The 8th Annual Postdoc Conference and Career Fair is April 24, 2013 at the Bethesda North Marriott Conference Center. The event draws and average of 500 postdoctoral fellows from federal and university laboratories who are finishing their fellowships in the STEM fields and are seeking professional employment. The conference portion of the event runs concurrently with the career fair, and focuses on such topics as preparing for an interview and exploring non-traditional careers. The conference is organized by a symposium of government, private, educational and economic development organizations. Company registration for the career fair portion is now open and starts at $500.

Thinking about Big Pharma’s relationship with the biotech industry last week at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco reminded me of an old physical education teacher I had in 7th grade.

This guy was feared for his patented “pinch.” He would grab misbehaving teenage boys by the clavicle, and squeeze so hard that his thumb and index finger almost completely wrapped around the bone. He would then drag the pimply, 100-pound punk to his office for a scolding.

New data show that local venture-capital deals have come roaring back after the economic downturn.

Investors pumped $1.54 billion into Washington area companies last year, the largest sum in more than a decade. The figures suggest that venture capitalists may be more bullish on the state of the economy and are loosening their purse strings as a result.

DreamIt Ventures, a pre-seed stage venture firm, has announced that Kaiser Permanente will be joining its Baltimore accelerator, joining Northrop Grumman Corporation, BioHealth Innovation, and Johns Hopkins University.

The nine start-ups will undergo a four month long program including guidance on resource access, seed capital, and the healthcare, technology, and business marketplaces. The organizations will also be mentored the high-profile partners.

DreamIt Ventures‘ Baltimore accelerator is adding another prestigious partner to its ranks: Kaiser Permanente will join the organization’s leadership team, alongside Johns Hopkins University, Northrop Grumman Corporation and BioHealth Innovation.

“We look forward to working with these very promising new healthcare technology companies where we can provide access to industry leading health professionals and a real world laboratory to test the usability and effectiveness of next generation technology solutions” Kim Horn, president of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the Mid-Atlantic States, Inc., said in a statement.

Five Baltimore companies are among the startups that will be the first through a new health IT accelerator in the city.

A total of nine companies from around the world were selected for DreamIt Health Baltimore’s inaugural program, which officially begins Jan. 20. The accelerator program lasts four months and includes seed funding, mentorship from veteran entrepreneurs, workspace and other resources to help participants’ businesses take off. It is designed help startup companies power through early problems and prepare for the market.

Johns Hopkins was a city within a city.

A gleaming, state-of-the-art, wonder-what’s-going-on-in-there mansion smack in the middle of a rundown Baltimore neighborhood.
Hopkins has always been involved in Baltimore to some extent. The university and the health system employ roughly 50,000 people in the Baltimore area, making them the two largest employers here. Their construction projects inject millions into the local economy. But Hopkins’ reputation is as a world-renowned medical research giant

Johns Hopkins' quest to build bridges in Baltimore

Q&A with Johns Hopkins University President Ronald Daniels

Q&A with Johns Hopkins Hospital President Ronald Peterson

Q&A with Johns Hopkins’ new tech transfer chief

Here's a look at some Johns Hopkins spinoffs

Johns Hopkins is making primary care a priority

Johns Hopkins' storied history in medical discoveries

Johns Hopkins' reach goes well beyond Baltimore's borders

Johns Hopkins' top priorities include EBDI, Homewood

10 fun facts about Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins lags in generating startups, new patents

Abstracts are solicited for oral or poster presentation. Submissions will be reviewed and selected by the conference technical program committee. Abstract preparation guidelines.

Please visit the symposia pages for information about the scope and aims of each symposium and to learn about our prestigious invited/keynote speakers

• Nanotech2014, Advanced Materials and Applications
• Microtech2014, Electonics and Sensors
• Biotech2014, Pharma and Biomaterials
• Cleantech2014, Energy and Efficiency

Important Dates

• Final Abstracts Due: January 22nd
• Notification to March 7th
• Papers Due: April 11th

Authors of research submissions, upon acceptance, must register for the conference.

Johns Hopkins University's board of trustees has voted to renew the contract of President Ronald J. Daniels, keeping him at the helm of the nation's first research university for another five years. The unanimous board action today signaled a strong and clear endorsement for Daniels, who has been instrumental in leading and advancing the mission of the university.

The reappointment, announced by board chairman Jeffrey H. Aronson, extends Daniels' contract to 2019.

Venture capitalists more than doubled their investment in companies based Baltimore- and Washington, D.C.-area companies in 2013.

Venture firms invested more than $1.5 billion in the region in 2013, making that the biggest year for investment since 2001, according to the latest MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Maryland companies took in 43 percent of that investment money.

