Biohealth Innovation
Rockville-based biodefense company Emergent BioSolutions, taking steps to move deeper into the commercial drugmaking world, is paying $222 million to buy Cangene Corp., a Canadian firm, according to the Washington Post.
Emergent emerged as a key biodefense company following the Sept. 11 attacks, when it sold Anthrax vaccines to the U.S. government.
GlaxoSmithKline is to invest another 200 million pounds ($330 million) on advanced manufacturing in Britain, the company said on Wednesday, underlining the draw of a tax break designed to encourage research and development.
Britain's so-called "patent box" scheme, which offers a reduced rate of corporation tax on income derived from patents, has been hailed by GSK, its biggest drugmaker, for transforming the country as a place to invest.
BD Diagnostics, a segment of BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), a leading global medical technology company, today introduced two new erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) instruments in Europe that standardise analysis for more accurate, timely results and an efficient workflow in comparison to a manual Westergren method. This next generation of BD ESR instruments results in improved patient care in the laboratory or point of care setting.
Erythrocyte sedimentation is a commonly used hematology test to measure inflammation and the presence and severity of disease. “Improved automation and efficiency are key to carrying out analytical tests in a busy laboratory. More and more tests are being conducted each year and reduced healthcare spending puts pressure on laboratory resources,” comments Stephen Church, European Medical Affairs, BD Diagnostics -Preanalytical Systems.
Drexel University, the University City Science Center and DreamIt Ventures are on a mission to support innovators and entrepreneurs in the Philadelphia region and have formed a strategic partnership that creates a hub for start-ups to test their wings and the capital that will support their continued growth.
Drexel – Science Center Collaboration
Drexel and the Science Center have collaborated to form a 17,500-square-foot innovation hub that will serve as a launching pad for companies by offering business incubation and accelerator spaces and services to support idea generation, innovation and growth as well as support for later-stage companies.
The Indian Biomedical Association (IBA) invited entrepreneurs from early phase companies with products or services in the life sciences industry the opportunity to connect, collaborate and partner with investors. Following the event on Nov 17th [Developing and delivering effective investor presentation for your early stage venture], four companies were chosen to pitch in front of investors on Dec 17th, 2013. The four companies are: Neuronascent, RoosterBio, LiquiLens and OTOMAGNETICS.
Top Five Reasons You Should Attend:
1. Learn by Example- Listen carefully to how others pitch so that you can perfect your own!
2. Understand what seasoned investors expect in real life terms
3. Networking with like-minded professionals
4. Create your own Due Diligence process for investing
5. Building a vibrant entrepreneurial healthcare and life science community in the DC/MD/VA region - Be a Part of It!
Own an emerging cyber security company and need more cash to grow?
Maryland has set aside $3 million in tax incentives for companies seeking outside investments. Those investors must keep their money in the company for at least three years.
There has been some confusion over the tax credit so state officials are trying to get the word out that there’s money on the table.
December 19, 2013 6:00-8:00 PM
William Hanna Center for Innovation at Shady Grove, 9700 Great Seneca Hwy Rockville, MD 20850
Springboard Enterprises presents the Dolphin Tank, a pitch-practice event for life science entrepreneurs.
What is the format? Pre-selected presenters deliver a two- to three-minute elevator pitch (no slides!), followed by feedback from an expert panel. The audience also weighs in.
Who will pitch? Six to eight early-stage life science companies, or those with an idea for a new life science business. Those selected can pitch their idea/business on their own, or with a group.
What sectors? Life science, including biotechnology, medical devices, healthcare IT, pharmaceuticals, and diagnostics.
Men and women are encouraged to apply to pitch at this event.
Deadline to apply to pitch: Monday December, 16 at 12noon EST
Expect an email from This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. within 24 hours of the pitch deadline to confirm whether you've been selected to pitch.
DreamIt Ventures is raising a $30 million fund to further support its portfolio companies.
The five-year-old early-stage startup accelerator has raised $10 million so far, said managing partner Karen Griffith Gryga, who is raising the fund. The raise will go toward follow-on funding for the nearly 130 companies that have graduated from DreamIt’s programs in Philadelphia, New York City and Austin. (DreamIt’s latest program, DreamIt Health Baltimore, will launch in January 2014.)
