"We lost about nine months in time," said Galen Robotics CEO Bruce Lichorowic.

Image: David Saunders (left) and Bruce Lichorowic are the co-founders of Baltimore-based medical robotics startup Galen Robotics. GALEN ROBOTICS

Richmond-based Phlow Corp. announced Thursday the launch of a coalition that will help ensure that children’s hospitals across the country receive key medications. The Virginia Commonwealth University-affiliated Children’s Hospital of Richmond is one of 11 founding hospital members.

Children’s Hospital Coalition (CHC) aims to provide certainty in availability and access to medicine and address supply chain issues. Citing a 2019 survey of 330 American hospitals — including 29 children’s hospitals — Phlow says that medicine shortages disproportionately and uniquely impact children’s hospitals. The company also says that the pandemic has further exposed the vulnerabilities of the supply chain.

Image: Dr. Eric Edwards, co-founder and CEO of Richmond-based Phlow Corp.

It is with immense gratitude and sincere best wishes that I announce National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) Director Christopher P. Austin, M.D. will be departing NIH. His last day will be April 15, 2021. After nearly a decade of bold leadership as the founding director of NCATS, Chris will become CEO-partner at Flagship Pioneering, a life science platforms company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Image: NCATS Director Christopher P. Austin, M.D.Daniel Soñé Photography, LLC

RICHMOND, Va., March 18, 2021 – Phlow Corp., a U.S.-based, public benefit corporation committed to a bold mission of providing every American with access to affordable, high-quality essential medicines, today joins in announcing the launch of a groundbreaking Children’s Hospital Coalition: Powered by PhlowTM (CHC). This first-in-kind coalition brings together some of the top children’s hospitals across the nation, in collaboration with Phlow, to provide certainty in availability and access for key medicines necessary to sustain life and conquer disease and to address the nation’s broken essential medicines supply chain.

Launching an innovative product or technology takes more than a good idea, and there are many actions startups can take to strengthen their offering and overall chance of success as they develop the latest innovations to bolster health security, including battling COVID-19. Over the last year, the global scientific community has proven critical to our collective ability to combat the pandemic, and BLUE KNIGHT™ offers a new way to build the kinds of partnerships needed to advance potentially life-saving technology during public health emergencies.

In March 2021, the Dutch government celebrates the start of Horizon Europe. Horizon Europe is the new European framework programme for research and innovation. During a series of online events, we will inform you about the possibilities within this large funding programme.

The National Contact Points from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency organise these events.

The series of events starts with an online kick-off event about the importance of Horizon Europe for the Netherlands. This event focusses on the policy aspects of the programme and is in Dutch. Find out more about the kick-off event (in Dutch).

Blacksburg, VA – March 18, 2021 -- The Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center (VTCRC) in partnership with the Virginia Tech Foundation (VTF) has been awarded a grant from the GO Virginia program to fund the evaluation and design of new lab concepts to serve southwest Virginia’s growing life and health sciences industry. The award is part of the Enhanced Capacity Building program that will support Virginia’s Region 2.

“We’re honored to be selected to lead this project. The VTCRC is dedicated to making flexible lab space more accessible for smaller startups as well as some of our high-growth companies. This effort will lead to much-needed resources that will help us grow our biotech industry, recruit new companies, and create valuable jobs for our local economy,” said Brett Malone, Ph.D., CEO of the VTCRC.

Image: https://www.vtcrc.com

As COVID-19 became a growing concern around the world early last year, Lauren Gardner tapped into her research expertise as an infectious disease modeler. Gardner, director of the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, along with her Ph.D. student, were motivated to create a dashboard to track the spread of the novel coronavirus. During a panel Tuesday at this year's virtual South by Southwest conference, she shared how the journey unfolded. 

Image: https://www.cnet.com/

Amalgam Rx, Inc., the leader in connecting healthcare providers and life sciences companies through a SaaS-enabled digital marketplace and product platform, is announcing the appointment of Jennifer Main as chief operating officer (COO) and chief financial officer (CFO). On April 5, 2021, Ms. Main will join Amalgam Rx from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) where she has served as COO, responsible for a wide range of functions, including financial management, information technology, acquisition, human capital, facilities, strategic planning, and enterprise risk management. Prior to that, she held senior executive titles, including that of CFO, in five different public and private organizations over the span of her 25+ year career. 

Visualized: Key Events in the COVID-19 Timeline It’s been a long and eventful year since COVID-19 was officially declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020.

The tangible and intangible costs of COVID-19 have been severe. In this visual COVID-19 timeline, we delve into some significant milestones that have occurred around the world.

