BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a public-private partnership and innovation intermediary is seeking an energetic and motivated life science professional for the role of an Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) with product development experience and subject matter expertise in the fields of neurology and neuroscience. The EIR will reside within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will also support intramural and extramural initiatives on an as needed basis.

The EIR program was established at BioHealth Innovation to:

• Retain and bring entrepreneurial talent to the Maryland ecosystem
• Connect resources including institutions, technology assets, people and capital within Maryland that include federal institutions, labs, academic institutions, small businesses, disease foundations and the investor community
• Build/support sustainable life science startups that will add value within the healthcare system and also build upon the existing infrastructure

The EIR will work with BHI leadership to ensure that the activities and outcomes are aligned with BHIs strategic focus.

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.

From Christy Wyskiel,Senior Advisor to the President, Johns Hopkins University

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that Neil Veloso will join Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures as the executive director of technology transfer, effective May 18, 2015.

Neil has extensive experience in technology transfer and commercialization. He has spent the last nine years of his career in a variety of roles at Cleveland Clinic Innovations (CCI) in Ohio. Currently, he is serving as the senior director of innovation management, a role in which he directs technology commercialization at Cleveland Clinic and at seven of CCI's Innovation Alliance Partners. In this role, Neil focuses on commercialization strategy across a broad portfolio of both academic and hospital system assets. He manages a team that advises inventors, administers intellectual property, and promotes commercialization through licensing, new venture creation and the development of industry partnerships. Neil's collaborative leadership style and ability to work with myriad constituents has been cited repeatedly as one of his great strengths by former colleagues and industry partners.   

Thursday, May 07, 2015 to Friday, May 08, 2015

The Atlantic Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics Summit is a first-of-its-kind event to showcase Maryland's global leadership as an epicenter of vaccine innovation, development and commercialization. The Tech Council of Maryland is presenting this conference to bring together the industry's foremost researchers and business leaders for the purpose of educating, sharing, and collaborating on important issues affecting the new generation of vaccines.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 02:00pm - 03:00pm

The landscape of potential customers for biomedical products can be complicated, with patients, providers and payers assigning different values to new technologies. Companies must navigate this landscape to find the individuals who will actually make the decision to purchase their products. In this webinar, entrepreneur and educator Rana Gupta will talk about how customers can not only help biomedical innovators to define the value proposition for their products, but can also guide and fund their product development work.

The end may be near for Montgomery County’s Department of Economic Development.

County Executive Ike Leggett, speaking in North Bethesda as a panelist during the Washington Business Journal’s inaugural On the Road event, announced Tuesday he intends to replace Montgomery County's economic development agency with a public-private authority, along the lines of Fairfax County’s Economic Development Authority.

The Qiagen campus in Germantown is large, open and modern looking.

Its 25-acre site on Germantown Road houses a mostly glass office building connected to a newer addition that provides space for manufacturing and packaging the company’s biotech products.

The life sciences community presented a vision this week in which the Washington, DC region becomes a top 3 biotech hub by 2023. What role will economic development incentives play in achieving this status?

Industry, academic, nonprofit, investment and government partners participated in the Regional Biotech Forum: Growing Our Ecosystem, a program spearheaded by BioHealth Innovation, AstraZeneca, MedImmune and the Tech Council of Maryland and supported by BioMaryland, Virginia Bio, Montgomery County, MD among others.

ASTRAZENECA has paid $250m for the rights to develop an antibody that could help in the fight against cancer.

The pharmaceutical firm's research and development arm MedImmune, which is based in Cambridge, has entered into an agreement with Innate Pharma that will allow it exclusive access to the company's anti-NKG2A antibody.

AstraZeneca and its global biologics research and development arm, MedImmune, announced that they have entered into an exclusive collaboration agreement with Celgene Corporation, a global leader in haematological cancers, for the development and commercialisation of MEDI4736 across a range of blood cancers including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, myelodysplastic syndromes and multiple myeloma.

MEDI4736 is an investigational immune checkpoint inhibitor, directed against programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1). Signals from PD-L1 help tumours avoid detection by the immune system. MEDI4736 blocks these signals, countering the tumour’s immune-evading tactics. Within the collaboration, MEDI4736 will be assessed both as monotherapy and in combination with other AstraZeneca and Celgene potential and existing cancer medicines. Over time, the collaboration could expand to include other assets.

Real estate firms, which have traditionally been slow to innovate, are beginning to embrace new technologies to find clever solutions to old problems. This newfound openness comes as millennials start to enter the workforce, creating a need for tools that appeal to a tech-savvy customer base.

“It’s pretty fascinating when you think about we’re 75 percent millennials in maybe a dozen years. Clearly technology’s going to have an incredibly important impact on real estate; the operation of real estate and what the tenants do and how they do it,” said Joel Marcus, the CEO of Alexandria Real Estate Properties, an REIT that specializes in science campuses.

