Welcome to R&D Market Pulse, a weekly report on the top spenders in research and development.
I’m R&D Magazine Editor Laura Panjwani
Toyota and Uber Collaborate on Autonomous Vehicle Tech
Earlier this month, Toyota Motor Corporation and Uber Technologies announced that they are expanding their collaboration by integrating technology from each company into Toyota vehicles to be deployed on Uber’s ride-sharing network.
The initial autonomous-mobility service fleet will be based on Toyota’s Sienna Minivan platform. Uber’s Autonomous Driving System and the Toyota Guardian automated safety support system will both be integrated into these vehicles. Toyota will also utilize its Mobility Services Platform, its core information infrastructure for connected vehicles. Pilot-scale deployments will begin on the Uber ride-sharing network in 2021.
Toyota was already investing $500 million in Uber.
In a statement, Shigeki Tomoyama, executive vice president, TMC, and president, Toyota Connected Company said:
“Combining efforts with Uber, one of the predominant global ride-sharing and automated driving R&D companies, could further advance future mobility. This agreement and investment marks an important milestone in our transformation to a mobility company as we help provide a path for safe and secure expansion of mobility services like ride-sharing that includes Toyota vehicles and technologies.”
J&J Moves Forward on Nasal Spray to Treat Depression
Janssen, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, announced the submission of a New Drug Application to the U.S. FDA for esketamine nasal spray, a product designed to treat depression in adults that have not responded to other therapeutics.
The nasal spray is an investigational and rapidly acting antidepressant that works by restoring connections between brain cells in people with treatment-resistant depression through glutamate receptor modulation.
Esketamine has already demonstrated positive results in five pivotal Phase 3 studies in patients with treatment-resistant depression. In these studies, esketamine was associated with a rapid reduction of depressive symptoms and delayed time to relapse of symptoms of depression. A long-term safety study showed that the esketamine doses studied were generally tolerated, with no new safety issues with dosing up to 52 weeks.
Intel-Powered Supercomputer Poised to Break Records
The Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin announced that its latest supercomputer in development, known as Frontera, will be powered by next-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors. The new supercomputer will be utilized to enable discoveries across scientific fields, from astrophysics to zoology.
Frontera is expected to enter production in the summer of 2019.
Frontera will be roughly twice as powerful as the Intel Xeon processor-based Stampede2 which is currently the fastest university supercomputer. Intel claims that to match what Frontera will compute in one second, a person would have to perform one calculation every second for roughly 1 billion years.
R&D Magazine follows the top 25 spenders in R&D as part of its R&D Market Pulse Index.
To learn more about the R&D Market Pulse Index, view the full list of Top 25 companies, or read expert stock market insight from R&D Magazine contributing Editor Tim Studt, check out the Market Pulse page on rdmag.com.
I’m Laura Panjwani and thank you for watching R&D Market Pulse. Join us next week for more R&D business news.