Funding and Research Opportunities

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

NIH Guide Notices:

• NOT-RM-14-005: Change of Application Due Date for RFA-RM-13-015 "NIH Coordination and Evaluation Center (CEC) (U54)"
• NOT-RM-14-004: Notice of Change to Application Due Date for RFA-RM-13-017 NIH National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) (U54)
• NOT-RM-14-003: Notice of Change in Application Due Date for RFA-RM-13-016 NIH Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD ) Initiative (U54)
• NOT-HL-14-203: Request for Information: Topics to be Considered for Systematic Reviews and a Possible Update to Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Management of Asthma
• NOT-HG-14-017: Notice of NHGRI Participation in PA-14-015 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Institutional Research Training Grants (Parent T32) and Creation of New NHGRI Postdoctoral Training Programs in Genomic Medicine Research
• NOT-HG-14-016: Notice of NHGRI Participation in PA-14-015 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Institutional Research Training Grants (Parent T32) and Restructuring of NHGRI Training Programs Focused on Genomic Sciences
• NOT-GM-14-102: Notice of National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Participation in RFA-HG-14-001 "BD2K-LINCS-Perturbation Data Coordination and Integration Center (DCIC) (U54)"
• NOT-GM-14-101: Notice of National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Participation in RFA-HL-14-031 "Development of an NIH BD2K Data Discovery Index Coordination Consortium (U24)"

Please note that most links to RFAs, PAs, and Guide Notices will take you to the NIH Web site. RFPs will take you to FedBizOpps. Links to RFPs will not work past their proposal receipt date. Archived versions of RFPs posted on FedBizOpps can be found on the FedBizOpps site using the FedBizOpps search function. Under “Document to Search,” select Archived Documents.

Underwriters have snapped up another 1 million shares of GlycoMimetics Inc. stock, the Gaithersburg biotech announced this week, marking the close of its $64.4 million initial public offering.

GLYC debuted on the Nasdaq last week in the Washington region's first IPO of 2014, selling a total 8 million shares at $8 apiece. Net proceeds to the company will be around $57.4 million, much of which will pay expenses to advance one of its oncology drug candidates through the clinic.

Thursday, January 30 | 1:30 – 6:30 pm

Shark Tank is a one-of-a-kind event where industry experts pose stimulating questions to CBID MSE student teams about their medtech projects. A mid-year design project showcase and reception will follow the challenging throw down.

It’s rare for me to hear a panel discussion on digital health and not hear the same conversation repeated and reiterated over and over again. In a discussion between health IT company CEOs at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference, some of the most interesting points raised were the ones the healthcare industry is struggling with the most. Of course, there were a lot of sound bites too. Here are five of the most interesting digital health insights.

If you control the capital, you control the data and if you control the data, you control the product. This is a sound bite, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Providers’ relationship with their digital health companies revolves around this balance. Digital health companies are using their technology to help providers deliver better patient care. But investors have an impact in shaping business model. With the shift to outcomes-based care, data generated by digital health tools will become even more critical to care delivery.

Gov. Martin O'Malley on Wednesday unwrapped his eighth and final budget, a $39 billion plan that increases spending on tax credits for cyber security, biotechnology and research and development while holding the line on taxes.

For fiscal 2015, O'Malley has proposed hiking the biotech and life sciences tax credit by 20 percent, to $12 million. He wants to increase the cyber tax credit by 33 percent, to $4 million and raise the credit for research and development by 12.5 percent, to $9 million.

What would your business do with $100,000?

For more than a dozen Maryland technology startups, dreams of expansion and development are becoming a reality with the help of awards from the state-sponsored Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO).

TEDCO announced on Tuesday that 13 startups received total funding of $1.3 million, $100,000 each, between July 2013 and January 2014, through the organization’s Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF). The companies range from i-Lighting, an InvestMaryland Challenge winner and lighting system innovator, to Graftworx, a high-tech medical device developer.

From wearable technologies that track back posture, blood pressure and brain waves to connected cars and homes, the 152,000 attendees at this year's Consumer Electronics Show were treated to some of the most innovative wireless technologies global innovation has to offer. So dazzling and ubiquitous were the wireless innovations not just on display --but in use-- that the event easily could have been rebranded as the Consumer Mobile Show.

While many gadgets offer great fun, many more actually save lives. I was honored to lead a conversation on the coming wave of mobile innovation in digital health through next generation wireless sensors which we are implanting inside our bodies called "The Internet of You." Panelists Dr. Fran Kauffman, the Chief Medical Officer of Medtronic Diabetes and Dr. Christian Holz, a Research Scientist in the mobile innovation group at Yahoo! Labs brilliantly described the progress being made in this next powerful frontier of mobile innovation.

