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.

GlaxoSmithKline’s $500 million portfolio with Avalon Ventures invested in its in first startup – Palo Alto-based Sitari Pharmaceuticals.

According to Fierce Biotech, the San Diego-based venture group and its partners at GSK are funding Sitari with $10 million in cash and research support, with the R&D assist coming from the pharma giant.

The HCIL's ongoing work with temporal event records has produced powerful tools for analyzing and exploring patterns of point-based events (Lifelines2, LifeFlow). However, users found that point-based events limited their capacity to solve problems that had inherently interval attributes, for example, the 3-month interval during which patients took a medication. To address this issue, EventFlow extends its predecessors to support both point-based and interval-based events. Interval-based events represent a fundamental increase in complexity at every level of the application, from the input and data structure to the eventual questions that a user might ask of the data. Our goal was to accomplish this integration in a way that appeared to users as a simple and intuitive extension of the original LifeFlow tool. With EventFlow, we present novel solutions for displaying interval events, simplifying their visual impact, and incorporating them into meaningful queries.

Open innovation is not new, but it is relatively new to health care, igniting a broad cross-section of challenges, hackathons, and competitions that seek to identify breakthrough solutions to solve for our health and our health care. By applying the best practices of the leading tech accelerators, these programs accelerate the speed at which new solutions are developed, companies are formed, and jobs are created.

To quote Todd Park, CTO of the United States of America, "There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur at the intersection of health care and IT." And there has never been a better time, or industry, for open innovation, a game where no one loses. Open innovation is good for the sponsoring organization, good for the innovator, good for the patient, and good for America.

It’s more than likely that the readers of the NPQ Newswire may not be all that heavily involved in scientific research, but for those who are, the impact of federal budget cuts on agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies supporting scientific research have been devastating. For example, in fiscal 2013, the NIH had its budget cut (per sequestration) by 5 percent, roughly $1.5 billion, which meant that 640 research grants were not issued. As this Mediaite table shows, the NIH may be the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, but its appropriations have plummeted from over $31 billion in 2010 to a projected $27 billion in 2014: 

Imagine a website launched by students, for students to share information about their innovation ecosystem on campus. I'm talking a navigation tool of sorts that allows students from every corner of the country to learn about what effective strategies universities have developed to enhance resources for students interested in exploring the technology and entrepreneurship realms. No, this isn't a dream. This website exists, and it goes by the name of "University Innovation."

The wiki was initially created by the University Innovation Fellows, an elite group of 45 students that are a part of a national movement to catalyze innovation on campus. But they've now opened up the wiki for the whole world to enjoy as a "resource to all student stakeholders in the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship spheres in higher education."

Several pharmaceutical companies such as Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), Merck (NYSE: MRK) , and Bayer (NYSE: have been taking steps to infuse their pipelines with new drug drugs by developing incubators  to identify life science innovations that fit in with their longterm goals. Now Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG)  is collaborating with a biotech incubator backed by early stage life science and healthcare investor Versant Ventures, according to a company statement.

Many of today’s biotech companies don’t aspire to be companies at all. They’re more like temporary “virtual” projects, with skeleton crews of contractors who come together for a spell and then move on to the next thing. As others have observed, it’s much like what actors, directors and producers do to make movies in Hollywood.

That’s not how the enduring, independent biotech companies do it. These companies aspire to be bigger than any one individual, or any one product bound to lose patent protection in a few years. That means they need to do an old-fashioned thing—hire lots of smart people, give them good salaries and benefits, and challenge them to accomplish big things. Otherwise, there’s no way to carry out a long-term, lofty mission of creating valuable new products for patients.

A new business accelerator in Howard County has launched a crowdfunding campaign to get off the ground.

Conscious Venture Lab in Columbia is looking to raise $50,000 through the crowdfunding website Indiegogo, which allows users to set fundraising goals and generate donations from online supporters. The Howard County Economic Development Authority and the Maryland Center for Entrepreneurship, part of the development authority, will match the money Conscious Venture Lab raises through its crowdfunding campaign.

The head of Maryland’s university system on Wednesday said higher education needs to embrace disruptive technologies such as massive online courses in an effort to serve more students and contain costs.

“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,” William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council annual meeting. “We have the interests of the nation at stake.”

With the cost of drug development hitting the $5 billion mark and 94 percent of drugs failing at some point in clinical development, pharmaceutical companies have been turning to new tools to help clinical trial design: computers and robots.

