Latest news with #MattPrice
Yahoo
14-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Coast Funding Closes Senior Credit Facility with Plains Commerce Bank
SAN DIEGO, July 14, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Coast Funding, a leading provider of alternative financing for small and mid-sized businesses, announced today the successful closing of a senior credit facility with Plains Commerce Bank, a South Dakota-based, FDIC-insured institution with over $1.2 billion in assets. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. This milestone significantly enhances Coast's funding capacity, enabling the company to serve more clients, deliver faster approvals, and offer more competitive rates. "This transaction is a meaningful endorsement of the strength of our portfolio, our underwriting discipline, and our team," said Matt Price, Founder and CEO of Coast Funding. "Plains Commerce has been a valued partner for the past three years. This facility is the natural evolution of our relationship and a critical step forward in executing our long-term vision." Earlier this year, Plains Commerce Bank introduced its proprietary Plains Pay platform—a modern treasury management solution designed to provide the fintech sector with efficient ACH, wire, payment processing, and warehouse lending capabilities. "Coast Funding has demonstrated exceptional growth and a strong commitment to serving small businesses," said Chris Wasmund, COO of Plains Commerce Bank. "We're proud to support their continued expansion and be part of a partnership that helps entrepreneurs thrive." About Coast Funding Founded in 2021, Coast Funding is a proven leader in alternative financing for businesses across the U.S. The company offers products including business lines of credit, short-term business loans, revenue-based funding, and equipment financing. Coast differentiates by combining best in class technology with an old school relationship-based approach. The company has an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau and is rated 4.8 stars by TrustPilot. For more information, visit About Plains Commerce Bank Founded in 1931, Plains Commerce Bank is a privately held, FDIC-insured community bank headquartered in South Dakota. The bank offers a full range of commercial banking solutions focused on service, trust, and long-term partnership. For more information, visit View source version on Contacts Coast Fundingpr@ (855) 893‑3294 Sign in to access your portfolio
Business Wire
14-07-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Coast Funding Closes Senior Credit Facility with Plains Commerce Bank
SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Coast Funding, a leading provider of alternative financing for small and mid-sized businesses, announced today the successful closing of a senior credit facility with Plains Commerce Bank, a South Dakota-based, FDIC-insured institution with over $1.2 billion in assets. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. This milestone significantly enhances Coast's funding capacity, enabling the company to serve more clients, deliver faster approvals, and offer more competitive rates. 'This transaction is a meaningful endorsement of the strength of our portfolio, our underwriting discipline, and our team,' said Matt Price, Founder and CEO of Coast Funding. 'Plains Commerce has been a valued partner for the past three years. This facility is the natural evolution of our relationship and a critical step forward in executing our long-term vision.' Earlier this year, Plains Commerce Bank introduced its proprietary Plains Pay platform—a modern treasury management solution designed to provide the fintech sector with efficient ACH, wire, payment processing, and warehouse lending capabilities. 'Coast Funding has demonstrated exceptional growth and a strong commitment to serving small businesses,' said Chris Wasmund, COO of Plains Commerce Bank. 'We're proud to support their continued expansion and be part of a partnership that helps entrepreneurs thrive.' About Coast Funding Founded in 2021, Coast Funding is a proven leader in alternative financing for businesses across the U.S. The company offers products including business lines of credit, short-term business loans, revenue-based funding, and equipment financing. Coast differentiates by combining best in class technology with an old school relationship-based approach. The company has an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau and is rated 4.8 stars by TrustPilot. For more information, visit About Plains Commerce Bank Founded in 1931, Plains Commerce Bank is a privately held, FDIC-insured community bank headquartered in South Dakota. The bank offers a full range of commercial banking solutions focused on service, trust, and long-term partnership. For more information, visit
ABC News
25-06-2025
- Climate
- ABC News
Flights delayed, runways closed, trees down as 100kph winds roar through Illawarra