American innovation, badly damaged last year by federal budget tightening and the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration, appears to be getting partial relief with the bipartisan budget deals struck last month and Monday night. The progress is praiseworthy, but it will not counteract the decades-long decline in federal funding for research and development that is so essential to our economic future and critical to accelerating treatments for today’s major health care challenges, including Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

First there was a blizzard of new drug deals. Now comes the forecast for sunnier financial weather ahead.

AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot arrived at JPMorgan with a message: The pharma giant ($AZN) has beefed up its late-stage pipeline and is now ready to prove it can start to grow again in the near future as it pushes through one of the industry's most radical R&D reorganizations. As of today, AstraZeneca counts 11 drugs in late stages of development--just about double what Soriot inherited when he was named CEO a year ago--with another 27 coming up behind it. And it's mapped out a combo strategy for immunotherapies designed to get the company in the race to gain approvals and start growing oncology revenue.

The approaching March deadline for individuals to enroll in a health insurance plan is a useful reminder that provisions of Obamacare will continue to roll out this year. The Affordable Care Act and related legislation are putting a huge demand on the health system, from accelerating the shift to electronic medical records to creating a need for more efficient communication tools between physician offices, patients and insurers. A handful of industry insiders offers a glimpse of the kind of targets that will shift into focus in 2014 and the groups that will be looking to buy them.

A Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) and I-Corps presentation, “Linking Innovative Technology with University System of Maryland Resources,” with Mr. Joe Naft, Director, MIPS will take place on Thursday, February 6, 11:15 am – 12:30 pm in Wyle Building 1 North conference room, 22309 Exploration Dr., Lexington Park, MD 20653. This program, sponsored by The Patuxent Partnership, is free and open to the public. Check-in begins at 11:00 am; attendees are welcome to bring their lunch.

Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute’s (Mtech) MIPS program accelerates the commercialization of technology in Maryland by jointly funding collaborative R&D projects between companies and the faculty of Maryland’s public universities. With more than 500 Maryland companies participating in project awards since 1987, MIPS-supported products have generated over $25.2 billion in sales, added jobs to the region, and infused state-of-the-art technology into the global marketplace. To be sponsored by MIPS, projects must show strong potential for commercialization and economic impact. These projects cover the gamut of state-of-the-art technologies in fields such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, clean energy, robotics, information technology and all types of engineering.

After a successful launch of the Academy in September, we are excited to be offering another run of our career-oriented courses. We saw that our web development courses were incredibly popular so we have decided to focus on these two courses for our Winter semester.

A handful of students that took our Academy last year have been placed in either full-time positions or paid internships. Some came to learn the skills needed to build their own websites, while others were sent for professional development. Whatever your reason is for wanting to learn more, the Academy is the most intense digital education program in the region.

ATCC is featuring specific cell-based solutions for screening at SLAS2014, the 3rd Annual Conference and Exhibition of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening. Meeting attendees visiting ATCC at booth #1348 will find helpful information on hTERT immortalized cell lines, human stem cells, cancer cell panels, and reagents that are particularly suited for screening and drug discovery research. ATCC, the premier global biological materials resource and standards organization, maintains the largest collection of cells lines characterized and authenticated for use by the research community.

Cell-based screening programs, especially when automated, require a stable supply of cells for extended studies. To aid in this endeavor, ATCC currently maintains over 20 human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) immortalized cell lines of different types, including epithelial cells derived from various human tissues. These cell lines represent a breakthrough in cell biology research that combines the in vivo characteristics of primary cells with the ability to survive continuously in vitro.

Biomātrica®, Inc., a world leader in ambient temperature biological stabilization technologies, and ATCC, the premier global biological materials resource and standards organization, today announce the completion of a licensing agreement. According to the agreement terms, Biomātrica will supply ATCC with DNAstable® and RNAstable® reagents for the stabilization of DNA and RNA standards.

A JOLT of caffeine can boost memory, according to a study that provides a scientific motive for students slurping coffee, tea or energy drinks when cramming for exams.

A team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that caffeine enhances certain memories for at least a day after they were formed.

Evidence for caffeine as a memory booster has been anecdotal until now.

Our community relies on the current crop of PhD researchers to develop the insights, theories and tools to shape the future of innovation management thinking and action. The ISPIM Innovation Management Dissertation Award, sponsored by John Wiley & Sons and Innovation Leaders will reward this endeavour. Authors of the best three PhD dissertations that are completed in 2013 will be able to attend the ISPIM 2014 Conference in Dublin for free. Additionally, the winner will receive a prize of EUR 4000, and the runners-up EUR 2000 each, courtesy of Innovation Leaders, John Wiley and Sons and ISPIM.

