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'We need to provide high-quality education at a lower cost. If at the end of the day, this means there aren't as many universities or some people don't have jobs, you know, this is not a welfare business. We have the interest of the nation at stake. And this is what we all have to keep focused on—high quality and containing costs.'
William E. Kirwan, Chancellor, University
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QIAGEN has announced an agreement with Eli Lilly and Company to develop and commercialize a molecular companion diagnostic paired with a novel Lilly oncology compound. This is the third co-development project by QIAGEN and Lilly to create companion diagnostics, which are tests that analyze genomic information in patient samples to enable personalized decisions on treatments.
The latest collaboration, involving an undisclosed Lilly compound and an undisclosed molecular diagnostic target, builds on a master collaboration agreement for development of tailored therapies in cancer and other therapeutic areas signed earlier this year.
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Imagine a website launched by students, for students to share information about their innovation ecosystem on campus. I'm talking a navigation tool of sorts that allows students from every corner of the country to learn about what effective strategies universities have developed to enhance resources for students interested in exploring the technology and entrepreneurship realms. No, this isn't a dream. This website exists, and it goes by the name of "University Innovation."
The wiki was initially created by the University Innovation Fellows, an elite group of 45 students that are a part of a national movement to catalyze innovation on campus. But they've now opened up the wiki for the whole world to enjoy as a "resource to all student stakeholders in the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship spheres in higher education."
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Before 1960, the only way to treat cardiac arrest involved opening up the chest cavity and applying manual cardiac massage. The surgeon would take the heart in his hands and squeeze it ever so cautiously to a distinct rhythm in order to help pump blood to the brain and other important organs, giving the patient a chance at life once again. While a bold method, it was rarely attempted and more often than not didn't prove successful.
So, taking this as an opportunity to try something new, surgeons at Johns Hopkins created a new Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation technique dubbed closed-chest cardiac massage. The group of surgeons with a knack for innovation created a way to pump the arrested heart without ever having to open up the patient.
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Millennial Media, WeddingWire and RainKing Solutions led the list of Maryland companies making the 2013 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, a prestigious technology awards program in United States and Canada. Among Maryland’s eight repeat companies, United Therapeutics Corporation is on the list for the 13th straight year and Zenoss is on the list for the third straight year.
Overall, there were 15 Maryland companies on the list, up from 12 in 2012. Maryland’s 15 companies were the eighth most among states/provinces. California far outpaced other states with 166 companies, with Massachusetts, Ontario, New York, Washington and Pennsylvania following. Virginia had 16 companies on the list for the seventh most among states/provinces.
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Baltimore is a top destination for students looking to attend college.
The Charm City has ranked eighth among major metro areas in the American Institute for Economic Research’s College Destinations Index for 2013 and 2014.
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As reported in the Baltimore News Journal, Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz on Monday proposed a new department name and department head nominee for the County’s economic development agency.
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The head of Maryland’s university system on Wednesday said higher education needs to embrace disruptive technologies such as massive online courses in an effort to serve more students and contain costs.
“If at the end of the day this means there aren’t as many universities or some people don’t have jobs, you know, this is not a welfare business,” William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council annual meeting. “We have the interests of the nation at stake.”
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The state of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have embarked on a new partnership effort, the main goal of which is to attract high technology companies to Maryland, which in turn will enable both future missions of NASA and the economic future of Maryland. The agreement, signed by U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley and Goddard Space Flight Center Director Chris Scolese will help in several ways. Goddard will obtain specialized skills and technologies needed for its numerous mission applications. It will help the center engage in technical exchanges with local tech companies regarding new trends, theories, techniques and problems in aerospace technology. And finally, it will provide an opportunity for the development of local educational and labor resources specific to Goddard's needs.
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Dr. Daniel Saltzman says he can prove that bacteria that ordinarily cause food poisoning in people can be modified for use as guided missiles to deliver cancer-killing payloads into tumors.
But he needs $500,000 for some preliminary work, and despite his project’s potential, he’s not holding his breath for funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s leading source of biomedical research grants.
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QIAGEN (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt, Prime Standard: QIA) today announced an agreement with Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) to develop and commercialize a molecular companion diagnostic paired with a novel Lilly oncology compound. This is the third co-development project by QIAGEN and Lilly to create companion diagnostics, which are tests that analyze genomic information in patient samples to enable personalized decisions on treatments. The latest collaboration, involving an undisclosed Lilly compound and an undisclosed molecular diagnostic target, builds on a master collaboration agreement for development of tailored therapies in cancer and other therapeutic areas signed earlier this year.
