In a big step forward for Covered California’s ability to serve residents of the Tri-Counties, Sansum Clinic said late Friday afternoon that its 23 outpatient medical clinics will serve patients who buy Anthem Blue Cross coverage on the state’s online health insurance exchange. Sansum is one of the largest primary patient care providers in Covered California’s District 12, which includes Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties.
The struggling Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics nonprofit is narrowing its funding gap and has a strategic plan and new permanent CEO in place, putting it on track to become financially sustainable at a time when it looks to expand service to Goleta.
“Six months ago, we were in danger of closing our doors,” said Mark Palmer, president of the board.
Thousand Oaks-based ImmunGene, a cancer treatment firm led by a former Amgen scientist, has raised $9 million from Ally Bridge Group, an investment group with ties to Hong Kong.
ImmunGene’s so-called antibody-cytokine fusion technology could help improve the cancer-cell targeting in therapies. President and CEO Sanjay D. Khare was formerly the scientific director at Amgen, the biotech giant. Prior to the funding, ImmunGene had received several hundred thousand dollars in federal research grants.
Antibody technologies hold promise for creating cancer treatments that do less damage to healthy cells. Molecules are crafted to mimic the body’s own immune system and bind to specific defects in cancer cells.
Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill supported by Thousand Oaks-based Amgen and other biotechnology companies that would have made it more difficult for pharmacists to dispense so-called biosimilars, the biotech industry’s analogue to generic pharmaceuticals.
Senate Bill 598, approved by both houses of the legislature, looked mostly like a procedural change to state’s pharmacy laws. If it passed, the bill would have allowed pharmacists to fill prescriptions with biosimilars that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration deems “interchangeable” with brand-name counterparts.
Sansum Clinic’s planned merger with Cottage Health System remains on track despite the possibility that the partial government shutdown could delay an anti-trust review of one of the region’s biggest health care deals. And the biggest physician group in Santa Barbara County says it hopes to be able to join the Covered California insurance exchange Read More →
Sansum Diabetes Research Institute in Santa Barbara has received a $2.25 million federal grant for diabetes research. The three-year funding comes from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and is for Sansum to continue its work on diabetes, endocrinology and metabolic research. Sansum’s research focuses specifically on Type 1 diabetes and the creation Read More →
Santa Paula-based Thomas Aquinas College has joined with several other Catholic educational institutions in a lawsuit against the federal government over a mandate that the school provide coverage for contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act. The lawsuit was filed in Washington D.C. The college’s co-plaintiffs are the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington, The Catholic University Read More →