Who are the entrepreneurs pushing hardest for technology advances that will connect patients with better healthcare? They’re people like Sean Duffy, who’s using the Web to help people make behavioral changes that could head off Type 2 diabetes at his startup Omada Health, and Joanne Rohde, whose company Axial Exchange is building systems that help patients stay in touch with their doctors before and after office visits.

That’s according to Rock Health, the San Francisco-based accelerator and seed fund for Health IT entrepreneurs, which named its 2013 “Top 50 in Digital Health” honorees at a downtown ceremony last night. The event helped to kick off the week-long J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference and was co-hosted by Goldman Sachs, Silicon Valley Bank, and Fenwick & West.

Who knew elephant sharks held potential answers for health problems such as osteoporosis and poor immune systems?

An international team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Germany discovered new insights into human health by sequencing the elephant-shark genome.

MIMETAS and Galapagos will collaborate to develop miniaturized 3D cell culture models that mimic specific aspects of human diseases. These models will be applied to the identification and improvement of novel compounds. Dr. Richard Janssen, Senior Director of Target Discovery at Galapagos, states: “The MIMETAS platform is the first to combine organ-on-a-chip technology with our high throughput screening of primary human cells. As we see it, OrganoPlates™ make 3D culture as straightforward as traditional cell culture.”

Dr. Jos Joore, MIMETAS’ CBO underscores this notion: “This agreement is a crucial step forward for MIMETAS and for the organ-on-a-chip field in general. Galapagos sets an example as one of the first drug discovery companies worldwide to implement innovative organ-on-a-chip technologies. This collaboration helps us to further validate our technology, by enabling development of unique novel compounds with unique human disease models.”

Nationally, startups seeking venture capital at an early stage saw another great year in 2013 with an abundance of active seed investments being made. And according to data released by CB Insights last week, of the seed investors making deals with young companies in 2013, three D.C.-based VCs were some of the most active. Among the likes of West Coast seed powerhouses 500 Startups and Andreessen Horowitz, Washington-area CIT GAP Funds, New Enterprise Associates and Fortify.vc were ranked in the top 60 venture capital funds for most active nationally.

One way pharma giant Johnson and Johnson stays ahead of the competition is via its network of Innovation Centers where researchers are working on new approaches to cardiovascular issues, infectious diseases, neuroscience, and more.

The centers are located in San Francisco, Boston, London, and Shanghai – and this week the company announced that Israel was joining the family, in the form of an incubator J&J will be opening in Rehovot, near the Weizmann Institute. Working together with several other partners, the company said, the new incubator “is the latest in a series of recently announced collaborations to fuel entrepreneurship in the world’s scientific hot spots.”

Entrepreneur Office Hours for University of Maryland Students, Faculty and Staff, and Regional Entrepreneurs with Tech-Based Startups or Ideas

Get answers now from experienced entrepreneurs and legal/business professionals on how to build a successful startup company. Receive free and impartial advice, brainstorm business strategies, investigate funding opportunities and learn about the vast resources available to entrepreneurs.

DATE:   Tuesday, January 14, 2014

PLACE:  Room 1103, Technology Advancement Program building (directions)

REGISTER:  Schedule an appointment here to guarantee your time slot. Walk-in appointments are also available.

Happy New Year! Thanks to two recent, major life sciences announcements spotlighted in Site Selection magazine, Montgomery County shows that our biotech sector is well-poised for accelerated growth in 2014!

The December 2013 Site Selection web exclusive features details on the attraction of Brazilian-based Brace Pharmaceuticals' new U.S. headquarters to the County's Rockville Innovation Center and its plans to invest $200 million.  Brace is focused on the late stage clinical development of pharmaceutical products with the potential for near-term commercialization.

Six months into its fiscal year, the Maryland Technology Development Corp. has received almost as many applications from state startups looking for funding as it got in all of the previous year.

As a result of the spike in demand, Tedco is asking the Maryland General Assembly for what Tedco President Robert Rosenbaum called “a substantial increase” in funding for fiscal 2015. The General Assembly convened for its annual session in Annapolis on Jan. 8.

Kauffman FastTrac® has just joined with Montgomery College to support future and current business owners before, during, and after the startup process. Entrepreneurs will receive the information, resources, and networks necessary to start and grow successful businesses.

Classes:
SMB957: FastTrac NewVenture for the Veteran Entrepreneur (2/13-4/24)
SMB956: FastTrac TechVenture (2/26-5/7)