Date: 1/22/2020 Expressions of Interest are due no later than 4:59pm EST on Monday, March 2, 2020.  CAPCaT Contact: Mary Dubuque  Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Funding Opportunity The Center for Advancing Point of Care Technologies (CAPCaT) in Heart, Lung, Blood, and Sleep Disorders (U54HL143541) announces the 2020 solicitation of grant applications focused on developing, adapting, or validating point of care technologies that can be rapidly applied to heart, lung, blood, or sleep disorders, with additional interest in projects that incorporate complementary and integrative health approaches.  We plan, based on the receipt of meritorious applications, to fund up to six awards of up to $100,000 over 12 months, with one or more award(s) focused on complementary and integrative health.

Less than 4% of money raised for cancer research targets pediatric cancers, but a D.C.-area charity that’s devoting resources to benefit young cancer victims is sponsoring trials at Children’s National Hospital.

Clinical trials underway for about a year are turning patients’ own immune system cells into an army of soldiers to attack their brain cancer tumors.

“We’re all really excited,” said Dr. Eugene Hwang, associate division chief of oncology at Children’s National Hospital. “The biggest problem would have been if we ran into a big side effect or toxicity signal, and we have not.”

WASHINGTON (February 19) – Today, a diverse group of research and scientific organizations, as well as those directly involved in commercializing new products, launched Bayh-Dole 40, a coalition that will celebrate and protect the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act of 1980, better known as the “Bayh-Dole Act.”

The Bayh-Dole Act has empowered universities, small businesses, and nonprofits that have received federal grants to retain ownership of any patented inventions — and license those patents to private firms, who then turn promising ideas into real-life products that improve peoples’ lives.

Image: https://www.ipwatchdog.com

The BioHealth Capital Region (BHCR) is evolving quickly and it can be tough to keep pace with the latest news emerging from the host of biotech, medical device and cell, and gene therapy companies in the area. BioBuzz, when combined with some strategic social media follows, can help you stay on top of the latest developments, news and thought leadership coming out of the BHCR. 

Image: https://biobuzz-io.cdn.ampproject.org

Incoming University of Maryland President Darryll Pines may describe himself as a bit of a joker — but he is serious about building out the school’s tech and startup ecosystems.

“The university is an incredible innovation ecosystem, but we were not leveraging every aspect of it. Now you will start to see a lot more startups coming out of the University of Maryland,” Pines told the Washington Business Journal in an interview after a Friday press conference punctuated by accolades, off-script jokes by Pines and plenty of Terrapin pride.

Image: Darryll Pines has been named the next president of the University of Maryland, College Park. JOHN CONSOLI, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

It’s highly appropriate that the 40th anniversary of the Bayh-Dole Act occurs in a year as politically contentious as that in which it passed. In 1980, many predicted that our best years were behind us and that the United States would soon lose its place as the world’s economic superpower. Experts proclaimed the best remedy was to adopt the “Japan, Inc.” model,  where the government  bureaucracy orchestrated a coalition of dominant companies boldly plotting the future (that idea was particularly popular with many in Washington, D.C.). The patent system was under constant attack for being unfair, the U.S. suffered from double digit unemployment and inflation (dubbed “the misery index”) and energy costs skyrocketed. Congress discovered that despite billions of dollars invested annually in federally funded R&D, few inventions were being brought to the marketplace where they could benefit the American people. It felt like the bottom had fallen out from under the feet of our nation.

Image: https://www.ipwatchdog.com

Doylestown-based Pennsylvania Biotech Center (PABC) this week announced a sponsorship program intended to support early-stage biotech companies via supplier services, education and collaboration.

This comes seven months after PABC announced a $50 million dollar investment fund and accelerator providing seed and Series A and B funding to its incubator companies.

The program was created by Hatch Biofund Management, LLC, the operators of the life science venture fund. Sponsors in the program will specifically work with early-stage companies in PABC’s incubator and the Unite IQ incubator PABC runs at The Discovery Labs in King of Prussia.

Image: Pennsylvania Biotech Center's future expanded campus.

U.S. healthcare providers in 2019 experienced almost triple the number of breaches to their records than they did in 2018.