A couple of Wall Street Journal articles highlight this trend.

One notes that in June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency endorsed a simulator from the Critical Path Institute to help develop Alzheimer’s disease treatments. Additional simulators are in the works for tuberculosis, Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

The equity culture among young technology companies is almost universal. When implemented properly, broad employee ownership within a company can:

• Align the risk and reward of employees betting on an unproven company.
• Reward long-term value creation and thinking by employees.
• Encourage employees to think about the company’s holistic success.

The Symposium is the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund premier event that delivers comprehensive scientific talks, poster presentations, Ethics discussions and networking time, enabling cell therapy basic research and technologies from the lab to pre-clinical and to commercialization.

With a powerful line-up of speakers and many opportunities for you to present your work in concurrent or poster presentations, the Symposium will follow the format and style of previous meetings with an additional networking time and an intimate environment.

Keynote Address: The John L. Kellermann, III Memorial Lecture

Keynote Speaker:

Rita Perlingeiro, Ph.D.
Associate Professor & Lillehei Endowed Scholar
Lillehei Heart Institute University of Minnesota

The pharmaceutical industry needs better scientific models for testing drugs before they get to the proving ground of human clinical trials. Current lab dish models and animal testing models are time-consuming, expensive and chronically unable to predict which drugs are going to work in clinical trials. The industry is crying out for new modes of early testing that can shorten the timelines, reduce the cost and increase the odds of success in clinical trials.

Both lab dish models and animal models have run into serious limitations. Cell culture (“in vitro”) assays offer some real advantages. Many can provide true, “human” answers to fairly simple questions. But they lack complexity.

Millennial Media, WeddingWire and RainKing Solutions led the list of Maryland companies making the 2013 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, a prestigious technology awards program in United States and Canada. Among Maryland’s eight repeat companies, United Therapeutics Corporation is on the list for the 13th straight year and Zenoss is on the list for the third straight year.

Overall, there were 15 Maryland companies on the list, up from 12 in 2012. Maryland’s 15 companies were the eighth most among states/provinces. California far outpaced other states with 166 companies, with Massachusetts, Ontario, New York, Washington and Pennsylvania following. Virginia had 16 companies on the list for the seventh most among states/provinces.

QIAGEN (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt, Prime Standard: QIA) today announced an agreement with Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) 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.

QIAGEN and Lilly are long-standing partners in personalized healthcare. QIAGEN's therascreen(R) KRAS RGQ PCR Kit has been widely adopted by laboratories since its July 2012 approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a companion diagnostic. The therascreen KRAS Test detects gene mutations in metastatic colorectal cancer patients, indicating which ones will benefit from Erbitux. In September 2011, QIAGEN and Lilly partnered to develop a companion diagnostic that evaluates the Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) gene, which plays a role in some blood cancers. The test is paired with a Lilly compound to guide use of the proposed drug, currently in clinical trials.

For budding startups, accumulating funding is necessary — but difficult. Crowdfunding can be a viable alternative for entrepreneurs.

That was one key takeaway for the few hundred part-time and aspiring entrepreneurs gathered at the Entrepreneurs Inspiring Entrepreneurs Expo at the BWI Marriott Monday who caught the “Sourcing the Crowd” panel discussion.

Paul Silber had some unexpected advice from a venture capitalist for the entrepreneurs who crowded a conference room at the BWI Airport Marriott Monday hoping to find out how to land some VC cash.

Silber’s suggestion: tap all other sources first, like friends and family and angel investors, before looking to a venture capital firm for funding.

We’ve all done it. You throw your clothes in a bag and head to the airport. Sixteen hours later, you’re in a country where the customs, dress, language and food are very different from home.  As you leave the airport, you stop at an ATM, and within seconds have enough local currency for a taxi and a few meals. All you needed was an ATM card and some money in the bank. 

In fact, your trip is going really well until you slip on some ice and fall down a flight of stairs. As you tumble to the bottom and see your femur bone break through the skin, you wonder whether you will be awake to tell the hospital about your allergy to local anesthetics and your heart disease, which has left you with an abnormal heart rhythm.

Much has been written about the pharmaceutical industry’s R&D-productivity challenge during the past decade: the decline in new-drug approvals has raised discovery and development costs just as companies struggle to find new drugs to replace blockbusters that have lost (or will soon lose) their exclusivity. Yet by one important measure, the output of the pharmaceutical R&D process has accelerated significantly: the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 39 new drugs in 2012—the highest level in a decade.

