Independence Blue Cross today announced it has created the Independence Blue Cross (IBC) Center for Health Care Innovation, an important milestone in the company's groundbreaking efforts to transform the Philadelphia area into a national magnet for health care innovation. At the 5,000-square foot center at 1700 Market Street in Philadelphia, the company's associates and external partners will innovate, collaborate, and implement path-finding new concepts in health care. The center will also be the home for the company's widening range of innovation initiatives, including its partnership with Penn Medicine and DreamIt Ventures on the region's first health care accelerator, DreamIt Health Philadelphia, which last year brought ten promising health care startups from across the country to Philadelphia and today eight are still located in the region.

"Through the IBC Center for Health Care Innovation, we are championing health care entrepreneurism in our region, and acting as a catalyst for innovations that lead to superior care at lower costs," said Independence Blue Cross President and CEO Daniel J. Hilferty. "With our region's active investment community, experienced health care talent, world class health care systems, and strong academic institutions, we have all the ingredients to become the Silicon Valley of health care innovation."

One year after DreamIt Health and the Canadian consulate launched digital health accelerators, the University City Science Center is hosting a state-backed health IT accelerator, according to a statement. The program has spots for six companies in a three-month program in Philadelphia. Aron Starosta, who set up the Canadian Consulate’s accelerator on the Science Center’s campus, also developed the Pennsylvania-backed program.

Geography isn’t a barrier as long as companies are registered in the state. The application deadline is March 15.

The Salk Institute's Office of Technology Development (OTD) is responsible for managing the intellectual property of the Salk Institute.

At the OTD, our mission is to enable our researchers to realize the commercial potential of their ideas. Our goal is to develop and support relationships with industry partners who can help turn scientific progress in the lab into tangible products for the benefit of patients and society at large, while returning income to the inventor and to the Institute to support further research.

Commentary by Dr. Wallace D. Loh, President, University of Maryland

Maryland's economic success relies on its staggering concentration of scientific talent, superb education, highly competitive businesses and enlightened government. When they all mesh, the state's economy outpaces the competition.

This has earned Maryland a designation by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as the No. 1 entrepreneurial state and a No. 2 ranking by the National Science Foundation for the economic impact of its concentrated research activities.

People can argue all day about whether Illumina has, at last, given us the $1,000 genome. The answer does matter, because the cheaper it gets to sequence a whole human genome, the easier it will be to gather lots of them. That will help us understand what makes people different, and shed light on what causes disease. Or so scientists hope.

It’s heady stuff. But that’s the not the biggest story at Illumina right now.

GlaxoSmithKline is set to unveil plans to launch late-stage clinical trials on 10 new drugs over the next two years, the Telegraph reported, without citing sources.

The new drugs, which have not been detailed to investors, will include cancer and respiratory disease medicines, the newspaper said on its website.

The venture arm of GlaxoSmithKline joined investors in ZappRx, a prescription app, in a second instance recently of big pharma putting cash into a mobile health firm.

ZappRx announced it had closed a $1 million round from backers led by current investor Atlas Venture but also including GSK-backed SR One.

The round follows $1 million invested by Atlas Venture in September 2013.

The 2014 SBIR and STTR Omnibus Grant Solicitation of the NIH is now live and the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) budget for the program is increasing. Funding from the NCI Small Business Innovation Research & Small Business Tech Transfer (SBIR & STTR) Programs can help you advance your technology towards commercialization and can also help spark investor interest in your business.

The next application due date is April 5, 2014. We encourage you to start preparing your application and are happy to provide feedback on your project. If you’d like to take advantage of this opportunity, please email the NCI SBIR program director listed in your relevant technology area. Also be sure to check that all of your required registrations are complete. It’s never too early to start the registration process.

Directing a child to set up a diagnostic test is one way to illustrate the ease of using a device. That’s the approach Biomeme took for its pitch on crowdfunding website AngeList. Biomeme co-founder Max Perelman’s cute-as-a-button 7-year-old daughter takes on the role of lab assistant.

The DreamIt Health Philadelphia graduate developed a test kit to identify the DNA or RNA signature of bacteria and viruses through blood, urine or saliva samples. The company raised about $1 million in a mix of debt and options, according to a Form D filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and received $400,000 from the Philadelphia area division of Ben Franklin Technology Partners, the economic investment arm for Pennsylvania.