That’s the assertion of healthcare compliance analytics platform Protenus in its Protenus Breach Barometer report, which reported that 41 million patient records were breached in 2019. The increase in breaches was a 48.6% difference from 15 million in 2018, while the trend of at least one health data breach per day — a trend first reported in 2016 — remains.

BALTIMORE, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The W. P. Carey Foundation, whose generosity launched Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, has made a $25 million commitment to the school to recruit renowned faculty, enhance academic programs, and help launch student careers. The gift will be matched with commitments from Johns Hopkins University and contributions from other donors for a total of $50 million.

The W. P. Carey Foundation's new gift provides Carey Business School with support to ensure its path of growth and advancement in shaping business leaders of the future.

Image: Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--LumaCyte, an advanced bioanalytical instrumentation company specializing in vaccine and cell and gene therapy bioprocess, production, and R&D analytical capabilities, announces its expansion into Europe with the establishment of LumaCyte, B.V. in The Netherlands. LumaCyte has experienced a rapid increase in global demand for Radiance®, it’s label-free single cell analysis instrument, with a large portion of that demand coming from Europe. In the fall of 2019, LumaCyte reported that it was strengthening its infrastructure to support a growing customer base, with strong efforts being placed on servicing the expansive European market. The company has expanded its US headquarters, significantly increasing manufacturing and laboratory footprints, as well as completed the rigorous EU specific regulatory CE mark certification, indicating Radiance® conformity with EEA health and safety standards, which is a prerequisite for its instrument sale and use.

Orgenesis Inc (NASDAQ:ORGS) announced a collaboration with Johns Hopkins University to utilize its point-of-care platform to develop and supply gene therapies and technologies. 

The company’s POCare cell therapy platform is designed to advance the development of Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products — medicines based on genes, tissues or cells — through collaborations and in-licensing with other companies. 

CEO Vered Caplan is confident in the pedigree and resources of the Baltimore research university. 

BALTIMORE, February 18, 2020 (Newswire.com) - Over 40 million patient records were breached in 2019, according to new data released today in the Protenus Breach Barometer®. Published by Protenus, a healthcare compliance analytics platform that protects patient data for the nation’s leading health systems, the Breach Barometer is the industry’s definitive source for health data breach reporting.  

Two commercial real estate firms with a significant presence in the marketing of life sciences properties have issued reports over the past 12 months that illustrate the growth in industry employment in recent years.

One life sciences segment, “Research and Development in Biotechnology” (NAICS code 541714), has largely driven that growth, with its number of jobs more than doubling over the past decade, to 204,800 as of 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data cited by Cushman & Wakefield in “Life Sciences 2020: The Future Is Here,” a report released February 6. Between 2010 and 2019, biotech R&D employment grew 5.1%, compared with 1.6% for total employment. Most of the increase, more than 70,000 jobs, occurred between 2013 and 2019.

Pete Briskman, an Executive Managing Director with JLL, leads the Tenant Advisory and brokerage business for JLL in Maryland, sits down with BioTalk Host Rich Bendis to talk his role with JLL, his focus on Life Sciences, and vision of the BioHealth Capital Region

Pete Briskman works with many of the regions' most exciting and fastest growing Life Science Companies assisting them with their real estate and site selection strategies for Headquarter transactions, relocations, build-to-suits, renewals, expansions, and consolidations. Pete and his team bring proprietary tools to help organizations make informed decisions around the size and scale of their operation, assessment of labor, modeling and programming of occupancy, approach to optimizing business and economic incentives, and very unique real estate market intelligence that can be communicated via our proprietary geo-spatial market intelligence platform.  He is the recipient of GWCAR's Commercial Leasing Broker of the Year and has been recognized with GWCAR Office Leasing Transactions of the Year for multiple clients.

SANTA MONICA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 10, 2020-- Kite, a Gilead Company (Nasdaq: GILD), today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted the Biologics License Application (BLA) and granted Priority Review designation for KTE-X19, an investigational chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma (MCL).

