IBM has made its Watson cognitive computing technology available as a cloud-based app development platform, and healthcare vendors are already getting in on the act.

Company officials they hope to encourage new uses of the fast-evolving technology and spur a slew of innovative apps. In this new marketplace, they say, developers of all sizes and industries can access resources – developer toolkits, educational materials and access to Watson's application programming interface – for developing Watson-powered technology of their own.

Physician’s Choice Laboratory Services (PCLS) announced today that it has recently partnered with Genesys Biolabs, a division of 20/20 GeneSystems, Inc. (Rockville, MD) to offer PAULA’s Test (Protein Assay Using Lung Cancer Analytes), a simple blood test that aids physicians in the early detection of lung cancer.

“As an enthusiastic proponent of personalized medicine, PCLS is pleased to partner with 20/20 GeneSystems to promote their newest assay for early stage detection of lung cancer, PAULA’s Test. This test will be of great value to the physicians and patients affected in communities PCLS serves. Lung cancer is a curable disease when caught early and risk-directed screening will save lives as well as reduce the total cost of treatment. The test is a beneficial leap forward for high-risk individuals, providers, and the healthcare system,” said Joe Wiegel, President of PCLS.

Mark Cuban’s comments about personalized health may have turned a few heads but as one source soberly reminded us, he is not the first or the only billionaire investor in healthcare. Not by a long shot. Several people who have nine zeroes in their net worth have invested in the space. They’re motivated by emerging mobile health technology to help reduce healthcare costs and see it as playing a critical role in the future of healthcare technology. There are also philanthropic considerations to increase access to healthcare in underserved populations.

MhealthInsight reckons there are about 19 billionaire investors in mobile health, including Cuban. Here are some highlights from that list.

A new interdisciplinary center at the University of Maryland is at the forefront of a digital revolution in health care.

Gaithersburg-based biotech MedImmune has appointed Yong-Jun Liu, chief scientific officer of the Baylor Research Institute, as its new head of research.

The appointment puts Liu in a pivotal role, not just for MedImmune but also for its parent company, AstraZeneca, which is depending on its U.S.-based biologics arm to supply a pipeline of early-stage drug candidates.

Johns Hopkins undergraduate students have invented a system to shock a dangerously irregular heart back into normal rhythm more safely and effectively.

The two-component system is designed both to expand a doctor's options in routing electric current through the heart and to improve the application of pressure to the patient's body to help treatment succeed.

The past month has seen a flurry of social engagement around the Pitch Across Maryland and the 160+ videos we amassed during the month-long tour around our great state of Maryland.

Our entrepreneurs and their supporters got the Vote Out for their ventures and the Three Fan Favorites were announced last week.

This week we have received the “envelope” with the distilled list of Eight (8) Finalists (a.k.a The Great 8) who have been selected to present again at TEDCO’s Entrepreneur Expo (www.innovate.md) on Monday, November 18.

Monday, November 18, 2013, BWI Airport Marriott

The 2013 Entrepreneur Expo  hosted by The Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO) brings together all of Maryland’s entrepreneurial resources from across the state into one place, at one time. This 3rd Annual Event is expected to draw 400+ of the region’s top entrepreneurs, small business executives, angel and venture capital investors, federal and state economic development officials, university leaders and legislators.

The theme for this year’s event is E2E: Entrepreneurs Inspiring Entrepreneurs and illustrates the focus on creating an environment where leading entrepreneurs can inspire the next generation of innovators, and where up-and-comers can make valuable connections to ideas, mentors and capital.

Two more venture capital firms have been selected to receive InvestMD funds that they will invest in local startup companies.

EnerTech Capital Partners will receive $10 million and Foundation Medical Partners will receive $7 million. As part of the state’s InvestMaryland program, the firms will use it to back local startup companies. After a startup exits, the state gets 100 percent of its principal investment and 80 percent of the proceeds from the exit. The venture firms can keep the remaining 20 percent of the proceeds.

New Enterprise Associates has had a hand in a number of Boston’s biotech startups over the years. But it wasn’t until now that the big VC firm officially put a physical footprint in the biotech cluster in Cambridge, MA.

NEA today is announcing that it has opened an office in Kendall Square. It’s on the third floor at 700 Tech Square in Cambridge, and will serve as a local home base for the VC firm and its healthcare partners, many of which serve on boards in the area. NEA already has offices in New York, California, Washington, D.C, Chicago, China, and India.