Getting specialty medications can be a big hassle. Dozens of pages of forms are required. Patients rely on call centers to find out the status of their prescriptions, and can go days wondering exactly when the next refill is coming. What if you could handle it all, instead, with just a few clicks on a smartphone app?

That’s the kind of thing ZappRx, a recently-formed startup out of Cambridge, MA, is trying to do.

The statistics surrounding startup success are pretty daunting — in fact, of the 500,000+ businesses owners that launched companies in 2012, only a handful will ever achieve a fraction of the notoriety of famed CEOs like Zuckerberg, Dorsey or Karp.

When launching a startup, there are countless decisions to consider: number of founders, sources of funding, location and target market, to name a few.

This infographic takes a look at the statistics surrounding startups and examines how many of them actually manage to get off the ground.

Baltimore is known for being home to companies such as Under Armour Inc. (NYSE:UA) and McCormick & Co. (NYSE:MKC) and, of course, HBO’s “The Wire.” But a new survey suggests Baltimore also is a destination for high-salaried technology workers.

Baltimore in 2013 had the second-highest average salary for employees in the technology sector, according to jobs database Dice.com. The 2013 average salary for tech workers was $97,588 — a 0.3 percent decrease from the year before.

ROCK SPRING VENTURES,A LEADING EARLY-STAGE LIFE SCIENCE VENTURE CAPITAL FUND, IS NOW EPIDAREX CAPITAL

Our new name is inspired by Epidaurus, the home of ancient Greece’s first hospital and the temple of the Greek God of Medicine. It reflects our focus on innovation in the healthcare sector and our commitment to investing in young life science and health technology companies. Visit www.epidarex.com.

STAY TUNED FOR A NUMBER OF EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENTS THROUGHOUT THE COMING YEAR...

Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) is the latest Big Pharma company that has vowed to open its clinical trial data vaults to the public. Going a step further than previous efforts, it's enlisting the help of Yale University to manage data requests.

Under an agreement with the Yale School of Medicine, the school's Open Data Access (YODA) Project will serve as an independent body to oversee requests from investigators and physicians looking to access anonymized clinical trial data from J&J's Janssen. YODA, not J&J, will review each request and make final decisions on data sharing. Members of the YODA team will select and appoint an independent external panel of non-Janssen experts to help in some cases to assess requests.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. announced today the closing of its previously announced offering of 2.875% Convertible Senior Notes due 2021 in a private placement to qualified institutional buyers pursuant to Rule 144A under the Securities Act of 1933. Emergent issued $250 million aggregate principal amount of its notes, which includes the additional $35 million principal amount of notes purchased by the initial purchasers under the exercise of the option granted to them by the company.

Emergent intends to use a majority of the net proceeds from the offering to finance the acquisition of Cangene Corporation, announced in December 2013. The company intends to use any remaining net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, which may include repaying outstanding indebtedness under its existing credit facility.

Please join us for the 7th Annual Health Information Technology (HIT) Day of advocacy in Annapolis. Our agenda is focused on 'HIT in Action! Consumer Engagement' where we will showcase the perspectives of consumers using HIT today as well as their future hopes, concerns, and the value derived from accessing one's health information as the healthcare industry transforms.

We are finally hosting the FLC’s National Meeting (Federal Laboratory Consortium) here in Montgomery County! This program gives our local companies easy access to federal labs from across the country. As part of a triple opportunity, the FLC is helping to sponsor the Post Doc Conference (April 24) – and MEDA (Maryland Economic Development Association) has chosen tech transfer as their theme for this year’s Annual Conference (April 27-29). Three great programs all within one week!

We really want to spread the word about our area’s terrific connectivity with the federal labs, and would appreciate your assistance. Attached is the flyer, the program is posted on the DED calendar, and you can access more information about the agenda and registration at www.federallabs.org. Note: The biggest opportunity for our companies is on April 23rd which is Industry Day – so a one-day registration may work well for some businesses.

Noble Life Sciences (Gaithersburg, MD), in collaboration with IBT Bioservices (Gaithersburg, MD), announces a newly optimized cotton rat model for preclinical studies of RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) therapies and vaccines. The companies jointly developed the model of RSV infection in the cotton rat and demonstrated its use to evaluate the efficacy of test compounds in RSV challenge studies.

