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Wed, May 6, 2015 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT

This is an educational webinar on the NHLBI Phase IIB Bridge and Small Market funding opportunities to support continued development of SBIR/STTR Phase II projects focused on heart, lung, blood, or sleep technologies. The Small Market Awards support projects focused on rare diseases or for pediatric indications.

Phase IIB Bridge RFA-HL-16-009: http://1.usa.gov/1Deb9h5 Phase IIB Small Market RFA-HL-14-012: http://1.usa.gov/1p2cvbi

Presenters: Jennifer Shieh, PhD – NHLBI Small Business Coordinator Gary Robinson, PhD – NHLBI Business Development Advisor

The University of Maryland (UMD) and MakerBot, a global leader in the desktop 3D printing industry, will be holding a grand opening of the new MakerBot Innovation Center at UMD on April 23, 2015. UMD is the first in the Big Ten, and the first in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan area, to launch a MakerBot Innovation Center – a large-scale 3D printing installation that is designed to empower university faculty, students and organizations to innovate faster, increase collaboration and compete more effectively. Grand opening festivities will begin at 2:00 p.m., Thursday, April 23, at the University of Maryland, Technology Advancement Program Building, 387 Technology Drive, College Park, Maryland, with speeches from university staff and representatives from MakerBot.

Virginia will create a new online portal where researchers can post information about their biotech projects — information employers can then use for recruitment and investment opportunities, Gov. Terry McAuliffe said Thursday.

It’s among several specific investments the state needs to make to create a stronger life sciences industry, McAuliffe said. He was at the THRiVE 2015 conference, which attracted 350 bioscience leaders from across the state, to talk about how to better merge the commonwealth’s strength in big data with its growing biotech industry. The portal was among multiple ideas raised by an eager group of business leaders who sought more support from the state in their efforts to commercialize their work.

George Mason University unveiled its new $40 million Advanced Biomedical Research building Thursday, signaling its expansion in genomics and precision medicine research.

The university simultaneously renamed its Manassas campus its Science and Technology campus.

How much venture capital money is out there for healthcare start-ups?

Apparently, quite a bit.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, medical start-ups in the United States raised around $3.9 billion in venture capital during the first quarter of this year. Here are eight key trends from the report:

The University of Louisville announced today that a grant from the National Institutes of Health will combine with matching funds from the university to create a new $6.1 million initiative to commercialize discoveries made by UofL researchers.

UofL is one of just three institutions in the United States selected as a Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hub (REACH) by the NIH. The REACH award consists of $3 million over three years matched by an additional $3.1 million from UofL.

Pharmaceutical company Teva has offered to buy fellow drug maker Mylan in a deal that could be worth $40 billion.

In the proposal, confirmed yesterday (April 21), Teva offered Mylan $82 per share.

Last week, Mylan’s executive chairman Robert Coury dismissed rumours of a merger with Israel-based Teva.

The Food and Drug Administration is making as much as $1 million in grant funding available for mining a large database of electronic health records to conduct postmarket surveillance of drug safety.

The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) will award a one-year grant by summer to a single bidder to develop “new analytic methodologies” to look for signs of pharmaceutical-related safety problems in the Mini-Sentinel Distributed Database, an FDA-funded pilot with access to 178 million medical records.

A hallmark of Parkinson’s disease is the progressive loss of nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons. We derived human neuroepithelial cells from induced pluripotent stem cells and successfully differentiated them into dopaminergic neurons within phase-guided, three-dimensional microfluidic cell culture bioreactors. After 30 days of differentiation within the microfluidic bioreactors, in situ morphological, immunocytochemical and calcium imaging confirmed the presence of dopaminergic neurons that were spontaneously electrophysiologically active, a characteristic feature of nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons in vivo. Differentiation was as efficient as in macroscopic culture, with up to 19% of differentiated neurons immunoreactive for tyrosine hydroxylase, the penultimate enzyme in the synthesis of dopamine. This new microfluidic cell culture model integrates the latest innovations in developmental biology and microfluidic cell culture to generate a biologically realistic and economically efficient route to personalised drug discovery for Parkinson’s disease.

CORE PROGRAM APPLICATION  DEADLINE 5 PM, FRIDAY, MAY 1ST  

The Core Program is Leadership Montgomery’s (LM) hallmark program. It is a highly interactive and life-enriching nine-month course that makes a significant contribution to Montgomery County’s well-being by providing intensive hands-on study and in-depth discussion of current issues facing the County, including, transportation, education, public safety, business, planning, economic development, communities diversity and the arts. Click here to read about a session. Click here to see the session agendas.