Johns Hopkins is more than halfway to its $4.5 billion fundraising goal, the university announced Wednesday, with the money helping to support initiatives that include urban revitalization and global health.

More than 162,000 donors have helped Hopkins meet the halfway mark earlier than officials had previously expected, in spring 2014. The $4.5 billion fundraising goal is among the biggest such efforts in the country and the largest for the Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The Professor Venture Fair began at Bioscience Day 2007 and has become an annual event that gives faculty inventors the opportunity to pitch their new technologies to a team of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs from the region. Presenters are judged based upon clarity of pitch and commercial viability.

Bioscience Day 2013 Venture Fair 11:00 am - 12:00 n

Moderator: Gayatri Varma, Director, OTC

Presenters and INventors: Anthony Melchiorri and John Fisher; Yanjin Zhang; Hadar Ben-Yoav, Reza Ghodssi, Gregory Payne and Deanna L. Kelly ;Kenyon Crowley, Ritu Agarwal , Guodong "Gordon" Gao, Nanette I Steinle and Arnab Ray; Donald DeVoe

Judges:Todd Chappell, Wyatt Somogyi, Matt Cohen, Stephen P. Auvil  

Location: Grand Ballroom Lounge, Stamp Student Union

Theme: "The First Mile of a Marathon". The theme explores the next steps towards commercialization of University developed technologies. Most inventors painstakingly develop their technologies, and yet, underestimate the herculean task of moving an idea from the lab to launch. Even before funding, there is a lot of heavy lifting, analysis, customer discovery, team building, etc. that needs to be done. The panel speakers will discuss these next steps that every inventor or potential entrepreneur has to undertake.

Moderator: Elana Fine, Managing Director, Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship

Panelists: Todd Chappell, Wyatt Somogyi, Matt Cohen, Stephen P. Auvil

Location: Grand Ballroom Lounge, Student Stamp Union, UMCP

In the past few years, pharmaceutical distributor Cardinal Health (NYSE:CAH) has acquired a major distributor and half a dozen pharmaceutical companies in China. It also acquired AssuraMed to enter the home-health supply market, and invested in startups including HealthSpot, which makes a telemedicine kiosk, and Intralign, which helps providers optimize the cost and quality of surgical care.

Those moves were all part of a clearly defined strategy to meet the changing healthcare marketplace. John Rademacher, president of ambulatory care at Cardinal Health, told BioOhio members at the trade group’s annual event on Tuesday that the company’s investment and acquisition strategy is driven by these 12 healthcare industry trends:

Big data may be about to overwhelm the healthcare system. A little healthcare business intelligence tip: Data by itself won’t drive value and outcomes. Smart healthcare analytics will. In Deloitte’s DBrief, “Big Data Revolution: Unlocking Healthcare Analytics,” healthcare industry experts talked about the opportunities and barriers for industries across the care continuum to harness data, contextualize it and use it to move from hindsight to insight (and eventually, with the help of predictive analytics, foresight).

“The future is already here,” Brett Davis, a principal at Deloitte, said. “It just hasn’t been evenly distributed yet.” Here are the six key trends in healthcare shaping how data will be used.

Have a look at a handful of the 50 events that took place during Baltimore Innovation Week 2013. Get involved with Baltimore Innovation Week 2014 here: http://baltimoreinnovationweek.com

The University of Maryland on Wednesday announced the appointment of Thomas R. Fuerst, Ph.D., as the new director of the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research.

IBBR is a joint research enterprise created to enhance collaboration among the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the fields of medicine, biosciences, technology, quantitative sciences and engineering.

British Magician Steven Frayne

The following funding opportunity announcements from the NHLBI or other components of the National Institutes of Health, might be of interest:

NIH Guide Notice:

NOT-HL-13-200: Clarification of Number of Applications to RFA-HL-14-028 "Blood and Vascular Systems Response to Sepsis (R01)"

Requests for Applications (RFAs):

RFA-HL-14-020: Evaluation and Administration Coordinating Center for the Low-Cost, Pragmatic, Patient-Centered Randomized Controlled Intervention Trials (R01)

This NIH Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) invites applications to support an Evaluation and Administration Coordinating Center. This unit will facilitate the coordination among and between the awardees of RFA-HL-14-019 "Low-Cost, Pragmatic, Patient-Centered Randomized Controlled Intervention Trials (UH2/UH3)" and the NIH. This unit will also be responsible for conducting an evaluation of the RFA-HL-14-019 program.

