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Forbes has published a new feature on the “Best Performing Company in Each State.”

The magazine “tracked the total return of every public company between June 8, 2015, and June 8, 2016, excluding companies that have been trading for less time.” The analysis was based on data from FactSet.

Zika has been in the spotlight lately with summer in full swing and the Olympics in Rio just around the corner. A company in Montgomery County is working on a vaccine that could save lives.

Emergent Biosolutions was awarded a contract by the U.S. government worth nearly $22 million. Scientists will begin working on the vaccine within just a few days.

Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation is asking for your help in identifying some “knock your socks off” candidates for the next jobs the MCEDC will fill:

1) Executive Assistant. We are looking for someone who loves to create order from chaos, to keep multiple balls in the air at one time, to support the MCEDC Board, to manage vendor relationships and to create PowerPoint presentations, reports, Excel tables and correspondence; who is not afraid to learn new software; loves details and can keep them straight; is reliable; has a great telephone manner and likes to have fun while getting an enormous amount of work done!

2) Web Content Manager. This position is part of the Marketing/Communications group. We want to produce an award-winning, incredibly useful, highly visited web site on doing business in Montgomery County. We’re looking for someone who is a superb writer, knows business interests/language/terms, can work effectively and creatively with a good web design company, has an eye for detail and consistency. This position will entail working with the marketing and branding team in both launching new content and keeping content current and refreshed.

3) Marketing/Communications Director. This position will identify key messages for target audiences, develop a marketing plan for each of those audiences, work with a creative agency to produce the deliverables, evaluate the results and recommend/implement course corrections. This position will also oversee development of our social media presence, press relations and press releases, and other online communications. The director will also have supervisory responsibility for several marketing/communications positions.

Please tell anyone you know with the appropriate skills and experience about the openings. We are interested in moving forward expeditiously and will begin interviewing the week of July 18. Please have any qualified candidates forward a resume and statement of interest to Joyce Fuhrmann at jfuhrmann@choosemontgomerycountymd.com.

The Maryland Department of Commerce is seeking qualified candidates for the position of Senior Business Development Representative within its Division of Business & Industry Sector Development’s Regional Growth, Business Retention, Expansion and Strategic Rural Development Unit. This position is primarily responsible for attracting businesses, assisting with retention, relocation, and expansion needs and opportunities within the State of Maryland focusing on Montgomery County in the Capital Region. The incumbent will actively market and promote the region’s unique assets providing economic development assistance to businesses, Counties, or economic development organizations in Montgomery County.

Today, University of Maryland (UM) Ventures announced the appointment of Darryl L. Carter, MD, co-founder and former vice president of Nora Therapeutics, Inc., as Venture Advisor at the University of Maryland Baltimore’s (UMB) Office of Technology Transfer (OTT). In this role, Dr. Carter, who previously supported UMB’s OTT and entrepreneurially focused inventors as an entrepreneur-in-residence, will assist faculty in turning their technology inventions into commercial opportunities. Dr. Carter will also help support the formation of new UMB technology-based start-up companies.

Subscription boxes are a growing business trend. About a year and a half ago, Fatima Dicko founded mybestbox, a subscription-based business which delivers boxes filled with $75-$100 worth of healthy living materials to subscribers nationwide for $25 each month.

GlaxoSmithKline has bought global rights to an experimental drug from Johnson & Johnson for up to 175 million pounds ($230 million), raising its bet on a new generation of biotech medicines for severe asthma.

To address one of the greatest modern threats to public health — antibiotic resistance — the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Wellcome Trust of London, the AMR Centre of Alderley Park (Cheshire, United Kingdom), and Boston University School of Law will create one of the world’s largest public-private partnerships focused on preclinical discovery and development of new antimicrobial products.

The House Small Business Committee issued a report (H.Rpt. 114-705) on legislation (H.R. 4783) to reauthorize and improve the Small Business Innovation Research Program…

On June 27, 2016, the SEC proposed amendments that, if adopted, would allow more companies to qualify for “smaller reporting company” (SRC) status. The proposed amendments are intended to promote capital formation and reduce disclosure compliance costs for smaller companies while maintaining investor protections.

New York City-based Transfix, an on-demand trucking provider, has raised $22 million in Series B funding. New Enterprise Associates led the round with participation from other investors that included Canvas Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Corigin Ventures. In conjunction with the funding, Scott Sandell of NEA has been added to Transfix’s board of directors.

We’ve tried to cure cancer before. Will this time be different?

Reltio, the enterprise data-driven applications and modern data management Platform as a Service (PaaS) company, announced today that it has raised $22M in Series B funding. Leading the oversubscribed round is one of the world’s largest and most successful VC firms, New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Existing investors, Crosslink Capital and .406 Ventures added to their $10M Series A investment, bringing Reltio’s total venture funding to $32M to date. The new financing will be used to extend Reltio’s leadership position in modern data management through accelerated hiring of talented individuals across all groups, and continued expansion into global markets.

At Human Longevity Inc. (HLI) in La Jolla, California, more than two dozen machines work around the clock, sequencing one human genome every 15 minutes at a cost of under $2,000 per genome. The whole operation fits comfortably in three rooms. Back in 2000, when its founder, J. Craig Venter, first sequenced a human genome (his own), it cost $100 million and took a building-size, $50 million computer nine months to complete.

BioAdvance, the operator of a $50 million early stage life sciences fund that work with health-care entrepreneurs in the mid-Atlantic region, invested $2.9 million in companies and technologies targeting human health during fiscal 2016