To address one of the greatest modern threats to public health — antibiotic resistance — the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Wellcome Trust of London, the AMR Centre of Alderley Park (Cheshire, United Kingdom), and Boston University School of Law will create one of the world’s largest public-private partnerships focused on preclinical discovery and development of new antimicrobial products.

GlaxoSmithKline has bought global rights to an experimental drug from Johnson & Johnson for up to 175 million pounds ($230 million), raising its bet on a new generation of biotech medicines for severe asthma.

Today, University of Maryland (UM) Ventures announced the appointment of Darryl L. Carter, MD, co-founder and former vice president of Nora Therapeutics, Inc., as Venture Advisor at the University of Maryland Baltimore’s (UMB) Office of Technology Transfer (OTT). In this role, Dr. Carter, who previously supported UMB’s OTT and entrepreneurially focused inventors as an entrepreneur-in-residence, will assist faculty in turning their technology inventions into commercial opportunities. Dr. Carter will also help support the formation of new UMB technology-based start-up companies.

Zika has been in the spotlight lately with summer in full swing and the Olympics in Rio just around the corner. A company in Montgomery County is working on a vaccine that could save lives.

Emergent Biosolutions was awarded a contract by the U.S. government worth nearly $22 million. Scientists will begin working on the vaccine within just a few days. 

Reltio, the enterprise data-driven applications and modern data management Platform as a Service (PaaS) company, announced today that it has raised $22M in Series B funding. Leading the oversubscribed round is one of the world's largest and most successful VC firms, New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Existing investors, Crosslink Capital and .406 Ventures added to their $10M Series A investment, bringing Reltio's total venture funding to $32M to date. The new financing will be used to extend Reltio's leadership position in modern data management through accelerated hiring of talented individuals across all groups, and continued expansion into global markets.

The Maryland Department of Commerce is seeking qualified candidates for the position of Senior Business Development Representative within its Division of Business & Industry Sector Development’s Regional Growth, Business Retention, Expansion and Strategic Rural Development Unit. This position is primarily responsible for attracting businesses, assisting with retention, relocation, and expansion needs and opportunities within the State of Maryland focusing on Montgomery County in the Capital Region. The incumbent will actively market and promote the region’s unique assets providing economic development assistance to businesses, Counties, or economic development organizations in Montgomery County.

BioAdvance, the operator of a $50 million early stage life sciences fund that work with health-care entrepreneurs in the mid-Atlantic region, invested $2.9 million in companies and technologies targeting human health during fiscal 2016

Subscription boxes are a growing business trend. About a year and a half ago, Fatima Dicko founded mybestbox, a subscription-based business which delivers boxes filled with $75-$100 worth of healthy living materials to subscribers nationwide for $25 each month.

On June 27, 2016, the SEC proposed amendments that, if adopted, would allow more companies to qualify for "smaller reporting company" (SRC) status. The proposed amendments are intended to promote capital formation and reduce disclosure compliance costs for smaller companies while maintaining investor protections.

New York City-based Transfix, an on-demand trucking provider, has raised $22 million in Series B funding. New Enterprise Associates led the round with participation from other investors that included Canvas Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Corigin Ventures. In conjunction with the funding, Scott Sandell of NEA has been added to Transfix’s board of directors.

At Human Longevity Inc. (HLI) in La Jolla, California, more than two dozen machines work around the clock, sequencing one human genome every 15 minutes at a cost of under $2,000 per genome. The whole operation fits comfortably in three rooms. Back in 2000, when its founder, J. Craig Venter, first sequenced a human genome (his own), it cost $100 million and took a building-size, $50 million computer nine months to complete.

We’ve tried to cure cancer before. Will this time be different?

Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation is asking for your help in identifying some “knock your socks off” candidates for the next jobs the MCEDC will fill:

1) Executive Assistant. We are looking for someone who loves to create order from chaos, to keep multiple balls in the air at one time, to support the MCEDC Board, to manage vendor relationships and to create PowerPoint presentations, reports, Excel tables and correspondence; who is not afraid to learn new software; loves details and can keep them straight; is reliable; has a great telephone manner and likes to have fun while getting an enormous amount of work done!

2) Web Content Manager. This position is part of the Marketing/Communications group. We want to produce an award-winning, incredibly useful, highly visited web site on doing business in Montgomery County. We’re looking for someone who is a superb writer, knows business interests/language/terms, can work effectively and creatively with a good web design company, has an eye for detail and consistency. This position will entail working with the marketing and branding team in both launching new content and keeping content current and refreshed.

3) Marketing/Communications Director. This position will identify key messages for target audiences, develop a marketing plan for each of those audiences, work with a creative agency to produce the deliverables, evaluate the results and recommend/implement course corrections. This position will also oversee development of our social media presence, press relations and press releases, and other online communications. The director will also have supervisory responsibility for several marketing/communications positions.

Please tell anyone you know with the appropriate skills and experience about the openings. We are interested in moving forward expeditiously and will begin interviewing the week of July 18. Please have any qualified candidates forward a resume and statement of interest to Joyce Fuhrmann at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Vtesse, Inc. a company committed to developing drugs that will benefit patients with extremely rare, life-threatening diseases, announced today that it has secured $17 million in additional Series A funding in support of its global, pivotal clinical trial of VTS-270 for Niemann-Pick Type C1 disease (“NPC”).

All Series A investors contributed to the financing extension, including Alexandria Venture Investments, Bay City Capital LLC, Lundbeckfond Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), and Pfizer Venture Investments. Together with proceeds from the original Series A announced in January of 2015, Vtesse has raised a total of $42 million to fund development of its lead product to treat NPC.