Among this year’s Mentors-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures are a senior-level biomedical executive, a chief executive at a company developing novel treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, a two-time medical device industry Most Valuable Thought Leader and an American Pain Foundation chairperson.

These are just four of the 14 entrepreneurial leaders serving at Johns Hopkins as Mentors-in-Residence in 2015, the second year of the program. All 14 mentors this year are business leaders, entrepreneurs and development-driven experts with a passion for innovation and growth.

Since 2003, the Johns Hopkins Alliance for Science and Technology Development has brought faculty members and investors together for an annual daylong meeting to foster important biotechnical and pharmaceutical developments.

This year, 14 faculty members or teams of faculty members from The Johns Hopkins University and seven from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, presented work, as did eight startups affiliated with each university. Four Johns Hopkins University researchers received monetary awards for translational development of their inventions at the April 20 annual joint meeting of the alliance and the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Commercial Advisory Board.

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.

MaxCyte® Inc., the pioneer in cell therapies using scalable, high-performance cell transfection systems, today announces a strategic research collaboration with Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to develop unique Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies, which harness patients’ own immune systems to combat cancers.

MaxCyte’s unique approach to CAR cell therapy allows targeting of solid tumor cancers by enabling control over the on-target, off-tumor toxicity, which limits other CAR therapies to hematological cancers. MaxCyte achieves this by introducing the CAR construct as a transiently expressing messenger RNA (mRNA), thus allowing control of the duration of expression and toxicity against target antigens in normal tissue. This unique approach also avoids the cell expansion step required for standard approaches, dramatically reducing manufacturing time and expense for CAR therapies from days or weeks to a matter of hours.

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.

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.

What if the answer to reducing health costs of the most expensive patients stems from listening to the hunches of home care workers with little — if any — medical training?

That’s the premise tech startup Care at Hand Inc. used to predict and prevent an estimated $6.5 million in Medicare spending by reducing hospitalizations among aging patients in Massachusetts.

NO one who lived through the 1990s would have suspected that one day people would look back on the period as a golden age of bipartisan cooperation. But in some important ways, it was. Amid the policy fights that followed the Republican victories of 1994, President Bill Clinton and the new majorities in Congress reached one particularly good deal: doubling the budget for the National Institutes of Health.

The decision was bipartisan, because health is both a moral and financial issue. Government spends more on health care than any other area. Taxpayers spend more than $1 trillion a year for Medicare and Medicaid alone, and even more when you add in programs like Veterans Affairs, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Indian Health Service.

A few months into 2015, D.C.’s tech industry is continuing to prove itself a major region for venture capital investing interest. Based on an NVCA/PwC report provided to DC Inno, the District is ranked No. 9 among major U.S. regions for investments during Q1. In a quarter that saw vibrant deal flow and exceptional venture raises, the D.C. focused software sector did especially well by raising $220 million in investment dollars.

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 list of the top five health systems in the Baltimore area was static this year, with Johns Hopkins at No. 1 and Mercy Health Services at No. 5.

The data comes from our List of Health Systems in the Baltimore area, which is available to subscribers.

Tokai Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:TKAI), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing novel therapies for prostate cancer and other hormonally-driven diseases, today announced that scientists in the laboratory of Vincent Njar, PhD, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine presented preclinical data showing that galeterone and novel analogs of galeterone inhibited growth, survival and migration of human pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) cells.

These data were presented in a poster presentation titled, “Galeterone and Its Novel Analogs Induce Profound Anti-Cancer Activities in Human Pancreatic Cancer Cell Lines,” abstract number 1764, at the 2015 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Thanks to our back to back April/May sponsor, The University of Maryland's Biotech Research and Education Program (BREP), who is sponsoring the upcomig event in Rockville on May 20th at the @AmericanTapRoom. BioBuzzMoCo events always draw an awesome crowd so join BREP for an awesome evening in the heart of the region's growing BioHub.

he world's first malaria vaccine, produced by GlaxoSmithKline, could be approved by international regulators for use in Africa from October.

The final trial data showed that the shoe, called RTS, S offered partial protection for children for up to four years.

United States-based New Enterprise Associates (NEA), which last week raised $3.1 billion in the world's largest venture capital fund, is looking to step up investments in India after going slow over the past two-three years. The venture capital fund, which has backed start-ups such as daily deals firm Groupon and online storage service Box in the US, has said that it will look to sharpen its focus on technology related themes.

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.

The City of New York Early-Stage Life Sciences Funding Initiative represents an unprecedented public-private partnership across world-class academic institutions, industry leaders, top-tier investors, and the philanthropic community.

Established by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) with at least $50 million in matching funds from top-tier venture capital partners including Celgene Corporation, GE Ventures, and Eli Lilly & Company, the funding partnership will deploy a minimum of $150 million and seeks to launch 15 to 20 breakthrough ventures by 2020.