Cotton rats are the gold standard for preclinical development of drugs and vaccines for RSV. The cotton rat gained importance for RSV studies because the permissiveness of cotton rats to infection with human RSV surpasses that of mice by more than 100-fold and because the model replicates several characteristic features of the human disease. Moreover, the predictive quality of the model is so high that treatments for severe disease advanced to clinical trials based on the results of efficacy and safety studies using cotton rats without the need for testing in primates.

I was in Washington D.C. today at the State of the Net conference, listening to conversations about internet governance, Bitcoin, broadband metrics and privacy. And despite the fact that this an event about technology I’ve never felt so out of place.

It’s not just because everyone around me is wearing a suit. Here a few differences between political conferences and tech conferences; some of which are humorous, but others that are worth learning from.

The Mid-Atlantic area is full of outstanding leaders and innovative companies, but only a chosen few will receive a coveted TCM Industry Award. Our winners develop technologies that save lives, keep the country safe, and consistently perform beyond expectations. Play a part in helping us choose our next class of winners! Nominate now!

The nominations process is easier than ever this year. We will be accepting nominations in 7 categories from any company or individual that has done business in the Mid-Atlantic region during 2013, and you don't have to be a TCM member to submit.

There are 7 prestigious award categories including:

• Chief Financial Officer
• Chief Information/Chief Technology Officer of the Year
• Emerging Company of the Year
• Executive of the Year
• Government Contracting Firm of the Year
• Life Science Firm of the Year
• Technology Firm of the Year

Visit our secure online site to nominate a firm or individual. It only takes a few minutes! The deadline to submit is Friday, February 28, 2014.

Remember, talking about a great leader or remarkable company won't make a difference, but nominating them will! Nominate now!

The effort to focus the post O'Malley era in Maryland on developing private sector businesses and jobs got a big boost Friday from the unprecedented joint agenda of House Speaker Michael E. Busch and Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller. It's encouraging that the two top leaders in the General Assembly are both focused on the issue at the same time that most of the candidates for governor next year are talking about the same thing and private sector advocacy groups like the Greater Baltimore Committee are pursuing similar efforts. But what is more intriguing is the nature of the ideas Messrs. Busch and Miller are putting forward.

Too often, the debate about whether Maryland is business friendly goes no farther than a glance at the Tax Foundation's reports on the state and local tax structure, as if the only choices are a Maryland heavily oriented toward government or one that radically slashes taxes and regulation. The truth is that there are other models for success, and the one that best suits Maryland's strengths is a strategy that leverages our great advantages in intellectual capital to produce jobs in high-tech fields like biotechnology and cyber security. The Miller/Busch proposal recognizes that through tax credits to attract superstars from the private sector to academia, build the cyber security industry and encourage business formation in the areas directly surrounding institutions like Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland.

The head of a state-funded business accelerator on Monday said Kansas will soon be recognized worldwide as a place to bring bioscience businesses.

 "Our mission is for Kansas to become a global destination for bioscience. That is closer to a reality today than many realize," said Duane Cantrell, chief executive officer of the Kansas Bioscience Authority.

Johns Hopkins Medicine is joining with a company in Saudi Arabia to form a health care company.

The Baltimore medical institution said it and Saudi Aramco, an energy and chemical company with a health care arm, will open the Johns Hopkins Saudi Aramco Healthcare Company Feb. 1.

In a little more than two months, about 1,000 people will flock to Cole Field House, but the occasion won’t have anything to do with basketball.

From April 4 to 6, this university’s first-ever Major League Hacking-sanctioned hackathon will take place in the form of a 36-hour marathon competition called Bitcamp. 

Event director Shariq Hashme said he expects anywhere from 750 to 1,250 participants from more than 100 universities, with more than 100 of those participants hailing from this university. 

Six startup companies have been selected to participate in AccelerateBaltimore's 2014 program.

The accelerator program is run by the Emerging Technology Centers (ETC) and the Abell Foundation. Each company receives $25,000 in seed funding, office space and mentorship resources. The program runs for 13 weeks.

On a recent press tour of New Jersey I was introduced to PTC Therapeutics, a fascinating company that is developing ribosomal readthrough drugs for several indications.

