Day: February 10, 2017

Trump Meets Big Pharma, Signs Executive Order Reducing Regulations, Regulatory Costs

10 Feb 2017 IAC Staff

On January 31st, President Donald Trump met with major pharmaceutical company executives, and signed an executive order on reducing regulation and controlling regulatory costs, the White House said in a press statement.

The president had a meeting with executives from Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Celgene, Amgen, Eli Lilly, and the PhRMA trade group. The meeting was also attended by Greg Walden, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Trump praised pharmaceutical firms’ efforts to cut drugs prices. But he also insisted that there is more work to be done in the pricing area. The president promised to continue reducing the burdensome regulations that raise the cost of doing business in the United States.

The president signed the executive action, titled Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Cost, during the last week. The main purpose of this order is “to manage the costs associated with the governmental imposition of private expenditures required to comply with Federal regulations.”

“It is the policy of the executive branch to be prudent and financially responsible in the expenditure of funds, from both public and private sources. In addition,… it is essential to manage the costs associated with the governmental imposition of private expenditures required to comply with Federal regulations,” the order states.

The order outlined two key changes. First, it requires that, for every one new regulation issued, at least two prior regulations must be identified for elimination, and that the “cost of planned regulations is prudently managed and controlled through a budgeting process.” There will be a cap on the cost of new regulations. The total incremental cost of all new regulations, including eliminated regulations, to be finalized this year should be $0.

The order also requires the director of the Office of Management and Budget to provide the heads of agencies with guidance on implementing this policy change.

For the fiscal year 2018, and for each fiscal year thereafter, the head of each agency will identify, for each regulation that increases incremental cost, the offsetting regulations and provide the agency’s best approximation of the total costs or savings associated with each new regulation or repealed regulation.

Moreover, no regulations exceeding the agency’s total incremental cost allowance will be allowed in that fiscal year, unless required by law or approved in writing by the director. The total incremental cost allowance may allow an increase or require a reduction in total regulatory cost.

The order does not include regulations issued with respect to a military, national security, or foreign affairs function of the United States; regulations related to agency organization, management, or personnel; or any other category of regulations exempted by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Batteries: Longer Lasting with Increased Safety

10 Feb 2017 IAC Staff

Woburn, Massachusetts-based Ionic Materials claimed that it created the world’s first solid polymer electrolyte that could help make safe, longer lasting, and cost effective batteries. They say that “Significant improvements in battery safety, performance and cost are achievable with ionic conductivities that exceed those of traditional liquid systems over a wide range of temperatures.”

Conventional batteries use liquid electrolytes that are flammable, toxic and expensive. And those liquid electrolytes are main responsible for almost all of battery safety incidents.

Ionic Materials said that it built a solid state battery technology that eliminates the complicated and expensive process of making batteries with liquid electrolytes. Based on low-cost polymer processing techniques, the company’s technology eliminates toxic and flammable liquid electrolytes to make it possible to develop a true safe solid battery.

The company was able to create polymer electrolyte works at room temperature, resulting in improved battery safety and higher performance. Its polymer electrolyte is designed to enable next-generation rechargeable battery performance.

To allow a solid-state battery to function at room temperature and offer safe battery performance across a wide temperature range, the company built solid-state pouch cells with composite LCO and NCM cathodes. It replaced electrolyte and separator with an inherently safe, non-flammable polymer. Moreover, removing the liquid resulted in a more recyclable battery. The company’s batteries can be folded, cut, and damaged, but they do not ignite and continue to perform.

All previous attempts at solid electrolytes were unsuccessful, according to Ionic Materials. Other solid polymers only functioned at impractically high temperatures, while ceramic electrolytes struggled to overcome manufacturability, brittleness, stability, cost and other challenges.

Ionic Materials believes that its polymer electrolyte could replace the liquid electrolytes used in currently available batteries.

For the last four decades, scientists and engineers have tried to develop solid electrolytes for batteries. They have two main issues: polymers suffer from low conductivity at room temperature and lack of high voltage compatibility, while ceramics are brittle and they are associated with complex manufacturing. Also, ceramics have problems in scaling to high volumes.

Through lithium ion batteries are common and are being used in consumer electronics and electronic vehicles, they have a fundamental problem. In lithium ion batteries, liquid electrolytes become unstable when the temperature rises. Also, they are susceptible to shorts caused by dendrites and can catch fire and explode under certain circumstances. The company touts these benefits to consumers by saying “These improvements promise to speed the electrification of transportation and the transition to clean and renewable sources of energy, as well as enable safer and longer lasting consumer electronics devices.”