FREDERICK, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Maryland Tech Council (MTC) announced today it has expanded its offices to Frederick to broaden its reach throughout the State of Maryland and to meet the growing needs of its members. The satellite office will be located at 12 West Church Street. Additionally, MTC is planning a move of its Montgomery County satellite office to the Universities at Shady Grove (USG) in Rockville. MTC will continue to utilize its satellite offices in Annapolis and other key life science and tech hubs throughout Maryland.

HHS on Monday launched a new program to spur development and commercialization of technologies that would help the U.S. respond to health security threats and disasters.

The Foundry for American Biotechnology, a public-private partnership, will be jointly managed by the department's Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response—or ASPR—and the New Hampshire technology firm Deka Research and Development Corp.

Feb. 10, 2020 -- Linda Larrimore has been getting chemotherapy every other week for 6 years to treat and manage colon cancer.

The chemotherapy is keeping her health stable, so it’s well worth it to the mother and grandmother to regularly get the treatment. Usually, she spends the 4½ hours every other week reading, watching TV, or chatting.

Image: https://www.webmd.com

New Enterprise Associates Partner Sara Nayeem sat down with Proactive’s Christine Corrado at the BIO CEO & Investor Conference in New York.

The venture capital fund, which has a cumulative committed capital of $20 billion, focuses on investing in across all verticals in healthcare and in technology.

Image: https://www.proactiveinvestors.com

Mtech Ventures, a University of Maryland technology company incubator program, won a $50,000 U.S. Small Business Administration Growth Accelerator Fund competition award to support innovation in federal Opportunity Zones in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area.

Through the grant, Mtech Ventures is partnering with the Association of University Research Parks (AURP) and the Center for Accelerating Innovation to organize community-needs roundtables, identify promising innovations, develop entrepreneurs and build awareness of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) or Small Business Tech Transfer (STTR) program in low-income census tracts called federal Opportunity Zones (OZ). Maryland has 149 Opportunity Zones, while the District of Columbia has 25. Federal tax incentives for new investments are available in these zones.

WASHINGTON – The National Capital Consortium for Pediatric Device Innovation (NCC-PDI) announced today that the application deadline for its annual “Make Your Medical Device Pitch for Kids!” competition is extended one week to Feb. 22 at midnight EST. Innovators and startup companies with devices in the pediatric cardiovascular, orthopedic and spine, or NICU sectors are invited to apply for a share of up to $250,000 in FDA-funded awards and access to a newly created NCC-PDI pediatric device accelerator program led by MedTech Innovator. Applications are being accepted now.

The University System of Maryland Maryland Momentum Fund and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, have invested $350,000 in a medical technology startup, the 11th investment from the fund. University of Maryland BioPark startup ARMR Systems Inc. was awarded $350,000, the first time a BioPark resident has received an investment from the fund. The university investments led ARMR’s ...

Here’s a useful article that looks at the fate of university-licensed startup (ULS) life sciencecompanies over the last few years. There are more and more such companies (a greater than tenfold increase in their number since 1990), but a comprehensive look at success rates (and how such rates vary according to the universities involved) has been harder to come by. A lot of work went into this overview, and I’m glad the authors were able to assemble it. They spent a lot of time digging through tech-transfer records and contacting universities to make sure that they’d covered everything, checking venture capital announcements and state corporate registrations, and searching through press releases, LinkedIn pages, and more. The data that they have produced look like the best we have on the subject.

The University of Maryland announced Wednesday that it has appointed a new president.

The University System of Maryland Board of Regents appointed Darryll J. Pines to succeed Wallace Loh. Pines’ appointment is effective July 1, and he will be the 34th president of the University of Maryland, College Park.

Pines has been the A. James Clark School of Engineering dean for the past 11 years. He has been with the university for 25 years, starting as an assistant professor in 1995.

Image: https://umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/usm-board-regents-appoints-darryll-j-pines-president-university-maryland-college-park

The NIA Office of Small Business Research (OSBR) team is intrigued by startups and their unique role in research and development. Of course, we’re a bit biased — after all, we lead NIA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) programs, which are designed to help new companies commercialize products and technology to extend the healthy, active years of life.

Representatives of various industries trekked to Annapolis for a marathon hearing on several bills aimed at generating revenue for public education reforms.