LONDON—The Oxford startup behind AstraZeneca PLC’s Covid-19 vaccine has raised $168 million in new funding, which it plans to use to adopt its vaccine technology for the treatment of other diseases.

The move is a step in Vaccitech Ltd.’s preparations for going public as soon as this year, according to people familiar with the plans. The moves were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Image: Royal Navy personnel administer the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine at a center in Bath, England. PHOTO: BEN BIRCHALL/ZUMA PRESS

Here are eight recent health IT vendor contracts and go-lives accelerating digital transformation efforts at healthcare organizations.

1. Highmark Health, the parent company of Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Health Network, is building upon its tech partnership with Google Cloud through a new six-year collaboration with the tech giant's sister company Verily. 

2. The Department of Veterans Affairs, in partnership with T-Mobile, is deploying 5G technologies to the Miami VA Healthcare System.

The 8-year-old vaccine maker focuses on addressing unmet medical needs.

OXFORD, United Kingdom, March 17, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Vaccitech Ltd (“Vaccitech”), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company engaged in the discovery and development of novel immunotherapeutics and vaccines for the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases and cancer, today announces that it has raised $168 million in a Series B financing. This includes $43 million in convertible loan notes previously issued by Vaccitech that converted into Series B shares.

The Series B financing round was led by M&G Investment Management (part of M&G plc), with further participation from new investors including Tencent, Gilead Sciences, Monaco Constitutional Reserve Fund, and Future Planet Capital among others. The Series B financing round was also supported by existing investors, including Oxford Sciences Innovation.

Four Johns Hopkins professors have received grants for their research through the Bisciotti Foundation Translational Fund.

Established with a generous multiyear gift from the Stephen and Renee Bisciotti Foundation, the fund provides $300,000 annually in seed money to advance Johns Hopkins discoveries on a commercial path. Recipients are awarded from $25,000 and $100,000 to conduct their work during a period of up to nine months.

Image: The faculty winners of prizes from the Bisciotti Foundation Translational Fund are (clockwise from top left) Vivek Kumbhari, Xingde Li, Sung Hoon Kang, and Alan Cohen

A year ago, just before the start of pandemic lockdowns, some 10% or less of the U.S. labor force worked remotely full-time. Within a month, according to Gallup and other surveys, around half of American workers were at distant desktops. Today, most of them still are. And surveys of employers and employees alike suggest a fundamental shift. While forecasts differ, as much as a quarter of the 160-million-strong U.S. labor force is expected to stay fully remote in the long term, and many more are likely to work remotely a significant part of the time.

Image: ILLUSTRATION: JAMES GULLIVER HANCOCK - https://www-wsj-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/how-remote-work-is-reshaping-americas-urban-geography-11614960100

CHICAGO/FRANKFURT • The chief scientist of Johnson & Johnson said the company expects to produce up to three billion doses of its Covid-19 jab next year, after the European Union (EU) approved the one-shot vaccine on Thursday.

The company is bringing on three manufacturing plants to produce the key drug substance for the vaccine. It will also have seven plants globally to handle the "fill and finish" - the final production steps and bottling into vials.

IonQ, a quantum computing startup born in College Park, announced Monday that it would likely soon become the first publicly traded company to specialize in commercialized quantum computing.

The company plans to file paperwork with the Securities Exchange Commission in the next week, which will allow it to go public on the New York Stock Exchange through an acquisition deal that would set the valuation of the combined entity to nearly $2 billion.

Image: The IonQ headquarters in College Park on Nov. 9, 2020. (Kurt Leinemann/The Diamondback)  

The past year has been the most important in Emergent BioSolutions’ history. We’ve had the honor of helping our country address Covid-19, manufacturing vaccines in a way few companies can. Deploying longstanding pandemic preparedness capabilities to shorten timelines and ramp up large-scale manufacturing, we can now make more than a billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine a year.

GAITHERSBURG, Md., March 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- US-based biotech company VLP Therapeutics, Inc. (VLPT) announced that it has named Ms. Miwa Toyoda, formerly a venture capitalist specialized in pharma and biotech at JAFCO Group Co., Ltd., as chief business officer, effective March 15, in a bid to accelerate its vaccine research and development projects and expand the portfolio.

SIBF welcomes new members.  See the list here.

This free webinar will feature a fireside chat-style conversation with Dr. Robert Scharpf (Delfi Diagnostics) and Dr. Christie Bergerson (Exponent). Drs. Scharpf and Bergerson will discuss how machine learning and artificial intelligence are impacting biomedical engineering and the wider world of human health.

Rich Bendis (BioHealth Innovation/BioTalk podcast) will facilitate the discussion. View the speaker bios for more information.