RFA-HL-14-019: Low-Cost, Pragmatic, Patient-Centered Randomized Controlled Intervention Trials (UH2/UH3)

This NIH Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) invites applications to plan and conduct low-cost, pragmatic randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

Using scores obtained from cognitive tests, Johns Hopkins researchers think they have developed a model that could help determine whether memory loss in older adults is benign or a stop on the way to Alzheimer's disease.

The risk of developing dementia increases markedly when a person is diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, a noticeable and measurable decline in intellectual abilities that does not seriously interfere with daily life. But physicians have no reliable way to predict which people with mild cognitive impairment are likely to be in the 5 to 10 percent a year who progress to dementia.

An earlier research brief we’d issued highlighted that Silicon Valley dominates the list of top 50 VC-backed tech exits. The post generated a fair amount of chatter including some comments calling us arrogant Silicon Valley’ites (we’re based in NYC).

Among the more constructive comments were several from healthcare VCs who wondered if the data would be similar for the healthcare sector.  The prevailing hypothesis was that Silicon Valley’s dominance wouldn’t translate to healthcare (or perhaps not as much).  Note: our healthcare classification includes companies ranging from medical devices to biotech to pharma.

Investor Barbara Corcoran said that she has learned to spot the red flags of “well-intended misrepresentations” and fancy talk during her four seasons judging startups on Shark Tank.

Corcoran talked with Henry Blogett of Business Insider about how many companies she has invested in — about 25 — and how many have worked. Here is how she evaluated the four seasons:

Billlionaire investor Mark Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theaters and is a regular on Shark Tank, has expanded his interests to personalized health. He is part of a group of investors in mobile health startup, Validic,which raised $760,000 in a seed round. The Durham, North Carolina company has developed a platform to integrate and aggregate data from more than 80 health-oriented apps.

Cuban said this about the investment:

“Personalized health is the future of healthcare…and with the explosive growth of new mobile apps and devices coming on the market, Validic solves a fundamental problem of integrating all those new innovations into the healthcare system. I’m very excited for the future of Validic and the mobile health space.”

Mary Washington Healthcare (MWHC) and Zebrareach today announced a collaboration that provides MWHC's more than 4,000 Associates free membership to Zebrareach, a smartphone application that gives employees loyalty discounts at local stores, as well as other special offers negotiated for MWHC. The Zebrareach membership program for MWHC will launch in November 2013.

Zebrareach (http://zebrareach.com) is a mobile customer engagement application for small business that builds customer retention through a free consumer smartphone application. Businesses build and manage volume and tier-based loyalty programs, message exclusive news, product announcements, special events, secret menu items, limited time offers and more to their loyal customers. Customers are able to place orders for products and services through the web and mobile Zebrareach application. Zebrareach works for all customers, with or without mobile phones.

The Indian Biomedical Association (IBA) is inviting entrepreneurs from early phase companies with products or services in the life sciences industry the opportunity to connect, collaborate and partner with investors.

Entrepreneurs should submit their presentations for IBA’s event on “Developing and delivering effective investor presentation for your early stage venture” by 10/31/2013 for the event to be held on Tue November 19, 2013, 6:00 – 8:00 PM. Location: Johns Hopkins University, Room 121, Building 3, 9605 Medical Center Dr, Rockville, MD.20850

Selected companies will be invited to make their pitch to a panel of experts who will provide critical feedback.

Following the above event, a short list of selected companies will be invited to make their presentation to a group of investors on Tue December 17, 2013, 6:00 – 8:00 PM, at IBA’s “Biomedical Innovation Funding Forum“. Location: Johns Hopkins University, Room 121, Building 3, 9605 Medical Center Dr, Rockville, MD, 20850

Johns Hopkins University has an acceptance rate under 20 percent. It’s clearly a prestigious institution. But what is it like to interview for a job at the region's largest private employer?

I hit the books hard to go through Glassdoor’s index of user-submitted interview questions. Here are the three geekiest interview questions asked at Johns Hopkins (pertaining to different jobs, of course). Take a moment to see if you can answer them.

Social networks have been all “abuzz” over the past month getting the vote out for the most important elected-position in the region.  

