The latest chapter in Human Genome Sciences’ battle to fend off a hostile takeover bid by British pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline played out in a Rockville courtroom Thursday morning.

A Montgomery County Circuit Court judge shot down an HGS shareholder’s request for a temporary restraining order to invalidate the “poison pill” the Rockville biotech enacted last month to make it a less attractive acquisition target.

Johns Hopkins has had many milestones since it first opened its hospital in Baltimore in 1889. It pioneered the acceptance of women to medical school and the use of rubber gloves in surgery, discovered restriction enzymes and the brain’s natural opiates, birthed multiple medical specialties including neurosurgery and pediatrics, and developed life-saving procedures such as renal dialysis, CPR, and the “blue baby” operation that paved the way for modern heart surgery. May marked another major milestone for the nation’s best hospital for 21 years in a row: the opening of its brand new high-tech clinic.

We had the opportunity to sit down with The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System’s President, Ronald R. Peterson, to discuss their new clinical building. Peterson has an impressive and storied background at Johns Hopkins, which is why he’s ideally positioned to talk about the milestone.

Private Sector Entrepreneur-in-Residence Program in partnership with the NIH/OTT Monday, June 11, 12:00 pm to 12:30pm ET

Presenters: Richard Bendis Founding President and CEO Innovation America and Mark L. Rohrbaugh, Ph.D., J.D. Director Office of Technology Transfer National Institutes of Health Department of Health and Human Services

BioHealth Innovation, Inc.'s (BHI) Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) program is designed to be an active partner with research institutions to source, fund, and grow high-potential, early-stage products through project-focused companies. The entrepreneurs in the program support the formation of new companies based upon innovative discoveries in the areas of drugs, vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical devices from the intramural research programs at the NIH and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as well as from universities and businesses. The EIR will find, evaluate, and support the development of new start-up companies based upon technology license agreements from technology transfer offices or equivalent units within the research institutions.

If you are an emerging advanced technology, life sciences or professional services company or a foreign business looking for a soft landing in the U.S. market, the Business Innovation Network of Montgomery County, Maryland has the perfect place for you.  The Innovation Network business incubators are located throughout Montgomery County adjacent to Washington, D.C.  with its talented workforce and strategic access to the federal and commercial marketplace, all in a sophisticated, diverse community. The Network was founded by the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development in 1999 with the opening of the Shady Grove Innovation Center and specializes in helping young companies realize their potential.  Since its inception the Business Innovation Network has worked with over 250 teams of entrepreneurs and graduated about 100 companies. Over the last 10 years the Network has grown to five business incubation centers that offer the critical combination of highly flexible, modern office and lab space and business support services. 

United States Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) has introduced legislation that will revive the Therapeutic Discovery Project Tax Credit, which funneled $1 billion in tax breaks and grants to biotech companies across America in 2010. The program impacted about 3,000 small US companies that year. “Biotech labs employ dedicated scientists and researchers, whose discoveries could lead to a ground-breaking cures for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or HIV/AIDS,” Menendez said in a statement released last week. “Manufacturing these breakthrough therapies is already creating thousands of high-paying jobs, and extending this critical tax credit will not only create more good jobs here in America, but keep us at the forefront of life-saving innovation.”

Universities have historically been on the front lines of translating innovative research into novel medicines and technologies useful to patients. With that in mind, the 2012 BIO International Convention will look to highlight the role of academia in the advancement of the biotechnology field through the BIO Academic Park and the Translational Research Forum. Hosted by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), this year's global event for biotechnology will take place June 18-21, 2012 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston, MA.

"The BIO Academic Park will give Convention attendees the opportunity to connect and start conversations that could lead to partnerships, and most importantly, establish a tighter link between academic, industry representatives and investors," said Dr. Abigail Barrow, Founding Director of the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center and Program Co-Chair of the 2012 BIO International Convention.

Bernard T. “Bernie” Ferrari, an accomplished corporate strategist and management consultant to Fortune 50 companies, has been named the next dean of The Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School.

Ferrari, whose appointment is effective July 1, is the second dean to lead the Carey Business School since it was established in 2007. He succeeds Yash P. Gupta who stepped down last June.

Eli Lilly is participating in a new investment fund which will focus primarily on early-stage drug development opportunities in Canada as a whole and Quebec in particular.

The fund, which will be operated by investment investment group TVM Capital, will have an initial size of $150 million. As well as Lilly, other backers include Teralys Capital (which is putting in $65 million), BDC Venture Capital, Fondaction and Advantus Capital Management.

MedImmune in Cambridge UK is reaching out to academics and biotech companies in a bid to improve the industry’s poor neuroscience track record.

