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Today, July 22nd, a virtual summit was hosted by KidneyX to announce the six winners of the Redesign Dialysis Phase 2 prize. The goal of the Redesign Dialysis prize is to provide prize money for novel ideas and innovations that will lead to better outcomes for people with kidney diseases and eventually to a truly artificial kidney. The eventual artificial kidney and innovations made along the way will lead to better outcomes for individuals with kidney diseases and improve their quality of life by bypassing in-center hemodialysis.

BALTIMORE, July 23, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Vita Therapeutics, Inc. announced today that it received orphan drug designation (ODD) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for VTA-110, a novel regenerative therapy for the treatment of Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy (DMD).

VTA-110, is a potential first-in-class allogenic iPSC-based therapy that has shown the ability to repair and regenerate healthy muscle in preclinical studies and has the potential to benefit patients with DMD. The company plans to continue to progress this treatment towards clinical trials and plans to bring it forward for other congenital muscular dystrophy diseases as well. This therapy was exclusively licensed from technology originally invented at Johns Hopkins University and the Kennedy Krieger Institute in the labs of Dr. Kathryn Wagner and Dr. Gabsang Lee.

D.C. is requiring people making travel into Washington from 27 states to self-quarantine because of new surges in Covid-19 cases.

The order went into effect Monday.

NEW YORK – Liquid biopsy firm Creatv MicroTech is developing a diagnostic platform that measures the amount and size of specific circulating stromal cells called cancer-associated macrophage-like cells (CAMLs) to identify traces of cancer in a patient’s bloodstream.

The Potomac, Maryland-based company initially plans to commercialize the method, called LifeTracDx, to predict immunotherapy response in stage II to III non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cancer patients.

Researchers from AstraZeneca, the University of Oxford, and its spinout company Vaccitech today published preliminary Phase I/II data showing their closely-watched COVID-19 vaccine candidate AZD1222 (formerly ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) to have an acceptable safety profile, and favorable immunogenicity against the virus.

“A single dose elicited both humoral and cellular responses against SARS-CoV-2, with a booster immunization augmenting neutralizing antibody titres. The preliminary results of this first-in-human clinical trial supported clinical development progression into ongoing phase 2 and 3 trials,” the researchers concluded in Safety and immunogenicity of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine against SARS-CoV-2: a preliminary report of a phase 1/2, single-blind, randomised controlled trial, published today in The Lancet.

“5 Questions With……” is a weekly BioBuzz series where we reach out to interesting people in the BioHealth Capital Region to share a little about themselves, their work, and maybe something completely unrelated. This edition features Sara Nayeem, M.D., a Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA)

Sixteen finalists are announced in the “Make Your Medical Device Pitch for Kids!” special COVID-19 edition competition presented by the National Capital Consortium for Pediatric Device Innovation (NCC-PDI). Representing innovations in COVID-19-related pediatric medical devices, the finalists will compete in a virtual pitch event held on July 20,2020. Winners will receive grant awards of up to $50,000.

As we embark on our third fund at LionBird, we believe that proactively thinking deeply about what will drive the next decade of healthcare will help us both filter through the noise of digital health, and quickly identify the right investment opportunities. We believe that 2020 represents an unprecedented inflection point in digital health (due to both the COVID-19 global pandemic, as well as many other factors) and we aim to define the trends for the coming decade and their implications for our investment strategy.

Facial temperature detection, campus heatmaps: They’re among the tools in a collection of apps created by teams from within the University System of Maryland over the last month to help limit the spread of COVID-19 — and navigate a society that has changed quickly in the pandemic.

In all, six apps were selected as winners of the USM COVID App Challenge, which was issued at the end of May to galvanize the creation of new tools to respond to the pandemic.

Image: AnTech, developed by Andrew Karam of University of Maryland College Park. (Screenshot via YouTube/AnTech)