Its image further enhanced by the recent IPO of Twitter, Silicon Valley now stands in many minds as the cutting edge of the American future. Some, on both right and left, believe that the Valley's geeks should reform the nation, and the government, in their image.

Increasingly, the basic meme out of the Valley, and its boosters, is that, as one venture capitalist put it: “We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like.” The rest of the country, that venture capitalist, Chamath Palihapitiya, recently argued, needs to recognize that “it's becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else, that where value is created is no longer in New York, it's no longer in Washington, it's no longer in L.A. It's in San Francisco and the Bay Area.”

Image Courtesy of porbital / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The fourth edition of Building Biotechnology, the premier biotechnology industry primer, is now available.

Building Biotechnology has been adopted by dozens of educational programs, and is on the nightstands of many biotech CEOs. The book covers a broad range of essential knowledge in business, regulations, patents, law, policy, and science.

For many years we've been incredibly critical of the famous Bayh-Dole Act, which was passed in 1980 with the idea that it would encourage greater innovation by pushing universities to patent the research they were doing. The theory -- based on a rather ignorant view of innovation and research -- was that patents would create a market, which, in turn, would enable easier knowledge transfer from academia to industry, leading to a research boom. The actual results have been a near total disaster. What's actually happened are two very bad things. First, it's seriously harmed university research, by guaranteeing much less information sharing between researchers. And, it turns out, that information sharing is a big part of how innovation and big scientific breakthroughs occur. Not surprisingly (if you understand basic economics), when you try to lock up each idea with a patent, researchers (and, more importantly, their administrator bosses), suddenly don't want to share any more. The end result? Lots of important research stifled. What a shame.

Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The state of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have embarked on a new partnership effort, the main goal of which is to attract high technology companies to Maryland, which in turn will enable both future missions of NASA and the economic future of Maryland.  

The agreement, signed by U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley and Goddard Space Flight Center Director Chris Scolese will help in several ways. Goddard will obtain specialized skills and technologies needed for its numerous mission applications. It will help the center engage in technical exchanges with local tech companies regarding new trends, theories, techniques, and problems in aerospace technology. And finally, it will provide an opportunity for the development of local educational and labor resources specific to Goddard's needs.

CDER’s mission is to protect and promote public health by helping to ensure that human drugs are safe and effective for their intended use, that they meet established quality standards, and that they are available to patients. The range and complexity of the human drug supply and development pipeline, and the global nature of regulated industry operations present unprecedented challenges to effective regulatory oversight. Effective and sustainable regulatory operations also require explicit recognition of agency resource limitations.

MedStar Health and the Cleveland Clinic said Monday they'd signed a deal with a Maryland company to license patent rights for a medical device that would help patients with severe lung and neuromuscular diseases to breathe.

The deal comes two years after Columbia, Md.-based MedStar and the prestigious Cleveland Clinic's technology transfer arm unveiled its alliance aimed at commercializing medical innovation.

A new health information technology accelerator has caught the eye of one of Baltimore’s technology leaders.

Jason Hardebeck, executive director of the gb.tc, formerly the Greater Baltimore Technology Council, has been named managing director for DreamIt Health Baltimore. The accelerator is scheduled to launch in January.

Once a month, Growlers Brew Pub in Gaithersburg is packed with people talking about the latest trends in the biotechnology and life sciences industries.

The people who gather at Growlers are biotechnology students, lab workers, human resources managers, job seekers, educators, scientists, entrepreneurs and vendors. They come for the camaraderie and the opportunity to connect with people in the bioscience industry.

In 1837, entrepreneur and philanthropist Johns Hopkins bought a Federal-style mansion located on 300 acres in northeast Baltimore. Henry Thompson, a businessman and War of 1812 cavalry captain, had built the estate in 1803 and named it Clifton after his ancestral home in England. It became Hopkins' summer home, where he liked to entertain family and friends, until his death in 1873. It's where he welcomed the Prince of Wales, who became King Edward VII. It's where he held a clandestine meeting that included Salmon Chase, secretary of the Treasury under President Abraham Lincoln; his friend John Work Garrett, the B&O Railroad president; and other B&O officials, who offered to use the rail for Union Army troop movements. And it's where he hoped the university that would bear his name would be located

The fiasco with the $600 million federal health insurance website wasn’t all bureaucratic. Forcing slow and disparate databases run by government and insurance companies to work together in real time—and then launching the service all at once—would have challenged even technology wunderkinds.

In particular, the project was doomed by a relatively late decision that required applicants to open an account and let the site verify their identity, residence, and income before they could browse for insurance. That meant the site would have to interface in real-time with databases maintained by the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies.

The Evan Burfield of June 2000 was the archetypal startup wunderkind, the kind of overachiever who naturally invites unfavorable comparisons to yourself at the same age.