Image: Representatives from the Maryland Department of Commerce said getting rid tax credit programs would send a signal that the state is not committed to growing businesses and supporting economic development. BBJ FILE

ROCKVILLE, Md., Feb. 11, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR) is accepting proposals to lease a bio-manufacturing facility configured to produce biologicals under cGMP conditions in compliance with FDA requirements for phase I/II clinical trials. The facility is also equipped to perform process development research, pre-clinical manufacturing for material necessary to conduct IND-enabling toxicology studies, proof of concept (POC) studies, and process demonstration in advance of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) manufacturing. IBBR is a joint research enterprise between the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Image: https://finance.yahoo.com

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., February 11, 2020 – Johnson & Johnson today announced that its Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies will further expedite its investigational coronavirus vaccine program through an expanded collaboration with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

Image: https://www.jnj.com

Rebecca Stauffer, Parenteral Drug Association Managing Editor posed the following questions to PDA Letter Article readers in fall of 2019. "What if developers of cell and gene therapies treated their products like software releases? What if the human body could be manipulated like a highly complex computer?"

We invite you to join us for a LIVE and interactive presentation from Jeff Galvin, CEO of American Gene Technologies sharing his passion, vision, and conviction of "reprogramming the human computer."

Image: https://www.eventbrite.com

With the coronavirus growing more deadly each day, several companies are racing to produce the first vaccine or antiviral medication to combat the spread of the virus. One company that seems to have made large strides towards finding a vaccine, is Gaithersburg-based Novavax.

The genome of the coronavirus was published last month, which opened the floodgates for potential vaccine attempts. Novavax is most notable for releasing an Ebola vaccine within 90 days of the genome being published in 2015, and they estimate they could have a similar timetable for this vaccine as well.

The streets of Wuhan, China — the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak — are empty and quiet except for the sound of loudspeakers squawking quarantine instructions to its sheltered-in-place residents. Flights to some Chinese cities have been terminated. A Tokyo, Japan-based travel agency has canceled nearly 20,000 of its Chinese package tours. 

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the coronavirus, which has already killed more people than SARS, a global health emergency. There are currently 11 people stricken with the novel virus in the U.S. and over 17,000 are infected globally with numbers jumping exponentially by the day. 

Image: https://biobuzz.io

Citizens across Virginia need health solutions and affordable health care to live full, healthy and productive lives. Lawmakers in the General Assembly are examining a broad range of policies in an attempt to relieve the burden of rising health care costs. But some of the proposals under consideration might have unintended consequences for both patients and Virginia’s innovation economy. As our elected officials consider how to address health care costs, they should ensure that any measure provides meaningful financial relief to patients and preserves the environment for medical innovation in Virginia that delivers groundbreaking treatments and creates thousands of high-paying jobs in the commonwealth.

Image: Kelli Price Photography 

I made illustration of Corona virus today. 😍 I hope scientists and doctors can find a cure soon and I wish everyone who was affected to get well and recover soon! hashtag#sciart

New Members to Add Experience to Board of Directors

ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND, February 12, 2020 – BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI) announced that its Board of Directors unanimously has approved the appointments of six new board members:

• Sean Augerson, Vice President, Head of Operations Americas and APAC, QIAGEN
• Peter Briskman, Executive Managing Director, JLL
• Juergen Klenk, Ph.D., Principal, Deloitte
• Dr. Jay Perman, MD, Chancellor, University System of Maryland
• Aaron Ren, Head of Business Development and Operations, Viela Bio
• Tracey Vetterick, Vice President and COO, Oncology R&D, AstraZeneca

“I am privileged to welcome these new members to our board,” said Richard Bendis, BHI President and CEO. “The addition of their leadership experience in the BioHealth Capital Region and beyond ensures in BHI’s ability to have our finger on the pulse of innovation and fresh viewpoints. I also would like to thank Rip Ballou of GSK, Robert Caret of the University System of Maryland, Doug Liu of QIAGEN, Ashish Kulkarni, of Avantor, and Beth Meagher of Deloitte Consulting LLP for their many years of service on our Board of Directors.