What I find so interesting about this company and their technology is that it is a sort of magic bullet. Drugs that can modulate ribosomal activity can potentially treat hundreds of diseases (indeed, PTC told me that they are looking at thousands of diseases).

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and The Commonwealth Fund have concluded that electronic health record systems and other digital tools are likely to curb the demand for physicians in the future.

Based on their analysis of recent trends in digital health care and a review of the scientific literature, the authors conclude that patients’ future use of physician services will change dramatically as electronic health records and consumer e-health “apps” proliferate. The findings appear in the issue of the journal Health Affairs.

Primary care physicians' adoption of electronic health records increased significantly  between 2009 and 2012, but there continues to be a "digital divide" between large and small physician practices, according to a new study by the Commonwealth Fund, FierceHealthIT reports.

Study Findings

The study found that EHR adoption by primary care physicians increased from 46% in 2009 to 69% in 2012 (Hall, FierceHealthIT, 1/26).

Using tiny biodegradable particles to disrupt the body’s normal immune response after a heart attack could help save patients from tissue damage and certain long-term health problems that often follow. Researchers have shown that injecting such particles into mice within 24 hours of a heart attack not only significantly reduces tissue damage, but also results in those mice having stronger cardiac function 30 days later. The inventors of the new technology now plan to pursue human trials.

Much of the tissue damage that results from a heart attack is the result of inflammation, the body’s natural response to harmful stimuli such as damaged muscle. But in the case of a heart attack, these immune cells do more harm than good, explains Daniel Getts, inventor of the new therapy and chief scientific officer of Cour Pharmaceutical Development. The system’s weaponry is “fairly generic,” he says. While the toxic compounds that the immune cells secrete can be beneficial in defending the body against an infection, they also cause tissue damage. This phenomenon occurs not only after heart attacks, but also in a range of other diseases, including West Nile Virus, inflammatory bowel disease, and multiple sclerosis.

Image Courtesy of thampapon1 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Investing in activities that support the creation and expansion of high-growth companies and jobs is at the forefront of technology-based economic development (TBED). TBED fosters a climate where new and existing companies that develop technology and continuously innovate will thrive. Understanding the trends that are affecting and influencing TBED can help guide investment priorities for practitioners and policymakers across the nation.

A slow yet stable national economic recovery gave rise to many new initiatives across states and regions with a shift toward targeted and refined investments in the high-tech economy for quicker returns – a continued trend from 2012.

Millennial Media Inc. founder Paul Palmieri has stepped down as chairman and CEO of the publicly traded Baltimore mobile advertising firm, effective immediately.

He will join venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates as a venture adviser focused on technology out of its Chevy Chase office.

Threat and opportunities are two sides of the same coin here. While cancer is one of the biggest threats the healthcare sector is witnessing today, it has also thrown open a number of investment opportunities.

Cancer detection and treatment focused companies attracted almost $17 million from VC ( venture capital) investors during 2013. Norwest led the charge, which deployed $11 million in the cancer-focused medical devices maker Perfint Healthcare and $4 million in cancer-focused diagnostics chain Nueclear Healthcare. Cancer-focused drug development firm Invictus Oncology attracted $1.9 million from Aarin Capital and Navam Capital.

Earlier this month, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), a trade association representing the U.S. venture capital industry, released the results of its MoneyTree Report on venture funding for 2013.  The report, which is prepared by NVCA and PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP using data from Thomson Reuters, indicates that venture capitalists invested $29.4 billion in 3,995 deals in 2013, which constituted a 7% increase in dollars and a 4% increase in deals over the prior year (see chart below, which shows total venture funding from 2004 to 2013; data from MoneyTree Reports).

A Baltimore company's medical device that aims to reduce dialysis treatment complications was among two winners of an inaugural bioscience challenge.

Baltimore-based Hemova Medical and Arizona-based MyFuelUp were the winning companies Jan. 24 in the BioAccel Solutions Challenge in Phoenix, a contest that first identified four unmet medical needs before seeking out startups that could help solve the problem. MyFuelUp is an app that provides healthy meal plans.

Srinagar: Jammu Kashmir Innovators Forum (JKIF) is making a device that would measure glucose from the skin without taking any blood sample.

Jammu & Kashmir Innovators Forum, sole Forum from the state, which works for inventions, researches and innovations Saturday announced that it is testing a prototype of a device that would help the people with diabetes to manage this disease.