Together with AstraZeneca in Boston, Massachusetts, MedImmune – the global biologics unit of AstraZeneca – is setting up a collaborative unit at its Granta Park HQ with the aim of producing drugs to treat neurodegenerative conditions, long term pain and neuropsychiatric conditions.

Iain Chessell, vice-president R & D Neuroscience said: “There have been no new approvals of completely novel mechanisms for treating pain for at least a decade – if not more – and current treatment only works in a third to half of patients.

Johns Hopkins researchers say it’s going to be a hard sell to get physicians to stop screening healthy men routinely for prostate cancer with PSA testing, despite recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) that the cancer screening does more harm than good.

Patient expectations, malpractice fears cited The researchers surveyed physicians, 74.4% of whom said patients expect PSA testing.

Thursday, June 14, 2012 from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM (ET)
Rockville, MD

A free and open forum to:

• Discuss InvestMaryland implementation progress and investment strategy
• Detail state venture funding resources to seed and early-stage companies
• Address questions from the business community

The pharmaceutical industry rightly calls the stage in drug development between basic research and clinical trials the “Valley of Death.” This is when a potential treatment that’s worked in mice, monkeys, and the like catapults to a phase 1 clinical trial to assess safety. It’s rare.

Francis Collins, MD, PhD, director of the National Institutes of Health, calls this period “where projects go to die.” The reason: $.

Matthew Herper writes in Forbes that the cost of developing a new drug is $4-11 billion, not the $1 billion that Pharma often claims. Yet even that $1 billion is unimaginable, especially when you put a face on a rare disease and witness what the family goes through to leap to phase 1.

Thousands of companies from around the world and all industry segments will be at BIO, ready to build strategic partnerships. Attend the Global Event for Biotechnology and you will reap the benefits of an efficient four days! You will find connections, partnering and innovation everywhere at BIO. 15,000+ leaders from more than 65 countries come to this global gathering. We invite you to join!

BIO covers the wide spectrum of life science innovations and application areas. Drug discovery, biomanufacturing, genomics, biofuels, nanotechnology, and cell therapy are just a few of the industries represented at the BIO International Convention.

We have a free service, myBIO Personal Event Planner - search using keywords to find what interests you at BIO.

The key elements of the event are education,networking, BIO Business Forum partnering and the 1,800 companies showcasing the latest technologies, products and services in the BIO Exhibition. See the Schedule of Events.

It's been almost a decade since the Human Genome Project was completed, yet despite the best efforts of thousands of scientists around the world, hopes for cures for a wide range of diseases remain unfulfilled.

Last fall, a remarkable group of leaders came together to find new ways of overcoming the barriers that have prevented more progress in medical research. A report from the Milken Institute, released today, Accelerating Innovation in the Bioscience Revolution, recaps the discussions from that gathering – the 2011 Milken Institute Lake Tahoe Retreat.

BIO International Convention organizers are hoping for the usual surge in attendance provided by the Boston biotech community at the event scheduled for June 18-21 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. While it may not reach the 22,000 level achieved at the last Boston BIO in 2007, it should surpass the 15,600 who came to last year's event in Washington, D.C. Exhibitors will occupy more than 215,000 sq. ft of exhibit space.

Attendance for the event has been off its historic highs since the Atlanta event in 2009 which drew about 14,000. Organizers attribute the drop that year to the H1N1 influenza epidemic which surfaced a few weeks before the convention and to the economic downturn. Attendance has been slowly recovering since 2009.

Pharma corporate venture was back in the biotech news today with the release of Burrill & Company’s June 2012 report.  An interesting article by Vinay Singh evaluated the impact of Pharma corporate venture capital (CVC) investing, and the key takeaway is that CVC-backed companies have a higher rate of overall success than those without their involvement.

While a similar takeway has been published before by Windhover’s StartUp about a year ago, these data suggests a fairly robust effect from a large dataset.  The analysis includes 2907 therapeutics companies that raised venture capital dollars between 2000-2010 across 5100 rounds of financing.  Corporate VCs were investors about 10% of companies, and this pool of 286 companies had what appears to be a markedly higher hit rate: a ~60% higher rate of licensing deals, M&As and IPOs. 

Laurie Boyer, president of the Maryland Economic Development Association, is the new executive director of Rockville Economic Development Inc.

Boyer has more than 15 years of government and economic development experience, according to a statement from REDI.

She served more than five years as director of the Frederick County Office of Economic Development and earned her certified economic developer designation from the International Economic Development Council in 2006.

The State of Maryland's Pulse on the Bio Industry.