The University of Maryland (UM) BioPark announced today that the JS Yoon Memorial Cancer Research Institute, a basic research organization looking at the fundamental genetic and epigenetic basis of cancer, has expanded its space within the Biotechnology Innovation Center at the BioPark. The Institute, which moved into the Park in mid-2013, is housing six employees at the BioPark who are charged with performing basic cancer research designed to lead to therapeutic and diagnostic solutions addressing a variety of cancer types.
“What sets us apart from other cancer-focused entities is that we seek to elucidate the molecular basis of cancer and to use this knowledge to develop therapies and diagnostic tests, rather than the current method which is the other way around,” said Ji Eun Lee, Managing Director, JS Yoon Memorial Cancer Research Institute. “We’re thrilled to be conducting our research at the BioPark, which offers excellent proximity to the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM), Johns Hopkins, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institutes of Health. It’s also a huge benefit to have access to the top-rate resources and core facilities available through the UM SOM as we conduct our research.”
Our world is changing at an unprecedented pace. To prepare our students, lessons must go beyond the "3 R's" and foster 21st century skills. Skills like critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity will be essential for students to take on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
Note: As of August 6th, 2013, Smithsonian Student Travel is now known as EF Explore America. Please visit our website at http://www.efexploreamerica.com.
This FOA encourages applications to develop microfluidic devices to analyze blood for factors related to the thrombotic, transfusion, and/or hemostatic status of pediatric/neonatal patients. Platforms should support clinical and/or research applications. Microfluidic designs that are multifunctional, with the capacity to perform multiple assays on a single blood sample, are of interest. Use of these devices could significantly reduce levels of phlebotomy-induced blood loss in pediatric/neonatal patients.
This FOA encourages applications to develop microfluidic devices to analyze blood for factors related to the thrombotic, transfusion, and/or hemostatic status of pediatric/neonatal patients. Platforms should support clinical and/or research applications. Microfluidic designs that are multifunctional, with the capacity to perform multiple assays on a single blood sample, are of interest. Use of these devices could significantly reduce levels of phlebotomy-induced blood loss in pediatric/neonatal patients.
Aging baby boomers, Obamacare and a greater push toward electronic medical records.
Three Baltimore-area investment heavyweights — Paul Silber, Rick Kohr Jr. and Harrison Perry — are hoping that’s the winning combination for an investment fund they have launched to pump money into health care companies in the mid-Atlantic region.
Against a backdrop of slowing healthcare expenditures and ongoing implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the dynamics of the U.S. medical device industry have become increasingly fluid. In this article, Elliot Hyun, a medical device analyst at GE Capital Healthcare Financial Services, discusses the current status of the industry – and what lies ahead for investors.
Q. What is the state of the medical device industry?
A. Broadly speaking, we have seen growth slow in recent years, as the industry has grappled with both persistent utilization softness following the end of the most recent economic downturn as well as the increasingly real headwind of pricing pressure from customers. As such, we believe industry growth has slowed from the mid-high single-digit range prior to the recession to the low single-digit area today.
It is customary in higher education to dismiss rankings as misleading and arbitrary, quantifying things that don’t much matter about colleges and universities.
But one list of undisputed significance is compiled each year by the National Science Foundation: the top institutions ranked by total research spending. Such money supports laboratories, attracts top faculty and graduate students and gives many undergraduates a chance to learn through experimentation.
Many start-up medical device and diagnostic companies offer some of the most promising technologies in the industry. As a result, most large medical device companies have created significant business development and venture funding units to tap into this innovation. However, some promising technologies will never see the light of day – not due to the validity of technology, but because of significant commercial missteps.
Here are three common mistakes on the road to commercialization and how to navigate them successfully:
Alan Auerbach is the brains and leadership behind Puma Biotechnology PBYI -2.29%, a biopharma acquirer and developer of innovative cancer treatments that has had a great stock run this past week. The Los Angeles-based company’s shares surged 88 percent from Wednesday to Friday, closing the week at $86.75 per share. Today they’re up more than 1%, trading at close to $88 per share. The founder, chairman and CEO’s shares in the company have appreciated by $167 million on the good news, nearly doubling his stake from $185 million to $352 million.
Today, Sanofi US launched its second Partners in Patient Health (PiPH) Innovation Challenge: Collaborate | Innovate, which will award $100,000 to the winning team. This year's theme is "Co-Creating for Breakthroughs: Moving toward a collaborative research and development ecosystem." The Challenge calls on non-profit patient, provider and professional associations to partner with other associations and/or academic institutions to propose new approaches which translate patient insights into improvements in the drug development process.