There was his skinny, almost teenaged face on The Washington Post’s website, accompanying a reader Q&A on how he built a financial software company, netDecide, instead of rowing at Dartmouth.

Peter DeComo raised $20 million from investors for Renal Solutions Inc. in 2002, when the Pittsburgh medical device company had only a working prototype for an artificial kidney and no money.

During the next five years, he brought in $20 million more in capital before selling Renal Solutions to a German outfit in 2007 for nearly $200 million.

“That company couldn't even get funded today,” lamented DeComo, the CEO of South Side-based ALung Technologies Inc., because venture capital investors have pulled back from startup companies in his industry.

You’ve cracked open the crate of cranberries, stuck the turkey in the oven and are well into filling your second muffin tin with cornbread batter. And just in time for dinner, MedCity is here to talk about innovative obesity treatments, both pharmaceutical options and medical devices.

The Netherlands has retained its position at the top of the annual Euro Health Consumer Index (EHCI) which compares healthcare systems in Europe.

On 48 indicators such as patient rights and information, accessibility, prevention and outcomes, the Netherlands secured its top position among 35 European countries for the fourth year in a row, scoring 870 of a maximum 1,000 points.

Last summer when we were still waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the Affordable Care Act, many people I talked to said that regardless of the decision, the wheels were in motion. Too much had already happened for the Court to get the horse back in the barn.

That may be true, but President Obama and the ACA got everything started on a national scale: the focus on reducing readmissions, on care coordination, on patient engagement. When would hospitals have started revamping the discharge process or getting serious about follow-up care without the stick of reduced reimbursements? When would doctors and hospitals and long-term care facilities have started really focusing on any of these serious problems without real incentives to do so?

Trevigen Inc. has been awarded $252,000 for the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Contract, 261201300042C, from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a tumor-aligned 3D coculture system. Dr. Gabriel Benton is the Principal Investigator.

“Many anticancer drugs fail in human trials despite showing efficacy in in vitro studies and animal models. It has become clear that 2D in vitro monoculture assays do not reflect the complex cellular composition and microenvironment of the tumor tissue, and this may explain their failure to predict clinical efficacy” says Dr. Hynda Kleinman, former NIH PI.

Jason Hardebeck, whom many in Baltimore’s tech community know as the executive director of gb.tc, has been picked to lead DreamIt Ventures‘ new accelerator for health IT startups here.

Hardebeck will take on the role of managing director of DreamIt Health Baltimore, which will shuttle early-stage health care startups through a four-month program beginning in January, providing them with stipends of up to $50,000 in addition to other professional services. The program will be based out of Bond Street Wharf in Fells Point, a Johns Hopkins University property that DreamIt is leasing from the university.

Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and US-based VC Avalon Ventures have announced the creation of the first of up to ten San Diego-based biotech firms as part of a $495m alliance signed in April.

Sitari Pharmaceuticals, which is using technology licensed from Stanford University, will receive a total of $10m from Avalon and GSK to get the San Diego-based company off the ground. The company will investigate treatments for celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder which targets the small intestine. Avalon also created COI Pharmaceuticals, a support firm which will supply people and infrastructure to Sitari and other firms to emerge from the alliance.

It’s frequently used to raise money for producing movies and recording CDs, but a Toronto hospital is hoping the crowdfunding craze can help get potentially life-saving treatment out of the lab and into the arms of the people who need it most.

For almost two decades, Dr. Gregory Czarnota, chief of radiation oncology at Sunnybrook Hospital, has been working with Michael Kolios, an associate dean in Ryerson University’s faculty of science, on software that could help better manage breast cancer treatments.

It’s been a relatively quiet year for facility investment projects from Merck KGaA, the life sciences and chemical firm that employs more than 38,000 around the world and reported 2012 revenues of more than US$15 billion. But the past fortnight has been something else entirely.

On Nov. 15, Merck announced an €80-million (US$108.3-million) investment in a new pharmaceutical manufacturing facility to be located in the Nantong Economical Technological Development Area (NETDA) in the Greater Shanghai region (Yangtze River Delta area).

Heart attacks, anaphylactic shock and clinical decision support for healthcare workers in rural clinics in developing countries. Those are the targets of a group of mobile health apps that could help decide the future of mhealth technology commercialization at the university. It’s part of a new program at  the University of Pennsylvania.

Six apps were chosen by development firms who will produce prototypes for the Center for Technology Transfer. The first three were conceived by faculty from Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and qualify for UpStart’s incubator program. A drug verifier app, developed by a Wharton business school student, will get advice from UpStart’s new student entrepreneur adviser program. Aside from Resuscor, each of them fit the description for the Noble Mobile category — an app to improve society.

A university team took first place in a health competition earlier this month after implementing a method to improve health care access for Americans.

