool designed to factor in health and happiness, as well as finances, as people plan and set goals for retirement.
College career counselors are intensifying efforts to help students. Ms. Steinfeld’s group is inviting recruiters from smaller employers around New York, soliciting job postings from NYU alumni and scouring newspapers to find companies that are expanding. This week, the career center will hold an information session on “alternatives to Wall Street.”
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the number of companies attending a September career fair fell to 225, from 232 last year. Leslie Kohlberg, director of career services for the College of Letters and Science, is encouraging students to seek individual counseling, visit employers and develop a back-up plan — or two.
“Things have been so good that students were able to rely on even some of the least-effective job search strategies,” like sending résumés via email and searching online career postings, she says. “They can’t really afford to do that now.”
Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp will deliver the keynote address at the Wisconsin Bioenergy Initiative’s Bioenergy Summit on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus Thursday.
Krupp’s talk, which like the entire conference is free and open to the public, will cover current energy policy, as well as innovative ways to encourage companies to adopt environmentally conscious businesses practices.
The city has busted the Stadium Bar, the largest outdoor beer garden near Camp Randall Stadium, for staying open too late and operating its beer garden during more than just Badger football game days.
The Madison Plan Commission Monday night voted to hold a public hearing in December on the popular sports bar, at 1419 Monroe St., to assess its outdoor operations.
When Nate Lustig lost the lottery for student-section Badger football tickets in 2005, he turned to a year-old online business called ExchangeHut.com to buy seats for campus athletic events at market-rate prices.
Within a year, Lustig and friends John Tucker and Corey Capasso bought the company for $6,000 from founder Matt Stamerjohn, who was graduating from UW-Madison.
UW-Madison officials announced Monday they were reversing a decision to change the schedules of second-shift custodians after getting complaints from the workers.
The largest association of medical doctors in Wisconsin is barring its members from accepting gifts from drug companies, following a national trend to limit conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
The ban includes the most common gifts to doctors such as food, mugs and pens, as well as reimbursements for travel, the Wisconsin Medical Society said in a statement released Thursday.
“A complete ban eases the burdens of compliance, biased decision-making, and patient distrust,” reads the new policy, which was approved Saturday.
UW seniors are growing anxious. Excited to graduate, but nervous about what lies ahead in the real world.
Especially today where getting a job is getting a lot harder.
“I am legitimately scared, because we are going into the job market, and it’s going to affect our futures,” says UW senior Danielle Frydman.
Steve Schroeder of the UW’s Business Career Center tells students companies are still hiring, but because of the downturn in the economy, they may be hiring less.
