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Leading a startup has always been challenging, even under the best conditions. Founders need to quickly master a tremendous range of skills, from building a fantastic product and nailing go-to-market efforts to raising money and managing a board, all while figuring out hiring, culture and compensation. Starting a company is also a lonely endeavor, one that forces founders to make difficult decisions every day with imperfect information. While triaging these challenges, eventually every founder runs headfirst into a problem they haven’t seen before, the kind that leaves them unsure of where to start.

ROCKVILLE, Md. & PROVIDENCE, R.I. & GOLDEN, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Immunomic Therapeutics, Inc., a privately held clinical stage biotechnology company pioneering the study of nucleic acid immunotherapy platforms, announced today that it is developing a nucleic acid vaccine candidate against COVID-19 leveraging its investigational UNITE platform for prevention of the novel coronavirus disease caused by SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus. Immunomic will work with leaders from EpiVax and PharmaJet, who have a wealth of immunology and vaccine delivery expertise, to rapidly develop its COVID-19 vaccine. Immunomic’s UNITE platform has been widely applied to create vaccine candidates for rabies, yellow fever, dengue fever, hepatitis C and SARS, a relative to the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus.

Just as many schools around the nation began shuttering for the year last month due to the pandemic, top officials at Children’s National Hospital were quickly mounting their own response to address COVID-19 concerns among kids. 

“We heard from our pediatricians in late February, early March that they were very worried about what they were seeing in the community,” said Children’s National Chief Operating Officer Kathleen Gorman during a virtual roundtable with FierceHealthcare this week.

Image: Here’s a look at the advice Children’s National had to offer other hospitals about lessons learned from standing up a drive-thru specimen collection site within one week. (Children’s National Health System)

The AIM-HI Accelerator Fund’s Women’s Venture Competition is a high-profile initiative among women-led oncology start-up companies or venture teams aspiring to soon establish such firms, in which all participants are offered access to intensive accelerator boot-camp programming by one of the world’s most renowned women entrepreneur accelerator and business training service providers, Springboard Enterprises, and—subject to due diligence and negotiation—the winning business will receive up to $300,000 in AIM-HI investment.

Just three months ago, thousands of biotech types blotted out the streets of San Francisco for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, four days of crowded rooms, overstuffed bars, and double-booked meetings. Today, with the coronavirus forcing the industry to interact via videoconference, that kind of physical proximity is difficult to imagine. And it might still be unsafe by the time JPM 2021 rolls around.

COVID-19 wasn’t about to stop the important work being done to meet the large unmet need for pediatric medical devices among patients younger than 18. NCC-PDI’s annual “Make Your Medical Device Pitch for Kids!” pitch competition moved to a 100% virtual event format to keep pediatric medical device innovation moving forward while complying with social distancing recommendations that will help to flatten the curve.

In late March, 30 outstanding companies pitched their pediatric device innovations in cardiovascular, orthopedic, spine and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) devices — areas where the need is greatest  — to judges in a virtual meeting room setting. 

Image: https://biobuzz.io

Johns Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels shared a message with the university community today. The full text of the message is below.

Dear Johns Hopkins Faculty, Students, and Staff:

It has been a long and nerve-wracking month since we began to fully prepare for, and mitigate the impact of, the extraordinary challenges posed by COVID-19. Our colleagues from the Bloomberg School of Public Health remind us that we are still likely a few weeks from the peak of the pandemic in Maryland. For the foreseeable future, we will remain under significant strain as we respond in ways that run counter to our normal course of action and to our community’s innate desire to connect in person with each other.

Image: https://president.jhu.edu/

A new coronavirus was spreading in the U.S., and with social distancing orders going into place, talk immediately turned to finding a treatment that could stop the spread. In Maryland, companies jumped into action. Work began on a vaccine at Gaithersburg-based Novavax, and the company partnered with Emergent Biosolutions on initial development and manufacturing. Gaithersburg’s Altimmune is also developing a vaccine, and announced plans last week for a preclinical testing collaboration with the University of Alabama Birmingham.

As the U.S. continues to find its way through a tough fight against this global pandemic, a number of BioHealth Capital Region (BHCR) biotech companies are making significant contributions to stem the COVID-19 pandemic. With people across the U.S. and the world making sacrifices to flatten the curve — along with nurses, doctors and first responders who stand heroically at the front lines — life science companies in our region are doing everything in their power to make COVID-19 vaccine progress with celerity, safety and efficacy top-of-mind.

WASHINGTON (NEXSTAR) ─ Even though he says the worst is yet to come, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, has seen signs of progress in the country’s fight against the coronavirus.

“The next week we’re going to see a spike in deaths throughout the country, particularly in the hot spot areas like New York, but simultaneously with that, we’re starting to see some cautiously optimistic type signs,” Fauci said.

Image: https://fox8.com