Meanwhile, Ionic Materials said that it received a $3 million Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. The funding will be used by the company for the development of a polymer electrolyte and lithium/polymer interface to enable lithium cycling and development of solid intercalation cathodes. The program is scheduled to begin in the first half of 2017.

For more information please visit: http://ionicmaterials.com

Researchers Warn Stem Rust Could Destroy European Wheat

10 Feb 2017 IAC Staff

Researchers have issued a warning about a kind of stem rust that could damage wheat crops in the 2017 season.

Results of lab tests showed that stem rust epidemics in Sicily last year were caused by a new and dangerous variant of race TTTTF, according to Denmark-based Global Rust Reference Center (GRRC).

Researchers are warning that spores produced by stem rust may spread to this year’s crops in Europe, according to a report from Nature weekly magazine.

“We have to be careful of shouting wolf too loudly. But this could be the largest outbreak that we have had in Europe for many, many years,” Chris Gilligan, an epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge in the UK, was quoted as saying by the Nature magazine. Gilligan leads a team that has modeled the probable spread of the fungus’s spores.

In a statement issued February 2, the GRRC said the stem rust infected several thousands of hectares, and it could have produced a huge number of spores. There could be a “real risk of repeated outbreaks in the 2017 crop season if stem rust race TTTTF persists,” the center said.

The organization also said that two new strains of yellow rust were also spotted for the first time. One was found in Europe and North Africa, and the other in East Africa and Central Asia.

Farmers in at-risk areas should be fully ready, monitor crops for stem rust, and use registered fungicides. They need to control stem rust at an early growth stage to avoid losses, according to the center.

Similar alerts about the three crops diseases were issued by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on February 3.

Last year, stem rust destroyed tens of thousands of hectares of crops in Sicily. Europe is known as the world’s largest wheat-producing region. According to Mogens Hovmøller of the GRRC, the region has not been seen stem rust epidemics in Europe since the 1950s. Hovmøller, who leads the center’s testing team, thinks that there is a great need for an early-warning system in Europe. In next few weeks, he will join other experts to ask the European Research Council to release funds for the establishment of the warning system.

Such a system will help partners – including breeders, scientists, and agrochemical firms in Europe – to share investigative facilities and information about potential outbreaks.

Fazil Dusunceli, a plant pathologist at the FAO, believes that such a warning system might have helped to mitigate the Sicily outbreak. “I wouldn’t question the necessity for an early-warning system,” he said.

The GRRC is part of Aarhus University in Denmark and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.

 

President Trump Nominates Neil Gorsuch to Replace Scalia on Supreme Court

10 Feb 2017 IAC Staff

President Donald Trump on January 31 announced that Neil Gorsuch is his nominee for the Supreme Court. He has been selected for the position of Associate Justice to replace the late Justice Scalia.

Gorsuch is a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver, Colorado. He was appointed in 2006 to the 10th Circuit by then-President George W. Bush.

Gorsuch’s nomination was sent to the Senate on Feb. 1. If confirmed, he will replace Scalia who died last year. At 49, Gorsuch is the youngest Supreme Court nominees, and, if confirmed, he would be the youngest sitting Supreme Court justice since Clarence Thomas. Additionally, he would be the first Protestant on the court since John Paul Stevens’s retirement in 2010.

Gorsuch is a graduate of Columbia, Harvard, and Oxford. He served as the U.S. Department of Justice as the principal deputy associate attorney general in 2005. He assisted in managing major aspects of the agency’s work in areas such as constitutional law, counterterrorism, environmental regulation, and civil rights.

From 1995 to 2005, Gorsuch worked as an associate and partner at the law firm of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, PLLC. He also clerked for Justice Byron White and Justice Kennedy of Supreme Court of the United States and Judge David Sentelle of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Gorsuch attended Harvard Law School as a Harry Truman Scholar and graduated with honors in 1991. He graduated with honors from Columbia University in 1988, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After law school, he attended Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar and received his Doctorate in Philosophy in 2004.

“Judges should instead strive, if humanly and so imperfectly, to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be,” Gorsuch said in his speech at Case Western Reserve University.

He also published a book titled The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in 2006. He opposed assisted suicide, stating that “all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

In related news, Gorsuch criticized Trump’s tweet targeting federal district court judge James Robart. A spokesman of the Supreme Court nominee confirmed to The Guardian that Gorsuch called the president’s tweet “disheartening and demoralizing.” He criticized the president’s remark on the judiciary in a private meeting with Senator Richard Blumenthal, the spokesman said.

However, Trump said that reported comments from his Supreme Court nominee were misrepresented.