The American College of Cardiology is hosting its first Innovation Showcase in partnership with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI).   They have selected six healthcare start-up companies to present. Each presentation will end with a brief Q&A with our panelists, including BHI Entrepreneurs-in-Residence Renee Arnold, Luis Gutierrez, and Kwame Ulmer.  Immediately following the showcase, audience members will have an opportunity to attend breakout sessions with each company and representatives from the NHLBI.   Full details (schedule, presenting companies, registration, etc.) are available at: https://www.acc.org/InnovationShowcase.  

Marina Massingham, CEO, Aifred Health, and Laurent Waessa, Senior Business Development Advisor, Québec Government Office in New York, join BioTalk to discuss their backgrounds, Ecosystems for Entrepreneurs, and how Quebec can find partnerships in the BioHealth Capital Region

Listen via Apple http://apple.co/3lfW7q5, Google http://bit.ly/3qJm2HP, Spotify http://spoti.fi/30LaoSc, and TuneIn http://bit.ly/30JHq4Z.

When the pandemic hit in full force last March, healthcare organizations had to pivot overnight. What was once impossible became necessary, and what was once unlikely became an everyday occurrence. While this disruption came with growing pains — health organizations faced supply, staff and support shortages for months on end — the World Economic Forum notes that “the industry’s response has vividly demonstrated its resilience and ability to bring innovations to market quickly.”

Novavax reported on March 11 that its COVID-19 vaccine is 96% efficacious in reducing mild, moderate or severe disease. The Maryland-based company joins the handful of manufacturers that have reported encouraging data on a COVID-19 vaccine; three, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals, have already received emergency use authorization for their shots from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The advancement of children’s medical devices in the U.S. continues to significantly lag behind adult devices for many reasons. A dedicated group of public and private sector healthcare leaders are working together to change that trend. In culmination of its first stage of work, the System of Hospitals for Innovation in Pediatrics – Medical Devices (SHIP-MD) initiative recently held a dynamic 3-day public workshop to further develop this groundbreaking public-private partnership, which is currently in its pre-consortium/conceptual phase.

Alexandria Agtech/Climate Innovation Acquisition, a blank check company formed by Alexandria Real Estate Equities targeting agtech and climate innovation, filed on Thursday with the SEC to raise up to $250 million in an initial public offering.

All eyes are on the global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Achieving the broad uptake needed to reach population immunity and curb the virus’s spread will require an unprecedented effort among health workers, scientists and stakeholders at every step of the supply chain.

During this 90 min event, experts from organizations central to vaccine development and delivery, regulatory oversight and quality assurance will discuss over the course of two high-level panels what’s needed for the global COVID-19 vaccination campaign, how to build public trust in the quality and effectiveness of vaccines, and how these investments can build better systems for the future.

BIoHealth Capital Region Ranked 4th and metrics improving towards goals of Top 3 by 2023

Charles Dickens’ opening line of A Tale of Two Cities—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—was evoked recently by the head of the nation’s largest life sciences real estate owner to describe the past year for the industry served by his real estate investment trust.

“With respect to the industry, 2020 is the ultimate paradox: The worst year of our lives, yet the greatest year ever for the life science industry,” Joel S. Marcus, Alexandria Real Estate Equities’ executive chairman and founder, told analysts February 2 after releasing fourth-quarter and full-year 2020 results. “[There’s] much work to do to rebuild businesses and lives so devastatingly impacted, and I would say, it’s going to take a good part of this decade to do that for many people who’ve been really so devastated.”

After four years of extensive planning, Inova Health System and the University of Virginia School of Medicine this week opened the UVA Inova Campus, welcoming its first class of 36 UVA medical students. An additional 36 students will join the campus next year to complete a full complement of students for two years of clinical training.

The University of Maryland is a powerhouse of discovery, with decades of experience advancing a field that will help define our nation’s—and the world’s—future.

Image: https://quantum.umd.edu/

That’s the path for technology being developed by IonQ. The College Park-based company on Monday made official a deal to merge with special purpose acquisition company dMY Technology Group, Inc. III. When the merger closes and it begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol IONQ, the company is poised to be the first “pure-play” quantum computing company that is publicly traded, leaders said.

Image: Inside IonQ's College Park quantum computing work. (Courtesy photo)

One thing both the Trump and Biden administrations have agreed on is that the U.S. needs to expand domestic manufacturing, and soon.

The pharmaceutical industry in particular has outsourced much of its manufacturing to take advantage of lower costs and more lax environmental laws in other countries. This has left Americans reliant on overseas drugmakers, largely in India and China, and vulnerable to gaps in the supply chain when quality issues or a pandemic halts production.

Image:  Ronald T. Piervincenzi  - Source: United States Pharmacopeia