Winds in excess of 100kph have delayed flights in Sydney, blown roofs off buildings in Wollongong, and left some 12,300 homes and businesses on the state's south coast without power. Airservices Australia has ordered the Sydney Airport to shut two of its three runways, leading to a number of flight delays and cancellations. Passengers are being urged to check in with their airlines to confirm the status of their flights. Train services between Kiama and Bomaderry were also disrupted this morning after a tree was blown across the tracks at Gerringong. Transport for NSW says normal services have now been restored. In Bellambi, north of Wollongong, a gust of 117kph was recorded at 9am, while gusts up to 102kph were recorded further south at Albion Park and Port Kembla. The State Emergency Service has responded to 230 calls for assistance since midnight, while 12,300 businesses and homes were without power in the area at the time of writing. SES Southern Zone duty commander Matt Price told the ABC most of the jobs had involved damaged roofs and powerlines. "We've seen some significant wind gusts overnight … and seen a big uptake in job in the last couple of hours in the Illawarra and south coast," he said. In Wollongong's CBD a beauty business in Keira Street had its roof ripped off by the strong gusts and the road closed by emergency service crews. There have also been reports of trees crushing cars and falling on homes around Sydney. The SES received 60 calls for help in the hour between 9am and 10am, with that numbers expected to grow throughout the day. "We'll no doubt get another surge in requests for assistance at 4pm or 5pm when people start to return home from work and see any damage that's occurred during the day," Commander Price said. Endeavour Energy crews are working to restore power to the thousands of homes and businesses. Damage to a substation at Unanderra, south of Wollongong, left around 7,000 properties without power. The worst-affected areas in the Illawarra include Unanderra, Farmborough Heights and Berkeley. Further south, other areas without supply include Huskisson, Shoalhaven Heads, Shell Cove, Ulladulla, Berry and North Nowra. Endeavour Energy's manager of corporate affairs, Kate McCue, told the ABC that by 9am crews had 385 hazard reports to inspect. Power for some residents may not be restored until Thursday. Other areas impacted by the power outages include Batlow and Harden in the state's south, as well as the Monaro area. The Bureau of Meteorology has issued a severe weather warning for damaging winds for people in Illawarra and parts of Mid North Coast, Hunter, Metropolitan, South Coast, Central Tablelands, Southern Tablelands and Northern Tablelands forecast districts. A gale warning is in place for Sydney Enclosed Waters, the Macquarie Coast, Hunter Coast, Sydney Coast, Illawarra Coast, Batemans Coast and Eden Coast.
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Yahoo
Visitors bureau urges action to keep Raystown campgrounds open
HUNTINGDON COUNTY, Pa. (WHTM) — The Huntingdon County Visitors Bureau provided an update on staffing-related closures at a popular recreation area and is urging action from legislators. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Thursday that three campgrounds would be closed until further notice 'due to staffing shortages that will prohibit the safe operations of these facilities ahead of the 2025 recreation season.' The impacted campgrounds are Seven Points, Susquehannock, and Nancy's Boat-to-Shore. Friday, the Huntingdon County Visitors Bureau said only one of those is currently closed due to staffing — Nancy's Boat-to-Shore, which is year-round. The others typically open later in the season — April 4 for Seven Points and Memorial Day Weekend for Susquehannock. The bureau said that if the federal government avoids a shutdown and lifts a hiring freeze within the next few weeks, the campgrounds should be able to open as usual. The visitors' center and day-use facilities are not impacted. 'Although we don't want people to panic – yet – we are taking this news very seriously and calling on our stakeholders and the public to join us in advocating for our region by demanding our legislators take action immediately,' said Matt Price, HCVB Executive Director. Raystown Lake, the HCVB says, brings $62 million in annual visitor spending to the region and creates 393 jobs. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
09-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
How greed and profit fueled one failed Alzheimer drug
On May 3, 2021, Matt Price drove his 73-year-old father Stephen from their New Jersey home to a medical strip mall on the Jersey Shore, for his first injection of an experimental drug called simufilam. Cassava Sciences, a Texas biopharma company, had developed simufilam to treat (and possibly cure) Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia that afflicts tens of millions of people worldwide. When Matt, 27, first heard about simufilam, 'it sounded exciting,' writes Charles Piller in his new book, 'Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's' (Atria/One Signal Publishers), out now. Rather than simply calming symptoms, simufilam promised 'to slow, stop, or reverse cognitive decline — or for people who have no symptoms, prevent them — by attacking Alzheimer's biochemical cause,' writes Piller. It was based on a long-debated notion called the 'amyloid hypothesis,' which argued that Alzheimer's is caused by the buildup of the protein amyloid in the brain. 'If true, its removal would lead to a cure,' writes Piller. The discovery was shocking, especially given that it'd been introduced by a small biotech company that previously specialized in opioid painkillers and 'had never taken a drug to market in its fifteen years of existence,' writes Piller. 'Yet it claimed to have discovered a new molecule that stabbed the dark heart of the terrible illness.' Even in the beginning, Matt Price, a Harvard-trained epidemiologist and global-health specialist, had his doubts. Cassava's theory, which had not yet been validated by independent researchers, 'seemed weird and a bit thin,' Matt told the author. His concerns would soon be confirmed by a whistleblower, who produced 'convincing evidence that lab studies at the heart of the dominant hypothesis for the cause of Alzheimer's disease might have been based on bogus data,' writes Piller. The amyloid hypothesis wasn't just wrong, but it took valuable resources away from other promising theories on how to treat Alzheimer's. It was just the latest example, writes Piller, 'of the exaggeration, hype, and sheer fakery and fraud that has characterized Alzheimer's research for decades.' And it's not a problem confined to Alzheimer's research alone. As of this month, at least 55,000 medical and scholarly studies have been retracted, according to the Retraction Watch database from the Center of Scientific Integrity. And it's estimated that there may be as many as several hundred thousand fake studies still circulating and not yet identified. Even when they are exposed, journals are often slow to retract the bogus studies, if it happens at all. It's not just an issue of wasted research dollars. 