In an ongoing effort to improve the experience of doing business in and/or with Montgomery County, County Executive Ike Leggett is inviting the business community to identify opportunities for streamlining and simplifying rules and regulations for businesses, and for improving the County government's services to businesses. Your anonymous and confidential feedback will help us identify areas where change will have a positive impact.

Digital health technology leader WellDoc today announced a collaboration with Human API, the fastest-growing health data platform, through which the two companies will explore the unique integration of type 2 diabetes patient health data within WellDoc’s BlueStar digital therapeutic. Human API’s data platform will provide WellDoc with real-time access to comprehensive clinical patient data from its network of 15,000+ pharmacies, health systems and laboratories. The steady flow of data is shared within a highly secure environment that ensures protection of data and patient privacy.

Three counties in California signed on to use emocha’s apps for managing tuberculosis.

The Johns Hopkins spinout is implementing miDOT in Fresno, Merced and Contra Costa counties.

Gaithersburg, MD’s Altimmune has secured a sizable contract with BARDA to further develop its nasal spray anthrax vaccine candidate, building on an existing collaboration as the biotech prepares to move into clinical trials.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. (NYSE:EBS) today announced that it has completed its previously announced spin-off of Aptevo Therapeutics Inc. (Nasdaq:APVO) through the distribution of all of the shares of Aptevo common stock to the holders of Emergent BioSolutions common stock. As a result of the spin-off, Aptevo is now an independent public company and listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol "APVO."

GlaxoSmithKline and Alphabet unit Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) made a splash yesterday when they announced the launch of Galvani Bioelectronics, a company that will build upon GSK’s three years of work to develop tiny nerve-altering devices that might one day be used instead of drugs to treat a variety of diseases. The two companies will invest up to £540 million (more than $700 million) over the next seven years, they said, employing 30 scientists at GSK’s research center in the U.K. and at Verily in South San Francisco.

Yes, Hollywood may dramatize the plight of the entrepreneur. But sometimes the best way to capture reality is through fiction. Wherever you are in your business venture, you can glean some insight from these 18 provocative and wildly entertaining films.

We are delighted to announce Illumina Accelerator is accepting applications for its next funding cycle in San Francisco. Illumina Accelerator is the world’s first business accelerator focused on creating an innovation ecosystem for the genomics industry. It drives value for genomics startups developing breakthrough applications in therapeutics, diagnostics, agriculture, direct to consumer, synthetic biology, and beyond. Selected genomics startups will receive seed investment, business guidance, and fully operational lab space for six months in San Francisco, starting in January 2017. Applications for the fifth funding cycle are due by September 1, 2016.

The House Small Business Committee issued a report (H.Rpt. 114-705) on legislation (H.R. 4783) to reauthorize and improve the Small Business Innovation Research Program...

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.