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D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s administration plans to establish a new fund to aid tech startups and designate a stretch of Northwest D.C. as a “technology corridor” under its Digital DC initiative, according to an email obtained by the Washington Business Journal.

Digital DC — known until this week as Digital District — is the latest in a series of efforts by Gray to elevate the city’s status as a startup hub. It appears to mirror fairly closely some of the recommendations on Gray’s five-year economic development roadmap.

PricewaterhouseCoopers recently released the breakdown of its MoneyTree report by region. While we’ve know for about a month now what fourth-quarter venture capital in D.C. looked like, we weren’t completely sure what the total region looked like broken down by specific tech verticals and how much each received.

In total, the D.C./Metroplex region slipped a bit from the third quarter when it was ranked fifth in amount of funding. In Q4, however, we fell back to the ninth spot behind Texas and the Southeast. Yikes. That may have to do with an absence of huge deals that we saw earlier in 2013, such as Clarabridge’s $80 million raise and Evolent Health’s $100 million raise.

The excitement reached a new peak with the first successful mapping of a human genome at the turn of the millennium.

What if doctors could predict, based on your genetic makeup, which diseases you had a predisposition to so you could prevent them before you ever developed a single symptom? If you did get sick, what if they could tailor a specific drug that your DNA would best respond to?

As cars zoom along Darnestown Road, drivers can glimpse the gently sloping pastures of historic Belward Farm, a wide swath of green in the middle of Montgomery County that has seen little change since the Civil War.¶ Even as tract mansions, shopping centers, roads and office parks have sprouted nearby, Belward has endured, looking today much as it did in the 19th century. Not long ago, Belward Farm was home to an 80-head herd of black Angus cattle, two miniature horses and a donkey, whose owner, Elizabeth Beall Banks, was a feisty opponent of development.

GSK is inviting academic scientists to enter their most innovative drug research proposals into its 2014 Discovery Fast Track Challenge – a programme designed to accelerate the translation of early-stage research into game-changing new medicines. 

Building on the success of its first programme in 2013, which ran in the US and Canada, GSK is implementing the crowdsourcing challenge for a second year and expanding it to include Europe. Scientists whose entries are selected will collaborate with GSK’s Discovery Partnerships with Academia (DPAc) team, the sponsor of the challenge, to test their hypotheses on potential disease pathways or targets against GSK’s extensive library of compounds.

Dramatic change in angel investing means both threats and opportunities for the angel investment community and the tens of thousands of entrepreneurs they support, according to the Angel Capital Association (ACA), the world’s leading professional association for angel investors. The global angel investing community will debate and assess this new environment at the 2014 ACA Summit, “Angel Impact: Entrepreneurial and Economic Success,” March 26-28, 2014, in Washington, D.C.

U.S. angel investors – individuals who support startup companies with passion, experience and funding – in 2012 invested nearly $23 billion in about 67,000 ventures, according to estimates by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. Their impact on the economy is huge, as the kinds of innovative startups angels invest in create all of the net new jobs in the country, according to reports by the Census Bureau and Kauffman Foundation.

Accelerator programs and incubators are growing rapidly in number within the health care industry, with most replicating standard tech incubator models. But one organization has worked to redefine what an accelerator program can look like in the health space by joining one of the country’s largest and most influential associations in its landmark effort to court healthcare innovation. Dr. Ross Tonkens, a cardiologist and Chief Medical Officer in Cary, North Carolina has directed the creation of the Science and Technology Accelerator Program inside the American Heart Association (AHA), that targets and supports ground-breaking ideas from residents to senior clinicians.

Dr. Lucian Iancovici is an investment manager at Qualcomm Ventures with a focus on the Qualcomm Life Fund, a $100 million digital health fund. He manages the fund’s investments in Fitbit and PracticeFusion. This week at HIMSS, Iancovici was a keynote speaker at a venture forum to explore investment trends in healthcare and the different approaches digital health startups are taking to take on pain points in the industry.

In an interview with MedCity News, Iancovici identified a few emerging patterns he sees in digital health centered around mobilizing, organizing and analyzing patient data to catalyze changes in healthcare.

Fifteen university research teams from Maryland will receive a total of $4.1 million to work with local companies to turn their research into products that could one day be sold on the commercial market.

The grants were awarded by the Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program to projects that pair researchers at University System of Maryland schools with local businesses. The $4.1 million is a combination of MIPS grants and matching funding provided by participating companies.

GSK is inviting academic scientists to enter their most innovative drug research proposals into its 2014 Discovery Fast Track Challenge– a program designed to accelerate the translation of early-stage research into game-changing new medicines.  

Building on the success of its first program in 2013, which ran in the United States and Canada, GSK is implementing the challenge for a second year and expanding it to include Europe. Scientists who participate in the challenge are asked to submit details about the biological targets or pathways they are researching and the scientific rationale detailing how this early stage research could direct future drug development.