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The U.S. health care system is one in which price gouging is completely legal and cost inflation is out of control. According to a recent study from the Institute of Medicine, 30% of U.S. health care bills are waste, and if food-price inflation since 1945 matched that of health care, today we would be paying $55 for a dozen eggs. New doctors enter systems where financial incentives are in treating people as needed rather than keeping them healthy, and where legacy programs have no good reason to change.

On Sept. 30, former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Chief Technology Officer Bryan Sivak announced on Twitter that he has joined the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

Sivak became the CTO for D.C. in 2009 before becoming the CIO of Maryland and then CTO for DHHS. Sivak announced his departure from DHHS earlier this year.

Back in 2010, in a landmark analyst note (not exactly a phrase we hear very often), Andrew Baum, then at Morgan Stanley MS +0.00%, observed that while many pharma companies were ostensibly trying to discover and develop drugs, most weren’t very good at it and, and should probably stop. Instead, he suggested, they should shift from R&D to “S&D” – “Search and Develop” – and seek to in-license promising early-stage (or late-stage) products that innovative biotechs were making.

This November, Alexandria LaunchLabs™ will open its doors to local, cutting-edge life science startups at 708 Quince Orchard Road in Gaithersburg, MD.

Alexandria LaunchLabs was created by a consortium of world-class partners to fill a specific unmet need in the market for early-stage life science companies. The consortium, which includes Alexandria Venture Investments (the strategic venture capital arm of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc.), BioHealth Innovation, Montgomery County, and the City of Gaithersburg, recognized that in addition to providing early-stage life science companies with specialized state-of-the-art lab and office space, access to first- class supporting resources, services, and capital, is critical for innovation and growth. As such, consortium members will extend their respective networks to Alexandria LaunchLabs’ tenants, while BioHealth Innovation will provide access to its Startup and Entrepreneur-in-Residence programs. Additionally, co-location will provide a collaborative ecosystem in which tenants will be able to further assist one another in identifying resources and sharing best practices. The creative startup environment fostered at Alexandria LaunchLabs will dramatically accelerate the growth of local early-stage life science companies.

AccelerateBaltimore received new funding that will allow a startup in next year’s class to receive additional funding when the company completes the program.

The accelerator, which is run by the Emerging Technology Centers, awards six startups with $25,000 in funding as part of the program. New in 2016, one startup will receive an additional $100,000 in funding.

Join us for the Illumina Accelerator reception at ASHG. Meet and greet company leaders and industry peers to learn about new opportunities for your genomics startup.  

Date:   Tuesday, October 6                                    

Time:   6:45 PM–8:30 PM  

Location:     Illumina Lounge Baltimore Convention Center

DuPont has entered into a license and collaboration agreement with The Johns Hopkins University to commercialize a special garment from Johns Hopkins for the protection of people on the front lines of the Ebola crisis and fatal infectious disease outbreaks in the future. DuPont plans to launch the garment in markets during the first half of 2016.

DuPont has been providing special garments for over 40 years to cater to the safety and protection issues of industrial and healthcare workers. Hence, this alliance will enable the garment to gain faster and wider access to the market. According to the agreement, Johns Hopkins will support DuPont in assessing the sample garments produced by the latter and further help prepare information for users. DuPont, on the other hand, will take care of the commercialization of the garment. Further terms of the agreement were kept under wraps.

Without the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), Leesburg-based Disrupt6 wouldn’t exist. Just two years ago Disrupt6 co-founder and CEO Joe Klein was a defense contractor with more than 30 years of cybersecurity experience — he battled his first hacker in the 1980s. But Klein had never been able to get his own business off the ground until he was asked last year to pitch his business idea as part of CIT’s MACH37 initiative to promote cybersecurity startups.

Remember Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster who went on to be founding president of Facebook and then the investor who brought Spotify to the U.S.? He’s now putting his considerable wealth into immuno-oncology, and apparently doing it without his usual “disruptive” style.

The normally brash Parker — the one played by Justin Timberlake in “The Social Network” — has, according to FierceBiotech’s Damian Garde, been doing his homework on T cells and is ready to put his money where his mouth once was. “My role is not to be a disrupter but to be a consistent, long-term funder,” Parker said alongside two Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center researchers, discussing the “new face of cancer.”

Switzerland’s Roche has moved into pole position in the race to launch the world’s first treatment for progressive multiple sclerosis but smaller players are working hard on rival approaches.

While there are a number of treatments for relapsing remitting MS, the most common form of the disease, there are no approved drugs for progressive MS, which is marked by steadily worsening symptoms.