No … silly … we are not talking about elected officials in our neighboring Commonwealth, we are talking about what really matters — the Pitch Across Maryland 2.0!!!  

Today is the day we tallied the view-votes for the “Fan Favorite” competition of the Pitch Across Maryland.

GSK has selected eight winners in its first Discovery Fast Track competition, designed to translate academic research into starting points for new potential medicines. The contest attracted 142 entries across 17 therapeutic areas from 70 universities, academic research institutions, clinics and hospitals in the US and Canada.

The winning projects show clear opportunities to deal with important unmet medical needs, including antibiotics resistance, diseases of the developing world and certain cancer types. The selected scientists will collaborate with GSK’s Discovery Partnerships with Academia (DPAc) team, the sponsor of the competition, to rapidly screen and identify novel compounds to test their promising hypotheses. If advanced chemical testing is successful, the winning investigators could be offered a DPAc partnership to further refine molecules and assess their potential as novel new medicines.

Okay. The verdict’s still out on loud. (If my family–myself included–is any indicator, that’s probably a losing battle.) The point is our human capital is plummeting globally thanks to our poor health, according to the World Economic Forum’s new Human Capital report. Our obesity and fast-paced lives are bound to catch up with us with heart disease and diabetes among other chronic disease. But it could come around and kick us where it collectively hurts the most: our already hurting economy.

View Presentation

After the trip UNN participants were interviewed and filled the Feedback forms (see the Appendix). The results of interviews and feedback forms processing may be summarized as follows.

State government agency expenditures for research and development totaled $1.404 billion in FY 2011, an 11.3% increase over the $1.261 billion reported in FY 2010. Expenditures for R&D facilities (construction projects, major building renovations, and land and building acquisitions intended primarily for R&D use) totaled $109 million in FY 2011, a 1.7% increase over the $107 million reported in FY 2010. This InfoBrief presents summary statistics from the FY 2010 and FY 2011 Survey of State Government Research and Development, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The FY 2010 and FY 2011 survey presents the most recent NSF statistics of R&D activities performed and funded by state government agencies in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Survey data are available by state and by individual state agency. For the first time, NSF collected two fiscal years of data from state governments as part of a single survey operation. In addition, a new category was added to this survey, so state agencies were given the option to separately classify their energy-related R&D expenditures. Other R&D categories include agriculture, environment and natural resources, health, transportation, and other.

Now on its sixth run, the Research Commercialization Introductory Course is a very popular online course designed to help science and engineering researchers better understand how research commercialization works. Over 5000 students, faculty and researchers from across the US have taken this course since it's been offered.

Research commercialization involves taking articles, documentation, know-how, patents, and copyrights, which are created during research activities and getting them to users and patients for real societal impacts. In some cases, commercialization involved taking patents based on the research and licensing them to a company. This usually involves also having the researchers consult to the company. In other cases, commercialization involves forming of creating a startup and applying to federally funded commercialization programs. In all cases, though, research commercialization typically involves defining the nature of the research being commercialized (e.g., in a patent or intellectual property agreement), establishing a commercial relationship with another party (e.g., employment, a sale or license), and negotiating a contract (e.g., compensation).

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. presented preclinical data on its lead bispecific Adaptir therapeutic, ES414, at the 5th Annual Protein and Antibody Engineering Summit (PEGS) in Lisbon, Portugal. The ES414 molecule was constructed using Emergent’s Adaptir technology platform and is being developed as a potential therapeutic for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC).

The presentation shared results of preclinical studies demonstrating ES414 is pharmacologically active and well tolerated. Preclinical in vitro and in vivo studies have shown ES414 redirects T-cell cytotoxicity (RTCC) towards prostate cancer cells expressing prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA), an antigen commonly found on prostate cancer cells. The ES414 molecule selectively binds and links the T cell receptor on cytotoxic T cells to the PSMA on tumor cells, triggering tumor cell destruction.

Newly-minted MBA graduates are more frequently turning away from finance jobs as financial crisis aftereffects linger and instead picking careers in the tech sector.

In fact, for the first time, more Stanford Graduate School of Business grads this year chose tech jobs over finance jobs, The Wall Street Journal reports. Thirty-two percent of this year's class picked tech while 26 percent headed into finance — those figures were 13 percent and 36 percent, respectively, two years ago.