GlaxoSmithKline and Theravance's new inhaled lung drug Relvar has been approved in Europe to treat both asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), confirming an endorsement from regulators in September.

The medicine, which is inhaled through a palm-sized device called Ellipta, consists of a corticosteroid to reduce inflammation and a novel long-acting beta-agonist (LABA), which is designed to open the airways.

QIAGEN (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt, Prime Standard: QIA) today announced an agreement with Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) 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.

QIAGEN and Lilly are long-standing partners in personalized healthcare. QIAGEN’s therascreen® KRAS RGQ PCR Kit has been widely adopted by laboratories since its July 2012 approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a companion diagnostic. The therascreen KRAS Test detects gene mutations in metastatic colorectal cancer patients, indicating which ones will benefit from Erbitux. In September 2011, QIAGEN and Lilly partnered to develop a companion diagnostic that evaluates the Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) gene, which plays a role in some blood cancers. The test is paired with a Lilly compound to guide use of the proposed drug, currently in clinical trials.

We’ve heard a lot this year about the IPO boom for biotech companies. Even after a few high-profile blowups (Ariad, Sarepta), the public biotech stock indexes are still outperforming the Nasdaq Composite Index and S&P 500. Some biotechs have been acquired for megabucks (Onyx, ViroPharma). We’ve heard about another biotech bubble in the making.

AstraZeneca (AZ) has strengthened its research team by appointing leading academic Dr Yong-Jun Liu as head of research at its MedImmune subsidiary.

AZ has made of series of pipeline-boosting acquisitions in the past year, but the appointment of Dr Liu is a move to strengthen its existing R&D operations.

Dr Liu joins the company after an extensive career in academia, which most recently saw him serve as VP and chief scientific officer at the Baylor Research Institute and director of the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research.

A Cambridge company developing new drugs focused around DNA damage and genetically defined cancers has attracted investment from another pharma giant, Pfizer, in its latest funding round, a £20 million Series B.

Pfizer Venture Investments was the only new investor in Mission Therapeutics’ Series B round, which was led by existing investor Sofinnova Partners and also included Imperial Innovations, SR One and Roche Venture Fund, which means it now has three major pharmaceutical companies backing it – SR One is GlaxoSmithKline’s corporate healthcare VC fund.

Apply Now to be a Presenting Company at Bio€quity Europe 2014

Now celebrating its 15th meeting, Bio€quity Europe is the premier industry event for financial dealmakers looking for investor-validated life science companies positioning themselves to attract capital and for pharma licensing professionals to assess top biotech prospects. Bio€quity Europe has showcased more than 600 leading European companies to thousands of investment and pharma business development professionals. Delegates from over 20 nations attended Bio€quity Europe last year.

Present Your Story to the Financial Community

Each Presenting Company provides a thorough 25-minute overview to fund managers, venture capitalists and pharma business development and licensing professionals.

Special "Next Wave" sessions feature young innovator companies and consist of eight-minute presentations on the company, technology and programs. In addition, the turf-neutral setting provides unique access to a cross-section of sellside analysts, investment bankers, and business development professionals from top-tier pharmaceutical and biotech companies in a single location.

Special events and private meeting space allow Presenting Companies, "Next Wave" presenters and Sponsors to network and conduct one-on-one meetings with the delegates throughout the two-day event.

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Last week, the nation’s leading heart organizations released a sweeping new set of guidelines for lowering cholesterol, along with an online calculator meant to help doctors assess risks and treatment options. But, in a major embarrassment to the health groups, the calculator appears to greatly overestimate risk, so much so that it could mistakenly suggest that millions more people are candidates for statin drugs.

The apparent problem prompted one leading cardiologist, a past president of the American College of Cardiology, to call on Sunday for a halt to the implementation of the new guidelines.

A patient with abdominal pain dies from a ruptured appendix after a doctor fails to do a complete physical exam. A biopsy comes back positive for prostate cancer, but no one follows up when the lab result gets misplaced. A child’s fever and rash are diagnosed as a viral illness, but they turn out to be a much more serious case of bacterial meningitis.

Such devastating errors lead to permanent damage or death for as many as 160,000 patients each year, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Not only are diagnostic problems more common than other medical mistakes—and more likely to harm patients—but they’re also the leading cause of malpractice claims, accounting for 35% of nearly $39 billion in payouts in the U.S. from 1986 to 2010, measured in 2011 dollars, according to Johns Hopkins.