QIAGEN and Lilly are long-standing partners in personalized healthcare. QIAGEN's therascreen(R) KRAS RGQ PCR Kit has been widely adopted by laboratories since its July 2012 approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a companion diagnostic. The therascreen KRAS Test detects gene mutations in metastatic colorectal cancer patients, indicating which ones will benefit from Erbitux. In September 2011, QIAGEN and Lilly partnered to develop a companion diagnostic that evaluates the Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) gene, which plays a role in some blood cancers. The test is paired with a Lilly compound to guide use of the proposed drug, currently in clinical trials.
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T he Symposium is the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund premier event that delivers comprehensive scientific talks, poster presentations, Ethics discussions and networking time, enabling cell therapy basic research and technologies from the lab to pre-clinical and to commercialization.
With a powerful line-up of speakers and many opportunities for you to present your work in concurrent or poster presentations, the Symposium will follow the format and style of previous meetings with an additional networking time and an intimate environment.
Keynote Address: The John L. Kellermann, III Memorial Lecture
Keynote Speaker:
Rita Perlingeiro, Ph.D.
Associate Professor & Lillehei Endowed Scholar
Lillehei Heart Institute University of Minnesota
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Many of today’s biotech companies don’t aspire to be companies at all. They’re more like temporary “virtual” projects, with skeleton crews of contractors who come together for a spell and then move on to the next thing. As others have observed, it’s much like what actors, directors and producers do to make movies in Hollywood.
That’s not how the enduring, independent biotech companies do it. These companies aspire to be bigger than any one individual, or any one product bound to lose patent protection in a few years. That means they need to do an old-fashioned thing—hire lots of smart people, give them good salaries and benefits, and challenge them to accomplish big things. Otherwise, there’s no way to carry out a long-term, lofty mission of creating valuable new products for patients.
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A new business accelerator in Howard County has launched a crowdfunding campaign to get off the ground.
Conscious Venture Lab in Columbia is looking to raise $50,000 through the crowdfunding website Indiegogo, which allows users to set fundraising goals and generate donations from online supporters. The Howard County Economic Development Authority and the Maryland Center for Entrepreneurship, part of the development authority, will match the money Conscious Venture Lab raises through its crowdfunding campaign.
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With the cost of drug development hitting the $5 billion mark and 94 percent of drugs failing at some point in clinical development, pharmaceutical companies have been turning to new tools to help clinical trial design: computers and robots.
A couple of Wall Street Journal articles highlight this trend.
One notes that in June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency endorsed a simulator from the Critical Path Institute to help develop Alzheimer’s disease treatments. Additional simulators are in the works for tuberculosis, Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
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The equity culture among young technology companies is almost universal. When implemented properly, broad employee ownership within a company can:
- Align the risk and reward of employees betting on an unproven company.
- Reward long-term value creation and thinking by employees.
- Encourage employees to think about the company’s holistic success.
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GlaxoSmithKline’s $500 million portfolio with Avalon Ventures invested in its in first startup – Palo Alto-based Sitari Pharmaceuticals.
According to Fierce Biotech, the San Diego-based venture group and its partners at GSK are funding Sitari with $10 million in cash and research support, with the R&D assist coming from the pharma giant.
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The pharmaceutical industry needs better scientific models for testing drugs before they get to the proving ground of human clinical trials. Current lab dish models and animal testing models are time-consuming, expensive and chronically unable to predict which drugs are going to work in clinical trials. The industry is crying out for new modes of early testing that can shorten the timelines, reduce the cost and increase the odds of success in clinical trials.
Both lab dish models and animal models have run into serious limitations. Cell culture (“in vitro”) assays offer some real advantages. Many can provide true, “human” answers to fairly simple questions. But they lack complexity.
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Open innovation is not new, but it is relatively new to health care, igniting a broad cross-section of challenges, hackathons, and competitions that seek to identify breakthrough solutions to solve for our health and our health care. By applying the best practices of the leading tech accelerators, these programs accelerate the speed at which new solutions are developed, companies are formed, and jobs are created.
To quote Todd Park, CTO of the United States of America, "There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur at the intersection of health care and IT." And there has never been a better time, or industry, for open innovation, a game where no one loses. Open innovation is good for the sponsoring organization, good for the innovator, good for the patient, and good for America.
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It’s more than likely that the readers of the NPQ Newswire may not be all that heavily involved in scientific research, but for those who are, the impact of federal budget cuts on agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies supporting scientific research have been devastating. For example, in fiscal 2013, the NIH had its budget cut (per sequestration) by 5 percent, roughly $1.5 billion, which meant that 640 research grants were not issued. As this Mediaite table shows, the NIH may be the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, but its appropriations have plummeted from over $31 billion in 2010 to a projected $27 billion in 2014:
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Several pharmaceutical companies such as Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), Merck (NYSE: MRK) , and Bayer (NYSE: have been taking steps to infuse their pipelines with new drug drugs by developing incubators to identify life science innovations that fit in with their longterm goals. Now Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) is collaborating with a biotech incubator backed by early stage life science and healthcare investor Versant Ventures, according to a company statement.
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