Only a few companies have ever been successful enough to call themselves Big Biotechs. If boards and shareholders lack vision and guts, we’ll look back in few years and wonder why the Big Biotechs went extinct.

The group of Big Biotechs includes companies like Amgen, Gilead Sciences, Biogen Idec, and Celgene. They grew from scrappy venture-backed startups with a dream into big, independent, profitable, diversified enterprises. They have enduring ability to create new jobs and new medicines. They are like ballasts in a stormy industry.

Following on the heels of two hospitals, the University of Notre Dame has become the first university to strike a collaboration with Cleveland Clinic aimed at commercializing medical innovations from its faculty and researchers.

Through the collaboration, Cleveland Clinic Innovations will essentially do for Notre Dame what it does for the Clinic — help turn employee ideas into marketable products that generate financial returns for the organization.

Osiris Therapeutics Inc. in Columbia has become the world’s first company to receive market approval for a manufactured stem cell product.

Health Canada, the country’s department responsible for overseeing pharmaceuticals, approved for commercial sale Osiris’ Prochymal, which uses stem cells from healthy donors to treat a fatal children’s disease.

“While today marks the first approval of a stem cell drug, now that the door has been opened, it will surely not be the last,” Osiris CEO C. Randal Mills said.

Rockville-based Emergent BioSolutions Inc. , which makes the only vaccine licensed by the Food and Drug Administration to protect against anthrax infection, has received FDA approval for a new, shorter-dosing schedule.

The new, supplemental biologics license application, follows trials to determine if the company's BioThrax vaccine would be effective with as few as three doses over six months.

United Therapeutics, which has has greatly expanded their downtown Silver Spring presence as of late, is reportedly set to purchase from the county the parcel located at the corner of Colesville Rd. and Spring Street. The parking garage that current occupies this space abuts an existing UT building, and has been closed for some time due to safety issues. (Surprisingly, it has its own Yelp page. Who uses their limited time on Earth to rate a public parking garage?)

I'm a big fan of the existing United Therapeutics buildings, what with their skybridge and giant external TV's and all. I also like the touch of the ground lights representing individual elements from the periodic table. The planning and construction of the new building could take five years (or more, because construction delays tend to happen around here), so we won't be seeing it anytime soon. Hopefully they will choose to incorporate some street-level retail into their design.

Human Genome Sciences Inc, which has rejected a hostile $13-per-share offer from GlaxoSmithKline, has adopted a short-term stockholder rights plan to fend off such unwanted attention.

Rockville-based Human Genome (NASDAQ: HGSI) said in a statement announcing the plan that it had declared a dividend of one share purchase right for each share of the company's common stock held of record at the close of business on May 29.

When Adam Steele worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), he and two other colleagues invented a technology that Steele believed had commercial potential. But Steele, a physicist, didn’t have a business background. He said he had no idea how to take the technology out of the lab and build a company around it. His colleagues recommend he apply for the JHU Carey Business School INNoVATE program. He did so, and was soon accepted into the program’s Class of 2011.

Now he and fellow INNoVATE student Brenton Knuffman, who is one of the technology’s inventors, are quickly becoming a success story for the program. The duo, who both currently work for the University of Maryland NanoCenter, recently won first-place – and $10,000 – in the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute’s 2012 Business Plan Competition in the Graduate Student, Faculty and Researchers Category.

“You do a really good job with complex trials.”

We’re lucky to say that we’ve heard this from several clients over the years. But, while we’re glad for the recognition, it made us ask ourselves a key question. What is it that makes a trial complex?

For pharmaceuticals, trials can be relatively simple. A company makes the drug, the drug is administered to the trial patients and the effects are monitored. There are very few moving parts involved. Medical devices, which can be complex machines in and of themselves, will require training and retraining of all parties that are involved with implementation and monitoring of the device– there are numerous moving parts and numerous opportunities to fall out of FDA compliance.

Human Genome Sciences, Inc.oday announced that its Board of Directors, after careful review and consideration with the assistance of the Company's management and financial and legal advisors, has unanimously determined that the unsolicited tender offer from GlaxoSmithKline ("GSK") to acquire all outstanding common shares of HGS for $13.00 per share in cash (the "Offer") is inadequate, undervalues the Company and is not in the best interests of HGS and its stockholders.

Accordingly, the Board recommends that stockholders reject GSK's tender offer and not tender any of their shares to GSK. The basis for the Board's decision is set forth in the Schedule 14D-9 being filed by HGS today with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), which will also be mailed shortly to stockholders.