This year’s American Public Health Association Codeathon event brought several teams from around the country to Boston on Nov. 1 to figure out how to put the Affordable Care Act into practice. The university’s team, Terrapin Health Transformers & Friends, brought together developers, coders, designers and health professionals to brainstorm their idea, said Kenyon Crowley, team leader and the Center for Health, Information and Decision Systems deputy director.

A Chinese herbal medicine for liver ailments has cleared a big hurdle with regulators in the United States, but there's still a long way to go.

For Tarek Hassanein, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, it took a long time to learn and finally to pronounce "fuzhenghuayu (FZHY)". That's the Chinese name of a patented Chinese drug that treats liver fibrosis, the scarring process of the liver from injuries and diseases.

It wasn’t just another business competition for Scott Holland, it was the realization of a life-long dream.

Holland’s startup i-Lighting, a novel easy-to-install indoor and outdoor LED lighting system, was awarded $100,000 and other prizes in April 2013 during the inaugural InvestMaryland Challenge, a prestigious business competition by the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development. Following weeks of rigorous judging and mentoring, his company beat out dozens of others, ranging from high-tech manufacturers to smart phone app developers, in the general category.

To say an IT project like HealthCare.gov was a large-scale, complex behemoth undertaking is an understatement, to say the least. All the myriad elements of the project must be successfully interconnected for it to function properly, which clearly did not occur.   

Neglect any one of these elements and it can lead to "outright failure," says Richard Spires a consultant who formerly served as the Department of Homeland Security's chief information officer.

“Domain specificity is important.” It is so refreshing to hear a tech entrepreneur like Steve Blank say this. Blank has been worked with researchers and clinicians for almost three years to bring the lean startup philosophy to healthcare. This is one of his conclusions about the industry.

Many people trying to get healthcare into the 21st century – doctors, nurses, entrepreneurs, investors – have been frustrated by the obnoxious attitude that technology is the solution to everything. A few too many tech entrepreneurs have breezed into the health world with “the solution.”

Johns Hopkins University has won a key court judgement in its disputed plan to develop a 108-acre donated farm into a $4.7 million "science city," The Gazette reports.

The Maryland Court of Special Appeals ruled Thursday that the plan complies with the agreement forged between Johns Hopkins and Elizabeth Banks, who sold Belward Farm in 1989 for $5 million. In November 2011, Tim Newell, one of Banks’ relatives, sued Hopkins claiming the university was violating a land use agreement it made with Banks.

The state of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have embarked on a new partnership effort, the main goal of which is to attract high technology companies to Maryland, which in turn will enable both future missions of NASA and the economic future of Maryland. The agreement, signed by U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley and Goddard Space Flight Center Director Chris Scolese will help in several ways. Goddard will obtain specialized skills and technologies needed for its numerous mission applications. It will help the center engage in technical exchanges with local tech companies regarding new trends, theories, techniques and problems in aerospace technology. And finally, it will provide an opportunity for the development of local educational and labor resources specific to Goddard's needs.

Baltimore is a top destination for students looking to attend college.

The Charm City has ranked eighth among major metro areas in the American Institute for Economic Research’s College Destinations Index for 2013 and 2014.

'We need to provide high-quality education at a lower cost. If at the end of the day, this means there aren't as many universities or some people don't have jobs, you know, this is not a welfare business. We have the interest of the nation at stake. And this is what we all have to keep focused on—high quality and containing costs.'

William E. Kirwan, Chancellor, University

Dr. Daniel Saltzman says he can prove that bacteria that ordinarily cause food poisoning in people can be modified for use as guided missiles to deliver cancer-killing payloads into tumors.

But he needs $500,000 for some preliminary work, and despite his project’s potential, he’s not holding his breath for funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s leading source of biomedical research grants.

As reported in the Baltimore News Journal, Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz on Monday proposed a new department name and department head nominee for the County’s economic development agency.

QIAGEN has announced an agreement with Eli Lilly and Company to develop and commercialize a molecular companion diagnostic paired with a novel Lilly oncology compound. This is the third co-development project by QIAGEN and Lilly to create companion diagnostics, which are tests that analyze genomic information in patient samples to enable personalized decisions on treatments.  

The latest collaboration, involving an undisclosed Lilly compound and an undisclosed molecular diagnostic target, builds on a master collaboration agreement for development of tailored therapies in cancer and other therapeutic areas signed earlier this year.

Before 1960, the only way to treat cardiac arrest involved opening up the chest cavity and applying manual cardiac massage. The surgeon would take the heart in his hands and squeeze it ever so cautiously to a distinct rhythm in order to help pump blood to the brain and other important organs, giving the patient a chance at life once again. While a bold method, it was rarely attempted and more often than not didn't prove successful.

So, taking this as an opportunity to try something new, surgeons at Johns Hopkins created a new Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation technique dubbed closed-chest cardiac massage. The group of surgeons with a knack for innovation created a way to pump the arrested heart without ever having to open up the patient.