When downtown department stores were common, shoppers could head to 9073 Center St. in Manassas for household goods, or as an ad in a 1929 issue of the Manassas Journal said, for “show boat” dresses.

Three Johns Hopkins BME-associated medical technology companies have been selected by the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO) Life Science Investment Fund for financial investment. TEDCO’s Life Science Investment Fund is specifically designed for companies that are beyond the technology validation stage and further along in product development. They invest up to $200,000 to support milestone-based medical products advance more quickly and efficiently toward commercialization.

Bina48 is a robotic head that looks and speaks like a person—it moves its lips and runs conversational software. Although the robot isn’t alive, it’s hard to say there is no life at all in Bina48. In conversation, it sometimes says surprising things. Google’s director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, says it’s “wonderfully suggestive” of a time when computers really will think and feel.

The University of Virginia’s College at Wise and the MACH37 Cyber Accelerator at the Center for Innovative Technology announced a new partnership Friday that aims to create cybersecurity employment and education opportunities in Southwest Virginia.

Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, has warned that the UK risks losing its lead in medical research after leaving the European Union.  The Swiss group called for Britain to move quickly to replace European regulations with rules that give patients access to innovative treatments or else risk delays in developing crucial medicines. 

WellDoc’s $29.5 million funding round made a splash earlier this year. A Samsung-led initial close of $22 million was only bolstered by another $7.5 million and a new partnership with Johnson & Johnson.

Following the deals, the company sought out executives with healthcare business experience, said CEO Kevin McRaith. Execs hired in the first half of 2016 include:

The U.S. Small Business Administration released its highly anticipated Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) online tutorials to help small businesses navigate the SBIR program. The site provides users with a mobile-compatible site to learn about the program through a combination of videos and text. This platform will provide accessible program information and training resources to underrepresented areas.  There is no registration or fee required and the courses are open to all.

In a partnership between Cray and Deloitte Advisory Cyber Risk Services, the two bring subscription-based supercomputer power to security analytics capabilities.

The challenges of modern cyber-security are complex, so complex that a supercomputer can make a big difference. That's the hope of supercomputer vendor Cray and its partner Deloitte Advisory Cyber Risk Services.

Martine Rothblatt has made no secret of her goal to move beyond the pharmaceutical business model that made her first foray into the biotech world — United Therapeutics Corp. (NASDAQ: UTHR) — a striking success.

The goose that laid the biotech patent golden egg is in trouble with the U.S. Supreme Court. Ironically, it was the Supreme Court that helped spur the industry with the watershed Charkrabarty ruling in 1980. But what has been giveth, can also be taken away. Beginning with the 2013 Myriad decision, the Supreme Court has stripped back eligible subject matter for so-called “products of nature,” raising doubts regarding whether any significant patent protection is left for biotechnology inventions. The trend continues as recently as June 27, 2016, when the Supreme Court let the Federal Circuit decision in Sequenom stand, resulting in claims directed to noninvasive prenatal screening of fetal DNA remaining a patent-ineligible subject.

New GSK PARADE (patient rheumatoid arthritis data from the real world) app promises to ‘learn from real patients’.

Glaxo Smith Kline has released an app paired with a patient study developed to provide the pharmaceutical company with a wealth of information on how people cope with rheumatoid arthritis and inform new drug development. 

Dreamit Ventures’ accelerator has ditched the demo day, according to Chief Innovation Officer Steve Barsh. That’s not the only change the early-stage venture firm and accelerator has made of late.

The Maryland Technology Development Corp. is giving a total of $800,000 in investments to four biotech companies.

Each of the firms will receive a $200,000 grant through TEDCO's Life Science Investment Fund. The fund was created to help give startup companies in life sciences fields a chance to have their technology validated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and to help further develop the product.

Maryland may have seen investments from venture capitalists decrease in the second quarter, but a director at PwC says he is not concerned.

Medical science and bio technology has given second chances to so many lives, especially in the form of prostheses. Gone are the days where your life was over if you lost a limb or two. So to honour this achievement in human endurance and scientific method, we’ve made a list of ten body parts that could theoretically be replaced if lost.

Rumors of staff cuts from AstraZeneca’s ($AZN) MedImmune biologics arm are part of previously stated changes and a deeper focus (and a larger cash pile) for its oncology research.

Rumors have been growing that AZ was axing staffers at MedImmune over the past week, but the Big Pharma tells FierceBiotech that this is part of the course originally announced back in its Q1 update in the spring.

Another month, another blockbuster deal in Boston-area real estate.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities has an agreement to buy the eight-acre One Kendall Square complex for $725 million, and it plans to add another building to the nine-building campus of office and lab space, the company disclosed in a securities filing. The complex includes the Kendall Square Cinema and several restaurants in addition to the office buildings.

VLP Therapeutics, LLC. ("VLP"), a Gaithersburg-based biotechnology company focusing on the research and development of therapeutic and preventative vaccines and next generation antibody agents based upon a novel and proprietary vaccine technology, announced that it won a $2.4 million Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program Technology/Therapeutic Development Award #W81XWH-16-1-0330 from the Department of Defense Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program to advance its malaria vaccine development program. 

CHINA is on the cusp of an innovation revolution, with the country's biomedical and healthcare sectors making great leaps in the last decade. The achievements are quite visible: the exponential growth of publication of academic articles, patent filings, international exchanges, globalisation of new drug R&D activities, and accessibility of new drug R&D technology capability platforms from both China and overseas, just to name a few.

Virginia Tech is talking to large pharmaceutical firms about cooperating with the university on research projects and opening offices inside Roanoke’s new health care innovation district.

Michael Friedlander, founder of Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute and a driving force behind the city’s growing health care industry, said that sort of partnership is only a concept, but affirmed that conversations are underway.