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Friday, Sept. 19, 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Under Armour – 1020 Hull Street, Tide Point, Baltimore, MD 21230

Baltimore Innovation Week starts NEXT WEEK and includes more than 45 events from Sept. 12-20. The fall is just beginning—kickoff the season with a big networking event for tech and entrepreneurship in Baltimore. Come to the Innovation celebration, which will be even bigger than last year and help close out a packed week. More games, more apps, more food and more networking—plus, you get the chance to see first the winners of the second annual Innovation Awards.

BioFactura is a collaborator on a grant awarded to the Geneva Foundation. Ebola drug development funding will be provided under a Partnerships for Biodefense grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The project team is led by the Geneva Foundation (Seattle, WA) and includes partners at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID, Ft. Detrick, MD) and the Fraunhofer USA Center for Molecular Biotechnology (Newark, DE). During the 5-year grant, the team aims to develop an effective monoclonal antibody (mAb)-based drug against Sudan ebolavirus.

Currently, there are no established treatments for Ebola infection. Over the past five years, three Ebola outbreaks involving a Sudan strain of the virus have occurred. The need for strain-specific Ebola countermeasures is imperative for treating infected patients and effectively containing outbreaks. The research team looks forward to developing a promising and urgently needed Ebola treatment that targets the Sudan strain of the virus.

There has been a long-running debate in the pharmaceutical industry about the value of being first to market. Companies spend considerable resources seeking to increase the odds of beating their competitors to market and often fret about the commercial disadvantage of being late. In the high-stakes race to market for a novel drug class, companies firmly believe that every month of lead time ahead of a competitor is significant.

It’s not quite that simple. Our analysis of pharma launches confirms a weak first-to-market advantage on average, but with significant nuances dependent on market context. In many instances, the first-mover advantage actually vanishes, particularly when the lead time is short or when the first mover is a small company. This article seeks to identify those situations where first-to-market advantage is strong and those where it does not hold.

Say you invent a medical device. A pacemaker. An improved hip implant. A microchip for the brain. Maybe you can change the world, but first you’ll have to get approved.

A new graduate certificate program in the bioengineering department teaches students the ins and outs of gaining Food and Drug Administration approval. This process is necessary to test the safety and efficiency of all medical inventions before they hit the market, but it can take years of expensive research — and disapproval is common, said William Bentley, the bioengineering department chairman.

Pluristem Therapeutics, a company that develops placenta-based cell therapy products, announced that its licensing partner United Therapeutics is advancing the Phase I study of Pluristem’s PLacental eXpanded (PLX-PAD) cells in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH).

PLacental eXpanded (PLX) cells are developed by Pluristem to serve as protein delivery platforms that release a mix of proteins for ischemia or inflammation. The treatment technology is also being used to investigate tendon-healing treatments in a preclinical model of tendon injury. The company presented results at the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons’ (AAOS) Annual Meeting last March in New Orleans.

Some of the greatest health care innovations have taken decades to reach widespread adoption, adding to the ever-increasing cost of health care.

We are looking for solutions that have already been implemented at least once and have demonstrated effectiveness. This “scale-up” competition seeks to shorten the time frame for innovation dissemination.

In the fight against cancer, Johns Hopkins University is invoking a popular attitude these days: go big or go home.

The Johns Hopkins radiation oncology department has teamed up with Toshiba Group to establish the Toshiba Center for Big Data in Healthcare at the Science + Technology Park at the Hopkins campus in Baltimore.

A white powdered chemical compound emerged from two University of Maryland School of Medicine laboratories more than 10 years ago with a name destined for oblivion, but a future that now looks promising as a treatment for the most challenging cases of prostate cancer.

Today, VN/124-1 is a drug candidate with a name — galeterone — a pharmaceutical company founded on its potential and a record of strong preliminary results in clinical trials with human patients.

Startup Maryland announced support from TEDCO (www.tedco.md) as a full-tour sponsor of the Pitch Across Maryland 2014, the third annual state-wide tour and celebration of entrepreneurship and startup companies.

Starting on September 15 and running through October 3 the Pitch Across Maryland tour will again traverse the state all in the name of celebrating Maryland’s diverse communities of venture building.

“Maryland’s innovation economy is front-and-center in many of the most lucrative industry and innovation categories,” stated Michael Binko, founder of Startup Maryland.  “From traditional ‘feds, eds and meds’ (government/education/healthcare/life sciences-bio), to cloud computing, cyber-security, creative/arts, clean energy/green, to autonomous systems, Maryland entrepreneurs are breeding innovation ventures that are disrupting a wide array of industry sectors and TEDCO has consistently been the recognized leader in early-stage resource commitments.”