A treatment breakthrough can cost billions of dollars and decades of time to research. Patient organizations are in the position of helping patients and their constituents to play an important role in research and development (R&D). Patient involvement in the entire process can lead to improvements in efficiency and effectiveness of industry efforts in developing new therapies.
When you speak with Dr. Joseph Loscalzo about the new Boston Biomedical Innovation Center, you can’t help but get excited about the prospects of enhancing the health of the nation by promoting greater commercialization of NIH-funded discovery science.
“We have all the people we need to make it work. We have all the resources now in hand that we need to make it work. So I think that we are in a very unique situation to prove that this concept is a valid one for the future development of technologies that spring from what the NIH supported over the years as basic investigation that can now be applied to patient care.”
Flu or influenza (caused by influenza virus) is a miserable experience as it daunts the victim with countless sneezes, head aches and fever.
Flu develops when tiny droplets coughed or sneezed into the air by an infected person are inhaled by an uninfected person. Flu is often confused with common cold. But, they are different, though certain flu symptoms are the same. According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, fever and muscle pain associated with flu goes away with prevention and treatment in a day or two, however, fatigue may last for a week.
Few companies watch their bottom line with more anxiety than startup firms, but the ones who want to move into a new business accelerator in Columbia will need to think beyond revenue and expenses.
Howard County's Conscious Venture Lab is on the hunt for fledgling companies practicing a form of what's often called responsible or sustainable capitalism — businesses with aims that include but aren't limited to profits. The accelerator's organizers want firms that consider not just shareholders in their decisions but also a broad range of other "stakeholders" such as employees, suppliers and the environment.
GlaxoSmithKline has announced the formation of a consortium comprised of "six internationally-renowned comprehensive cancer centres", three in North Americva and three in Europe.
In forming the Oncology Clinical and Translational Consortium (OCTC), GSK says it will benefit from the partners' expertise in preclinical, translational and clinical development of novel anticancer therapeutics including kinase inhibitors, epigenome modulating compounds and immunotherapies. In return, the centres will have access to studies with GSK's early-stage cancer pipeline "and opportunities to advance the next generation of novel oncology therapeutics".
Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) promotes the development and commercialization of products and processes through industry/university research partnerships. MIPS provides matching funds to help Maryland companies pay for the university research. Projects are initiated by the companies to meet their own research and development goals.
The Life Sciences Manager is responsible for connecting Maryland companies to faculty and researchers in University System of Maryland institutions, plus St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and Morgan State University to address corporate technology development needs. The Manager facilitates the creation of academic-industrial R&D partnerships through the MIPS program, with a particular emphasis on biotechnology, medical and other life sciences. The Manager evaluates proposals on an ongoing basis and acts as a technical coordinator for the MIPS program by identifying the technical reviewers for proposals. Additionally, the Manager coordinates the economic development reviews on MIPS proposals and implements existing MIPS concepts, processes, tools and other procedures necessary to evaluate and monitor ongoing projects, and develop improved capabilities therein.
Strand Life Sciences Private Limited, a global life sciences company headquartered in Bangalore, is collaborating with the San Francisco Bay Area based El Camino Hospital to locate a Strand Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at the Genomic Medicine Institute of the El Camino Hospital to accelerate the adoption of next generation sequencing based research panels and counseling services by the physicians at the Hospital and its partner clinics.
A Letter of Understanding was signed on Wednesday December 4th by Dr. Vijay Chandru, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Strand Life Sciences and Dr. Eric A. Pifer, Chief Medical Officer of El Camino Hospital. This signals the start of a collaborative effort to bring advanced genomic tests in cardiology, oncology, pharmaco-genomics and personalized medicine to the community served by the El Camino Hospital, a community that has traditionally been an early adopter of high technology solutions.
Cerner Corp., one of the top EHR vendors in the country, is teaming up with Claritas Genomics to advance personalized medicine by building tools and connectivity that will better integrate next-generation, sequence-based diagnostic testing into clinical practice.
The relationship with Cerner will enable Claritas to tap into an existing, scalable computing infrastructure that integrates ordering of genomic sequencing tests, laboratory processing, results interpretation, return of results to the clinician and incorporation of the result in the patient's electronic medical record, executives of both companies announced in a Dec. 5 news release.
Part of moving forward and progressing with health IT initiatives involves proactively setting new goals and establishing a roadmap for the future. The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange Foundation has taken this to task by releasing its 2013 report that puts forth recommendations for the health IT industry over the next decade.
