Evolva Holding SA (“Evolva”, SIX: EVE) today announced that Emergent BioSolutions Inc. (“Emergent”, NYSE: EBS) has acquired Evolva’s anti-bacterial programme, the EV-035 series. The lead compound in the EV-035 series is the broad-spectrum antibiotic GC-072, which is being developed with US government biodefense funding. For Evolva, this transaction is worth up to USD 70.5 million plus royalties.

United Therapeutics (Nasdaq: UTHR) announced two senior executive promotions as well as changes to Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D's compensation program.

Much of the talk these days regarding HR technology revolves around big data, wearable devices and bring-your-own-device policies. Such current technological concerns could be mere child’s play compared to cyberconsciousness and how it could alter the workforce of the future. This obscure concept is brought to you courtesy of Martine Rothblatt, an unrelenting force in business.

Friday, January 9, 2015

Learn How to Get Seed Funding Investment for Your Business from the Government! Improve your Federal Contractor procurement postion from the same program--Small Business Innovation Research Funds (SBIR). Featuring SBIR program managers from leading Federal agencies including DOD, NIH, NCI, NASA, DOE and NSF! Network with the SBIR program managers during an Expo and meet other business owners. Get tips on how to win awards and hear about changes in the agencies' funding and procurement programs. If you are considering applying for an SBIR grant in 2015, or have already won and need to learn updates directly from SBIR program managers, this event is for you!

From Steve Silverman, Directory, Montgomery County Department of Economic Development:

As 2014 draws to a close, I want to sincerely thank our 33,000-plus local businesses for all you do to support the local economy! Montgomery County benefits so much from our diverse, dedicated business community. I also applaud the many support organizations and entities that work with our Department, state and local governments to make sure you succeed.

Shareholders in British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK.L) have approved a planned deal with Switzerland's Novartis (NOVN.VX), which will see the two pharmaceutical groups trade more than $20 billion (12.7 billion pounds) of assets.

Advaxis, Inc. (Nasdaq:ADXS), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing cancer immunotherapies, announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared its Investigational New Drug (IND) application to conduct a Phase 1/2 clinical study of ADXS-HPV (ADXS11-001) alone or in combination with MedImmune's investigational anti-PD-L1 immune checkpoint inhibitor, MEDI4736, for the treatment of advanced, recurrent or refractory human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated cervical cancer and HPV-associated head and neck cancer. The trial is expected to begin patient enrollment in early 2015.

The Swiss firm, which this week filed a melanoma combination drug for US approval, spent $10bn on research into new products, ahead of rivals such as Novartis, which spent $9.8bn and the $8.2bn spent by Johnson & Johnson (J&J).

Let’s be clear: Martine Rothblatt is just plain more of a lawyer than anybody else in this town.

The 60-year-old grandmother and CEO of United Therapeutics, the Silver Spring-based biotech she founded to help save her younger daughter’s life, banked $38 million last year. It made her the nation’s highest-paid female executive. It also made her the nation’s highest-paid transgendered person, as she had sex reassignment surgery in 1994.

Healthcare workers treating Ebola victims are at a great danger of contracting the disease, as recent events in western Africa have shown. Currently available protective suits tend to require complicated procedures when putting on and taking off, are difficult to breathe in, and obscure the clinician’s face. A team at Johns Hopkins has developed, and just won a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to further perfect, a new protective suit for use when treating highly infectious patients.

Maryland is not waiting for the new year or a new governor to start taking applications for a program intended to boost business development around colleges and universities.

The state is now taking applications for its new Regional Institution Strategic Enterprise Zone program(called the "Rise Zone" program for short). It requires two application stages.

With new articles published in journals every week and scores of labs constantly at work, scientists at this university stay productive.

And a new ranking has found that university researchers live up to that standard — when it comes to science research, this university is one of the most prolific in the world.

University of Massachusetts President Robert Caret will take over as University System of Maryland's fourth chancellor in July.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has awarded a five-year contract to the Johns Hopkins Evidence-based Practice Center (JHU EPC) to help the Center continue to promote evidence-informed decision-making in clinical practice and public health policy. JHU EPC was established in 1997 as a charter member of the EPC Program supported by AHRQ’s Effective Healthcare Program (EHC). Today there are a total of 13 EPC’s.

Much like the American Dream, entrepreneurship is a national ideal of the United States representing a belief that prosperity and success can be achieved through hard, tireless work. Developing a technological innovation that will change the world for the better is what it's all about these days, especially for young people trying to make a name for themselves on college campuses. Students arrive on school grounds driven by two thoughts – fear of failure and desire for success – both of which naturally lead down the road to entrepreneurship.

Another one to file under the Science is Awesome category: Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory has engineered prosthetic arms that can be controlled with the mind.

The University of Maryland is recruiting Ken Ulman to transform College Park into a tech hub for incubators and startups, according to The Washington Post.

Ulman, a former Howard County executive who made an unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor in November, will announce Monday he is forming a consulting firm called Margrave Strategies. Its first client will be the university's fundraising arm, according to the report.

A coalition of geneticists and computer programmers calling itself the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health is developing protocols for exchanging DNA information across the Internet. The researchers hope their work could be as important to medical science as HTTP, the protocol created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, was to the Web.

The FDA offered up an early retrospective of the 2014 year of approvals Friday with a rundown the regulator feels pretty good about. “Our Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) has so far approved 35 novel drugs in 2014 compared to 27 in 2013,” FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg wrote on the agency's FDA Voice blog.

The world of technology is growing at a rapid pace, nothing new, but next year could involve some major cashing in for some health tech industries. With the help of some leading analyst firms, Business Insider put together a list of the trends that are predicted to be really booming next year.

Ebola dominated the news in the second half of the year. Other important news was the debate on maintenance of certification, the first baby born after uterine transplant, and the change in HHS leadership.

Cathal Garvey used to work in cancer research. Now he is the scientific director of IndieBio, a biotech accelerator based in Cork, Ireland which is about to open a branch in San Francisco. Garvey originally studied genetics. "I got into genetics after seeing a documentary about it when it was quite young." he says."I had already decided that I was going to be a biologist at an even younger age. And then I thought ‘Oh my God, living things operate on a code.’"

Boards aren’t working. It’s been more than a decade since the first wave of post-Enron regulatory reforms and, despite a host of guidelines from independent watchdogs such as the International Corporate Governance Network, most boards aren’t delivering on their core mission: providing strong oversight and strategic support for management’s efforts to create long-term value.

Nearly every state added jobs in 2014, and 14 states experienced an employment increase of 2 percent or more, according to a Stateline analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday.