Bioscience Research & Technology Review Day is a special event that features research talks, presentations, mini-symposia, and demonstrations by university scientists. The program provides a unique opportunity for executives and professionals in industry and government to:

• Discover the most recent advances in bioscience and biotechnology at the University of Maryland 
• Promote the potential for academic-industry-government collaboration 
• Meet University scientists and interact with graduate student researchers 
• Network with colleagues who share an interest in the promotion of bioscience and the bioscience industry 
• Recruit employees and investigate job opportunities

Noble Life Sciences, a provider of preclinical research services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, announced that its animal facility was awarded full accreditation by the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC International). AAALAC assessment and accreditation programs are designed to recognize organizations that demonstrate excellence in animal care and use.

Organizations volunteer to participate in AAALAC's program in addition to complying with local, state and federal laws that regulate use of animals in research. Accreditation was awarded following submission of a detailed program description and an in-depth review of the program and facility during an on-site visit by AAALAC representatives. In addition, Noble is currently licensed by the United States Department Of Agriculture (USDA) and meets the assurance requirements of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW).

WellDoc(R), developers of BlueStar(TM), the first mobile prescription therapy for type 2 diabetes, today announced it will present the initial results of its hypoglycemia prediction model at the 2013 Diabetes Technology Society Meeting. The model has demonstrated the ability to predict hypoglycemia (a dangerously low blood sugar level) in patients with type 2 diabetes. By using seven days of spot blood glucose monitoring data, with about one blood glucose test per day, the WellDoc prediction model can alert for hypoglycemic events that are likely to occur within the next 24 hours. The methodology for the research will be presented during the scientific poster session at the Diabetes Technology Meeting in San Francisco on October 31.

Hypoglycemia is one of the most dangerous, costly, and difficult diabetes complications to manage. A recent study(1) of 2.4 million type 2 diabetes patients found that hypoglycemia was especially common in patients treated with insulin or sulfonylureas with costs for a hypoglycemia related hospital event averaging $10,362, regardless of a patient's drug regimen. A 2005 study(2) further reported that patients who had experienced hypoglycemia had 77 percent more disability days per year.

Online health information company WebMD has snapped up Avado, a startup that develops cloud-based software to let physicians and patients interact.

The companies declined to disclose financial information, but said Avado’s technology will be integrated under the WebMD brand and that the founders will join the company to continue developing the technology and business relationships.

For $99, genetic testing startup 23andMe will analyze your DNA, telling you how to live smarter and longer--and what disease might kill you. But there's another inner frontier to explore in personalized medicine: the bacteria in your gut.

For $89, Ubiome, a startup founded by Jessica Richman--a doctoral candidate at Oxford who did stints at Google and McKinsey after graduating from Stanford in 2009--will send you a kit that harvests the organisms that live inside your body. For additional fees, you can also gather bacteria from your mouth, nose, skin, and genitalia.

The typical university research park is 119 acres (just over 48 hectares), has seven buildings open and is located in a suburban jurisdiction with a population of 500,000 or less.

But urban-style live-work-play campuses are where they’re going, typified by Centennial Campus (affiliated with North Carolina State University), Mission Bay (affiliated with the University of California San Francisco) and the Fitzsimons Life Science District in Colorado (affiliated with the University of Colorado’s academic medical center).

Site Selection for Life Sciences Companies,” a report released this month by business intelligence firm Venture Valuation and KPMG, uses an agglomeration of other reports and proprietary data to analyze key decision factors relevant to the leading life sciences clusters in France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK.

Why those territories? The authors say those countries are often preferred by foreign companies seeking European or global headquarters. But depending on which factors are emphasized and how they’re weighted, any of the six might stand above the rest.

GrayBug, LLC, a company that focuses on the development of innovative injectable drug delivery systems to more effectively treat eye diseases, has announced the appointment of Michael O'Rourke as President & CEO, as well as Board Member.

"I am excited to take on this leadership role at this pivotal point in GrayBug's development," said Mr. O'Rourke. "GrayBug has developed a unique approach to offer superior treatment options to patients through proprietary sustained release drug platforms. I look forward to working with the team at GrayBug to advance our lead product for the treatment of neovascular eye diseases including wet age-related macular degeneration (wet-AMD)."

To generate its list of the top 10 U.S. regions in which to secure a biotech job, GEN adopted a straightforward methodology. It identified the regions most frequently cited in biotechnology and pharmaceutical job listings. Over the past month, GEN collected data by scrutinizing five employment websites—LinkedIn, BioSpace, Medzilla, Indeed, and Monster.

The locales with the most biopharma-related jobs include the regular suspects—San Francisco and Boston—and also up and comers like the New York metropolitan area, which has grown steadily over the last few years.

BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) (NYSE:BDX), a leading global medical technology company, together with Direct Relief and the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), today launched BD Helping Build Healthy CommunitiesSM, a four-year initiative that will expand access and improve care for underserved and vulnerable populations in the U.S. The initiative, first announced earlier this year with a founding pledge at the Clinton Health Matters Initiative, includes a BD commitment of approximately $5 million in cash and product to clinics and community health centers (CCHCs) employing innovative models of care, along with strategic support from all

This is the start of the third year teaching teams of scientists (professors and their graduate students) in the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps). This month we've crossed ~300 teams in the first two years through the program.

I-Corps is the accelerator that helps scientists bridge the commercialization gap between their research in their labs and wide-scale commercial adoption and use.

During his nine years working in the phar­ma­ceu­tical industry, Michael Pol­lastri learned to pro­tect his research and data with extreme cau­tion. “In the drug industry, every­thing is super secret,” said Pol­lastri, now an asso­ciate pro­fessor of chem­istry and chem­ical biology at North­eastern. “It’s the culture.”

But Pol­lastri said this secrecy model doesn’t work when it comes to curing infec­tious dis­eases such as African sleeping sick­ness and Chagas dis­ease, which affect the poorest mem­bers of the global com­mu­nity but are largely “neglected” by the industry. What’s more, “there’s not enough money going around to spend time on projects in which no one is sharing infor­ma­tion,” Pol­lastri said.

Gaithersburg-based GlycoMimetics Inc. set the terms for its upcoming IPO on Monday, planning to sell 4 million shares at between $14 and $16 apiece.

The biotech expects to list on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GLYC. It would be the third in an already active stretch for Maryland life sciences IPOs, following Intrexon Corp. and MacroGenics Inc. to the public markets.

DreamIt Health is a health tech accelerator that selects up to ten startups from around the world to take up residence in Baltimore, MD and achieve in four months what might otherwise take years. Attend the information session on November 6 to learn how you can be a part of the program that has launched 130 IT companies.

Nov 13, 2013 06:00pm

Join the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs and Women in Bio as we host a panel of life science leaders who will share insights from their experience commercializing technology. The discussion facilitated by Lynn Johnson Langer, PhD, MBA, Director, Enterprise & Regulatory Science Programs, Johns Hopkins University will cover:

• licensing strategies for patents;
• marketing strategies;
• fee structure and standards of care;
• regulatory challenges;
• stories of success and failure.

With mHealth becoming the norm instead of the exception, a panel at Partners HealthCare's 10th Annual Connected Health Symposium last week concluded that EHR vendors will have to find a way to modify their products to focus on data that the patient and his or her care team want, or they'll become obsolete.

Important information for a patient's care actually exists outside the electronic medical record, panelists said.

Cybersecurity companies in Montgomery County will be eligible for tax credits starting next year as part of the county’s mission to become a national hub for companies that sell cybersecurity products to the private sector.

The Washington region is emerging as a hotbed for the cybersecurity industry, in part because of its proximity to federal agencies, the military and government contractors.

The National Institutes of Health aims to boost healthcare technology and science through 15 Institutional Clinical and Translational Science Awards. Total amount of the awards is $79 million in 2013.

The awards will be used to help translate basic discoveries into new treatments that tangibly improve human health requires innovative collaborations and resources, as well as a diverse, highly-trained workforce,” NIH officials said in announcing the awards on Oct. 22.

Crowdfunding moved closer to becoming a reality for small businesses Wednesday morning when the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed rules that will govern how shares in small companies are sold through Internet intermediaries.

The SEC took only 50 minutes to unanimously approve the proposed rules, which were issued more than 560 days after the JOBS Act, the law that legalized the use of crowdfunding for equity investments, was signed by President Barack Obama.

Towson University is getting more serious about entrepreneurship on campus, and Frank Bonsal III will play a big role in that new focus.

Bonsal has served as interim director for TowsonGlobal, the university's business incubator, since June. Earlier this month, he became the university's first director of entreprene

Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) has launched shortest ever insulin syringe needle for the first time in Hyderabad. The needle is 25 per cent shorter than the contemporary needles available in the market.

BD, a leading global medical technology company, has launched BD Glide 6mm needle, the smallest ever insulin syringe needle developed with TBL technology for the first time in India. The needle has been designed to improve patient comfort. Compared to present needle size, 80 per cent patients have preferred this new needle.

For six years, green energy business Clean Currents made the Rockville Innovation Center above the downtown Rockville library its home.

The company enjoyed reduced costs for spaces and certain services than it would have had in the general private market. It had access to shared conference rooms, administrative help, a kitchen and copy machine, all pretty much financed by Montgomery County.

Venture capitalists invested $1.12 billion to U.S. mobile companies in last quarter, making it the biggest venture capital financing quarter in history for this sector.

Q3 also had the highest number of mobile deals ever in a quarter, and it was the first time mobile VC deal share eclipsed the healthcare sector, according to a study by CB Insights. 

I think few things could be more rewarding than investing in a company that develops a cure or effective treatment for any of the hundreds of conditions that affect millions of people with no effective treatment. But finding the right company can be fraught with risk. That’s one reason why angel and venture investors have been allocating funds to later stage companies that carry less risk.

Luke Timmerman of Xconomy and David Sable, the portfolio manager for the Special Situations Funds, each compiled a handy list of red flags that should make prospective investors in startup life science companies pause. Here are six of them.

Between October 1 and 17, the federal government ceased all nonessential operations because of a partisan stalemate over Obamacare. Although it is premature to declare this the greatest example of misgovernance in modern U.S. Congressional history, this impasse ranks highly.

One casualty of the showdown was any consideration of changes to lessen the impact of the across-the-board sequestration cuts that began on March 1. The cuts have caused economic and other distress across the nation, including serious impacts within the health care sector. Nearly eight months into sequestration, we can move beyond predictions and begin to quantify these effects.

Venture capital deals in the Greater Baltimore area jumped in the third quarter, as investors poured money into medical device makers, biotech firms and one of the region’s largest money managers.

VC firms invested $445.7 million in 53 companies in the Baltimore-Washington area in the three months ended Sept. 30. That was up from $420 million invested in 30 companies in the second quarter and the highest level in almost six years, according to the MoneyTree report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. The report uses data from Thomson Reuters.

Every country, every government, every population is a participant in a global trial and error. Each one faces different circumstances and, therefore, approaches healthcare differently.  But, as world health leaders see it, everyone can learn from others' struggles and successes to improve and simplify their respective strategies. Health information technology is at the core.

Finding the global lessons from local healthcare strategies facilitates progress toward Universal Health Coverage, or UHC, a public health concept championed notably by the World Health Organization and it’s director, Margaret Chan. According to Najeeb Al-Shorbaji, director of knowledge, management, and sharing at the WHO, in a statement released to Healthcare IT News, WHO defines UHC as “all people receiving quality health services that meet their needs without exposing them to financial hardship in paying for them.”  

Join BioBuzz and their sponsor Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies along with many others from the local biotech industry at another exciting BioBuzz event on October 30th from 4:30 - 7:00 p.m. in Gaithersburg at Growlers in Old Towne Gaithersburg!

Click the link to learn how to win a FujiFilm Camera!

The economy works like a simple machine. But many people don't understand it— or they don't agree on how it works — and this has led to a lot of needless economic suffering. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to share my simple but practical economic template. Though it's unconventional, it has helped me to anticipate and sidestep the global financial crisis, and has worked well for me for over 30 years.

The Johns Hopkins University regained a five-year, $70 million federal grant designed to change how researchers pursue drug development and other medical treatments, but the University of Maryland, Baltimore lost its first bid for a similar grant, the National Institutes of Health said Tuesday.

The award pleased Hopkins officials, who had been forced to tweak their proposal for the grant after their application wasn't renewed in 2012. The university received $80 million through the program, which focuses on what is known as "translational" research, from 2007 through 2011.

Biotechnology startups have stampeded to the public markets this year, but their colleagues in the medical device field have sat quietly on the sidelines.

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News So far this year, 27 venture-backed biopharmaceutical companies have gone public, compared to just one medical device company, according to industry tracker Dow Jones VentureSource.

Go Neighborhood-Hopping in Baltimore

The city’s once-grungy northern districts have transformed into a thriving area with hip boutiques, destination restaurants, and a homegrown art and nightlife scene.

When WellDoc was founded in 2005, it was one of the first companies that sought 510(k) clearance for its patient and physician facing mobile health DiabetesManager platform. By putting its flagship apps through the discipline of clinical trials that generated positive results, it has helped earn confidence from physicians to prescribe it to their patients. Insurance companies are providing reimbursement for physicians and that has been critical for the company’s growth.

The Baltimore, Maryland-based company’s fundraise last year of about $8.4 million, in an amended Form D filing today, shows that confidence in the company is building. In a phone interview with WellDoc Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer Chris Bergstrom, he said the company continues to be entirely funded by angel investors who are flexing more power as Super Angels. “Each year we have brought on a higher caliber of angel investors. We’re really raising angel money at an institutional investor level.” He added: “It’s a great time and place for institutional investors, but angel investors can provide as much strategic value as institutional investors.”