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Relevant Health, a health tech accelerator in Rockvillle, Maryland, has picked seven companies for its inaugural class. Among the participants in the five-month program are a wearables developer seeking to help people avoid injuries from heavy lifting and a speech therapy tool to make learning seem more like a game.

The accelerator got started this year through a partnership between BioHealth Innovation, Montgomery County’s Economic Development department and Product Savvy, which is managing day-to-day operations. Here’s a summary of the members.

The booming biotech sector is putting a premium on lab space, and fund managers are buying in.

One of their favorite targets is Pasadena, California-based Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc, which owns the largest collection of high-end lab space in such research clusters as San Diego, San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts. A total of 64 mutual funds and hedge funds have reported adding shares of the company to their portfolios in the current quarter, a 56 percent jump from the quarter ending in September, according to Morningstar data.

Rockville-based health-tech incubator Relevant Health is out with its first seven companies that will begin co-working in the facility over the next five months.

“We didn’t want to just attract the best and brightest from around the region, we wanted the best and brightest from around the United States and elsewhere,” managing partner Rich Bendis told The Washington Post. “We have resources and assets that are one of a kind in our backyard that really aren’t present elsewhere.”

ATCC, the premier global biological materials resource and standards organization, announces today that it has been selected by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) to provide vital cell lines to academic, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology organizations committed to speed a cure for Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s disease is a chronic, degenerative neurological disorder that affects one in 100 people over age 60. While the average age at onset is 60, people have been diagnosed as young as 18. Recent research indicates that at least 1 million people in the United States, and more than 5 million worldwide, have Parkinson’s disease.

MacroGenics said today it has regained full global rights to the Phase I cancer compound enoblituzumab (MGA271), after Servier opted not to exercise its option to develop and commercialize the B7-H3-targeting monoclonal antibody in Europe and other countries under a four-year-old collaboration.

That collaboration generated a $20 million upfront payment from Servier and could have resulted in up to $450 million for MacroGenics.

Personal Genome Diagnostics, a Baltimore company that analyzes cancer patients’ genes to improve treatment and diagnosis, has received a $21.4 million venture capital investment led by New Enterprise Associates.

The company plans to use the money to sell more of its technology to sequence and analyze genes in biopsy samples.

When the demand for hospital beds exceeds the supply, doctors might have to turn patients away. But a computer model developed by University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University researchers might help doctors better determine how many patients will be discharged and how many beds will be available on any given day.

“Hospitals tend to be highly utilized,” said Sean Barnes, an operations management professor involved with the model, “which means it can be hard to bring in new patients.”

Relevant Health, a health-tech accelerator based in Rockville, announced and welcomed its inaugural cohort Tuesday.

The seven selected startups will begin their five-month program this week. According to the press release, the program will involve “intensive product development focus,” with the aim of “enabling [the startups] to improve their skills to define, develop, position and launch a viable health tech product.”

Are you planning your career path or currently transitioning between careers? If you attended last January’s webinar on “Career Development,” and would like to have in-person insights from career coaches and recruiters perspective, join us at the Montgomery College (Germantown Campus) where we will host:

• Rosemary Sisco, Principal Recruiter at Kelly Government Solutions
• Ashley Bowman Clouser, Executive Recruiter at Search Solution Group
• Cecilia Matthews, Director of Human Resources at MedImmune

These professionals will provide career advice on such skills as elevator pitches and making successful presentations. They will also present tips, methods, and resources for conducting a job search.

Recently, at the annual Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared a new era in computing defined by wearable devices. “People keep asking the question what’s next after the smartphone? There are early signs of it, things you wear on your wrists, in your ear and on your eyes,” he said.