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San Francisco-based Burrill & Company looked like it had beaten the odds a little more than a year ago during a tough time for biotech venture capital firms. Burrill said in a statement that it had put together Burrill Capital Fund IV, with “aggregate capital commitments” of $505 million to invest in drugs, diagnostics, medical devices, healthcare delivery, wellness, and digital health.

Actually, it turns out the fund raised about $200 million. Partly as a result of the size difference, the team responsible for investing the cash has split off from Burrill into a new venture firm called Biomark Capital, Xconomy has learned.

Lockheed Martin Corp. will formally open on Wednesday a Center for Health Innovation in Baltimore County to help the defense contractor delve deeper into the health care industry. The center, located within Lockheed’s offices on Lord Baltimore Drive near Woodlawn, will serve as a hub for Lockheed’s growing health care technology business.

The center will house existing technologies used by health care industry clients and serve as a place to develop new tools to address the industry’s needs.

Its image further enhanced by the recent IPO of Twitter, Silicon Valley now stands in many minds as the cutting edge of the American future. Some, on both right and left, believe that the Valley’s geeks should reform the nation, and the government, in their image.

Increasingly, the basic meme out of the Valley, and its boosters, is that, as one venture capitalist put it: “We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like.” The rest of the country, that venture capitalist, Chamath Palihapitiya, recently argued, needs to recognize that “it’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else, that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in L.A. It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area.”

Image Courtesy of porbital / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The fourth edition of Building Biotechnology, the premier biotechnology industry primer, is now available.

Building Biotechnology has been adopted by dozens of educational programs, and is on the nightstands of many biotech CEOs. The book covers a broad range of essential knowledge in business, regulations, patents, law, policy, and science.

For many years we’ve been incredibly critical of the famous Bayh-Dole Act, which was passed in 1980 with the idea that it would encourage greater innovation by pushing universities to patent the research they were doing. The theory — based on a rather ignorant view of innovation and research — was that patents would create a market, which, in turn, would enable easier knowledge transfer from academia to industry, leading to a research boom. The actual results have been a near total disaster. What’s actually happened are two very bad things. First, it’s seriously harmed university research, by guaranteeing much less information sharing between researchers. And, it turns out, that information sharing is a big part of how innovation and big scientific breakthroughs occur. Not surprisingly (if you understand basic economics), when you try to lock up each idea with a patent, researchers (and, more importantly, their administrator bosses), suddenly don’t want to share any more. The end result? Lots of important research stifled. What a shame.

Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

CDER’s mission is to protect and promote public health by helping to ensure that human drugs are safe and effective for their intended use, that they meet established quality standards, and that they are available to patients. The range and complexity of the human drug supply and development pipeline, and the global nature of regulated industry operations present unprecedented challenges to effective regulatory oversight. Effective and sustainable regulatory operations also require explicit recognition of agency resource limitations.

A new health information technology accelerator has caught the eye of one of Baltimore’s technology leaders.

Jason Hardebeck, executive director of the gb.tc, formerly the Greater Baltimore Technology Council, has been named managing director for DreamIt Health Baltimore. The accelerator is scheduled to launch in January.