Report officials outline 10 recommendations in four critical areas of focus including patient engagement, payment models, data exchange and interoperability and innovative encounter models.
Less than 10 percent of hospitals have warmed up to RFID technology. That’s the assessment of Mark Roberti, the founder and editor of RFID Journal, so it’s very much an emerging trend in healthcare. The idea is that by using resources more effectively, hospital staff can spend less time running around trying to find medical supplies and more time with patients.
“The reason why healthcare costs are so high is hospitals keep buying things they already have and waste money,” Roberti said at a conference organized by his Journal which focused on RFID in Healthcare. Hospitals have been so focused on the priority of saving lives that they have been slow to adopt technology that saves money.
ZocDoc dug into America’s “largest database of patient behavior” to discover the top patient trends of 2013.
ZocDoc makes it easy for people to book doctors appointments through its online booking service. More than 4 million patients use ZocDoc every month, and their interactions provide a wealth of data and insights that were never available before.
Each year, nearly $100 billion is spent in the United States on healthcare related research, with an increasing proportion of the breakthrough research being carried out in academic medical centers. While continued medical progress relies on enhanced academic-industry collaboration, the information available on the academic commercialization system function across these institutions is not uniform and often difficult to access.
The Medical Innovation Playbook is the first-ever comprehensive study of technological innovation and commercialization at the nation’s top healthcare centers.
As aging populations put a strain on cash-strapped governments, chronic illness and rare disease prevention is taking centre stage in healthcare. To meet new levels of demand, the sector is ramping up its innovative capacity through collaborations. But harnessing the disruptive potential of these partnerships is still very much a work in progress, according to participants of the INSEAD Healthcare Alumni Summit in Zurich in October this year.
Collaborations are widely seen by the sector as crucial to raise extra finance amid a credit crunch, share risk, boost research productivity, discover new therapies – and ultimately to reinvent the way healthcare is delivered. So large and small pharma companies, hospitals, pharmacy chains, venture capital firms, IT consultants, and academia are forming an array of partnerships.
A Johns Hopkins undergraduate biomedical engineering student team headed by Indian American Piyush Poddar that devised a two-part system to improve the way life-saving shocks are delivered to hearts earned first prize in the undergraduate division of a national Collegiate Inventors Competition.
Winners in the Collegiate Inventors Competition, conducted by Invent Now and the National Inventors Hall of Fame, were announced Nov. 12 after the finalist teams presented their projects to contest judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Va.
The OneStart Americas competition, a partnership between Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable and SR One, the venture capital arm of GlaxoSmithKline, officially launched on November 4 at UCSF. The kick-off event was followed by similar events held this month in Los Angeles, San Diego and Boston.
OneStart Americas invites individuals or teams of burgeoning life science entrepreneurs under 36 years of age to apply in one of four tracks: drug discovery, medical devices, diagnostics, or health information technology. 35 selected semi-finalists will undergo two-months of extensive mentorship from venture capitalists, pharmaceutical executives, and other entrepreneurs in order to turn their idea into a comprehensive business plan.
Eight former pro football players learned this year that they have signs of a degenerative brain disorder called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition linked to depression, dementia, and memory loss. These somber findings were uncovered using a new method of brain imaging that, for the first time, enables researchers to spot signs of the condition in the living brain. Previously CTE could only be identified after a victim died.
The new method could help quantify the risks of repetitive blows to the head (see “Images of a Hard-Hitting Disease” and “Military Brains Donated for Trauma Research”). It could also help future players avoid the degenerative and sometimes lethal condition by limiting their exposure, and it may help scientists develop better protective gear and treatments.
FRANCIS S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has been distributing a chart that shows the success rate of grant applications to NIH for scientific research. While the rate was about 30 percent as recently as a decade ago, it has plunged to about 15 percent, which Dr. Collins says is the lowest in history. One reason for this is that more applicants are seeking funds, but the budget squeeze also is to blame. Dr. Collins is worried that the low success rate will cause young scientists and researchers to abandon the laboratory for other careers or to take their talents and ideas to other countries.
Emergent BioSolutions Inc.’s U.S. Health and Human Services contract to help produce flu vaccines in the event of a pandemic are key to the firm’s expansion, Chief Financial Officer Robert G. Kramer says.
The Baltimore Development Corp. on Wednesday confirmed that it is offering a second $250,000 new job creation tax incentive to Emergent.