'It makes people start to distrust the clinical research enterprise,' says Price. Simufilam began as an experimental drug — code-named PTI-125 — developed by neuroscientists Lindsay Burns and Hoau-Yan Wang. It was designed to target filamin A, which becomes twisted into an abnormal shape and causes inflammation in the brain, promoting the formation of myloid-beta proteins. PTI-125, the researchers suggested, could reverse those terrible effects. The drug was renamed simufilam in August of 2020, and in preliminary studies, patients started showing improvement after just a month — 'extraordinary for any Alzheimer's trial,' writes Piller. Simufilam began to seem like the holy grail, 'the dream drug that generations of researchers had searched for in vain,' the author writes. By late July 2021, the tiny biopharma company, whose sample size for their simufilam experiments was a minuscule fifty participants, suddenly had a market valuation of $5.4 billion. The victory was short-lived. On Aug. 18, 2021, just weeks after the company's stock reached record highs, two neuroscientists — Geoffrey Pitt of Weill Cornell Medical College and David Bredt, a former executive at drugmakers Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson — submitted a 'citizen petition' to the FDA, asking them to take a closer look at simufilam. Their main concern was that the drug's development 'contained manipulated scientific images,' writes Piller. 'In short, they asserted, the work looked like it had been doctored.' To help prove their suspicions, they brought in Matthew Schrag, a neurologist and neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, who would become 'the most important whistleblower in the history of Alzheimer's,' writes Piller. When they asked for Schrag's help, 'my response was, 'You think I'm stupid enough to do that?' ' Schrag told the author. 'Apparently, I was.' Using ImageJ and MIPAV, software developed and endorsed by the NIH, Schrag carefully studied the images used in the simufilam study. He had a 'seasoned eye for detecting digital manipulation with common software programs,' writes Piller. Almost immediately, he spotted proof of manipulation. 'Schrag saw micrographs — magnifications of microscopic features of brain tissue — that seemed obviously cloned,' writes Piller. 'Yet they were presented as findings for different experimental conditions.' Schrag worried that he wasn't just uncovering evidence of research misconduct, but something much larger and more ominous. 'How had those problems gone unnoticed for years or even decades?' Piller writes. '[Schrag] wondered nervously: What other Alzheimer's research should be reconsidered with skeptical eyes?' Schrag had an uphill battle, mostly because 'disproving someone else's experiment can be a death wish in science,' writes Piller. Or as Schrag explained to the author, 'The field is absolutely calibrated to the newest, most interesting, most cutting-edge discovery. It disincentivizes replication at every turn.' Piller shared Schrag's findings with over a dozen experts, including several top Alzheimer's researchers. While most were hesitant to go on the record saying anything negative about the original research, some — like Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer's expert at the University of Kentucky who would later become editor of Alzheimer's & Dementia — admitted that several images showed 'shockingly blatant' signs of tampering. But others, like Dennis Selkoe, a Harvard professor of neurologic diseases and a celebrated Alzheimer's researcher, 'chastised' the author for his criticism of the 'objective evidence' that reducing amyloid in the human brain produces better cognitive outcomes. 'I'm on the right side of history,' argued Selkoe, who Piller accuses of being part of the 'Amyloid Mafia.' George Perry, a scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio and editor of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, agreed with Piller that many Alzheimer's researchers are too hellbent on being correct. 'The major goal of these people is to win—if it isn't the Nobel Prize, it's God's glory,' Perry told the author. 'To be acknowledged that they really did something great. They don't want the amyloid hypothesis to die, because then they have no legacy.' Schrag delivered his Cassava dossier to the NIH in 2021, providing 'forensic street cred' to doubts about the research, writes Piller. Two years later, in 2023, a university panel found Hoau-Yan guilty of 'egregious misconduct' because of his work for Cassava. Last September, the company agreed to pay $40 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for misleading investors. And then in November, Cassava acknowledged that simufilam failed to deliver the results they'd expected in a phase 3 clinical trial, and the company would be discontinuing research. Their stock plummeted by more than 80% after the announcement. Schrag wasn't surprised by the outcome. 'You can cheat to get a paper,' he told the author. 'You can cheat to get a degree. You can cheat to get a grant. You can't cheat to cure a disease. Biology doesn't care.'