Capital ConnectionTM, one of the nation’s most respected industry conferences, brings together high-growth and innovative technology companies from some of the most noted technology sectors and couples them with top business resources, including one of the largest concentrations of private financing sources of venture and private equity investors in the country.  The event is presented by the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association (MAVA) and will be held on May 23-24 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.

More than 800 attendees from throughout the United States attend each year to connect with other established companies and aspiring entrepreneurs and peers who share a common focus on building, investing, or serving some of the country’s most promising companies. For 25 years, Capital Connection and now TechBUZZ, have brought together a high-powered cross section of the nation’s technology-based, high-growth ecosystem.  Attendees include senior players from across the industry – investors across the continuum of capital, professional advisors, technology product and service firms, and, at the center of it all, innovative entrepreneurs.  

The first symposium on "the notion of entrepreneurship" by the newly formed University of Maryland (UM) Ventures was a breakthrough event for technology collaboration between the Baltimore and College Park campuses, said Jay A. Perman, MD, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB).

UM Ventures is a joint effort among the technology transfer offices at the two campuses and the entrepreneurial business services programs at College Park, and is a core initiative of the new collaboration called MPowering the State.

If you raised seed capital from a DC VC last quarter you are part of an exclusive club.  Only 3 firms raised seed capital from DC firms last quarter from VCs headquartered in our region and 2 of those companies got money from Virginia’s CIT. CIT is a state-sponsored fund chartered to make early stage investments and doesn’t represent the standard risk profile of a traditional VC.

John Backus and the New Atlantic Venture team were the only greed-based, non-state-sponsored fund laying down startup seed-stage bets last quarter with two investments of $3.2M each in American Honors College and Quad Learning Inc.

On any given weekend, there are countless community events throughout the Greater Washington region, many in ethnically diverse immigrant communities.  A Korean church service, an Indian American business conference, a Chinese choral concert and an Iranian Nowruz celebration, whether held in Maryland or Virginia, all draw crowds from the Region’s many counties and cities on both sides of the Potomac River.  These “new communities,” as we are often called, frequently travel across county and state lines to be connected with our own communities to worship, to learn, and to have a good time.  These activities and events add much vitality to local living.

The Washington Metropolitan area is one of the most transient metropolises in the country, with transplants and migrants defining and redefining much of the local demographic landscape.  In fact, in Montgomery County, where I live and work, one in three residents are from other countries and three out of four are from other states. What attracted many of us from other states or countries to this region was economic and career opportunities and a good quality of life afforded by a metropolitan area.  Immigrants like me have no roots in this country and will pursue opportunities wherever they are.

The Public Policy Institute (PPI), the research arm of The Business Council of New York State, today released an in-depth study on the challenges in attracting and retaining private-sector jobs and companies in New York's lucrative bioscience sector.

Based on interviews with 30 industry experts as well as existing research, Cultivating the Next Generation of Discoveries and Development in New York Bioscience explores the opportunities and barriers facing companies in various stages of development and offers three public policy recommendations to foster public-private partnerships and make New York more competitive with other states:

The Carey Business School, an offshoot of Johns Hopkins, has tended to be the institution’s least glamorous sister. Founded in 2007 (but with origins dating back a century before that) thanks to a $50 million donation from William Polk Carey, the freestanding school is too new to have established itself as an MBA powerhouse; instead of banking on a storied history, the program has opted to make its name through innovative programs. And now they’re revamping that system yet again.

The reorganization, announced this week, will shift the school’s focus to business as it relates to health care and the life sciences. The move seems like a smart one, both because Hopkins is such a medical powerhouse and because more and more business is happening in the health care arena.  “Health care is approaching 20 percent of the national gross domestic product, and it’s a key factor in the costs of any economic model, whether in manufacturing or services,” said the school’s interim Dean Phillip Phan. “Understanding the complexities of the modern health care industry is a crucial skill for any business manager. For those who manage in the health care sector, Johns Hopkins is the place to learn.”

The U.S. regulatory environment strongly impacts innovation and the development of new drugs and biologics. With this in mind, the Achieving Regulatory Approval and Compliance educational track at the 2012 BIO International Convention will tackle the most pressing regulatory issues facing the industry, specifically the reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA V), implementation of the new biosimilars pathway, and efforts to modernize and expedite drug development. Hosted by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), this year's global event for biotechnology will take place June 18-21, 2012 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston, MA.

"Attendees can expect to hear from a distinguished group of speakers from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as well as major biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies," said BIO CEO and President Jim Greenwood. "Sessions will address the steps involved in research and development of healthcare products and how to successfully bring these products to market, all while maintaining rigorous standards for safety, effectiveness, and compliance."