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A $10.7 million grant to the University of Maryland School of Dentistry and the University of Maryland School of Medicine will fund the collaborative study of biomarkers associated with sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia, in hopes of finding new ways to predict the infection and developing new vaccines or treatments. The five-year grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is the renewal of a previous $12 million, five-year grant awarded in 2009, bringing the project’s total to $22.7 million.

Image: http://www.oea.umaryland.edu 

What do you need to turn a brilliant idea into a business? “A good morale boost,” says Abhishek Motayed, Founder and President of N5 Sensors, Inc. of Rockville. Motayed had that boost this month when N5 Sensors received two Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards totaling $250,000. The grants came from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) towards N5 Sensors work developing low-power, computer chip-size benzene, carbon monoxide, and ammonia sensors.

Image: http://umdtechtransfer.wordpress.com – Pasquale Ferrari, Ratan Debnath, Abhishek Motayed 

Maryland Health Secretary Dr. Joshua Sharfstein will step down in January to join Johns Hopkins University.

Sharfstein’s move comes as Maryland is trying to revamp its failed health exchange in time for November open enrollment and as Gov. Martin O’Malley’s administration winds down.

Image: Nicholas Griner Maryland Health Secretary Dr. Joshua Sharfstein is stepping down in January and will join Johns Hopkins University. 

The Montgomery County Council gave final approval Tuesday to an ambitious land-use plan designed to spur creation of a new science-focused town center in the county’s long-neglected eastern sector.

The White Oak Science Gateway Master Plan envisions housing, retail and a hub for medical and life-sciences research adjacent to the Food and Drug Administration headquarters at Route 29 and Industrial Parkway. The plan also adjusts zoning and land-use regulations with the goal of energizing new residential construction and commercial renewal in the White Oak and Hillandale communities.

The FLC planner visually communicates the outstanding research and development efforts of the federal laboratory system. Images and captions tell the story of the technology’s scientific relevance and potential impact.

Printed annually, the planner is distributed to over 10,000 recipients, including members of Congress, scientists, researchers, agency representatives, laboratory directors, technology transfer professionals, students, academia, and members of industry.

Image: http://www.federallabs.org 

QIAGEN (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt, Prime Standard: QIA) today announced a collaboration agreement with AstraZeneca PLC (LSE, NYSE and OMX: AZN) for the co-development and commercialization of a liquid biopsy-based companion diagnostic to be paired with IRESSA, AstraZeneca’s targeted therapy for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The project builds on a master framework agreement signed by both companies in 2013 and aims to develop and market a novel QIAGEN companion diagnostic that analyzes plasma samples to assess EGFR mutation status in NSCLC patients. The assay will be designed to guide the treatment of NSCLC patients with Astra Zeneca’s oral monotherapy anti-cancer treatment when tumour tissue is not available. QIAGEN already offers the therascreen EGFR RGQ PCR Kit (therascreen EGFR test) as a tissue-based companion diagnostic for lung cancer patients, which was approved in the U.S. by the FDA in July 2013 and in China in May 2014.

Baltimore startup Quantified Care thinks it’s possible for doctors to do an entire check-up with a smartphone and a bag of gadgets. It wants to sell you all of it — including the bag. Quantified Care is making a business of finding the most useful smartphone apps and devices for doctors and is developing software to help docs analyze data across devices. The company also runs an e-commerce website at which doctors can buy the devices it backs.

Image Courtesy of phanlop88 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Ditching handshakes in favor of more informal fist bumps could help cut down on the spread of bacteria and illnesses, according to a study released on Monday.

The study in the American Journal of Infection Control found that fist bumps, where two people briefly press the top of their closed fists together, transferred about 90 percent less bacteria than handshakes.

Image: By The U.S. Army (Fist bump) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 

In these times of tight budgets and rapidly evolving science, we must consider new ways to invest biomedical research dollars to achieve maximum impact—to turn scientific discoveries into better health as swiftly as possible. We do this by thinking strategically about the areas of research that we support, as well as the process by which we fund that research.