Michael Milken, one of the biggest medical philanthropists in the country, on medical research today.
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Before the winter edition of HopHacks kicked off, a big crowd turned out at Johns Hopkins to hear about nurturing startups at scale from a pair of Y Combinator staffers.
The big takeaway of this YC Winter Tour for startups is pretty straightforward: applications for the biannual seed accelerator program are open. The Mountain View, Calif.-based accelerator program runs two batches each year. It provides $120,000 to each startup in exchange for 7 percent equity.
Today, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker announced the 25 awardees that will receive $10 million under the Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) 2015 Regional Innovation Strategies (RIS) program. The 2015 RIS program is managed by EDA’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE) and is designed to advance innovation and capacity-building activities in regions across the country through two different competitions: the i6 Challenge and the Seed Fund Support (SFS) Grants competition.
“As the driving force behind the Administration’s focus on entrepreneurship, the Department of Commerce is committed to helping set the conditions for innovators and entrepreneurs to test new ideas, take risks, find financing and customers, and ultimately thrive,” said Secretary Pritzker. “The Regional Innovation Strategies program is critical to ensuring that entrepreneurs have access to the tools they need to move their ideas and inventions from idea to market.”
For the past five years until January, a team of federal contractors has been poring over academic journals, news reports and press releases in search of emerging technology that could change the outcome of clinical care.
The team’s goal was to write reports containing lists of topics worth further research from the Department of Health and Human Services. The assessment team surfaced medical products and techniques such as “wearable artificial kidney for managing end-stage renal disease” or “joint-sparing knee implant[s] for treatment of knee osteoarthritis,” according to the team’s report from last year.
In the blink of an eye, a business world that required only antivirus protection now requires far better solutions to combat sophisticated, determined ‘bad actors’ who want to steal your valuable information. You can’t pick up a newspaper or watch a news program and not read or hear about an important breach. Despite spending at a rate of $100 billion annually, global damages from cybersecurity breaches and attacks are on a trajectory to increase from $500 billion to potentially more than $2 trillion per year.
US President Barack Obama’s plan to get a vast Pacific Rim trade deal through Congress this year is taking flak from the presidential campaign trail, where disdain for the pact appears to be one of the rare unifying themes for almost everyone from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton.
Baltimore health IT startup Protenus Inc. has raised $2.6 million of a $4 million equity funding round, according to documents filed with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission.
CosmosID, the leading genomic big data company focused on microbiome research, outbreak investigations, and infectious disease diagnostics, using next-generation DNA sequencing, announced $6M in Series B funding. The company will expand its engineering capabilities, enhance clinical applications, undertake research and development to improve linkage of the DNA genetic code to actual biological traits (genotype to phenotype), such as antibiotic resistance, and develop new products directed at monitoring, predicting, and preventing disease outbreaks.
A Virginia House panel on Wednesday advanced bills that would allocate about $40 million for grants that some of the state’s most powerful business, education and government interests are touting as a boon to regional economic growth.