Personal Genome Diagnostics, Inc. (PGDx), a provider of advanced cancer genome testing products and services, today announced that it has raised $21.4 million in a Series A funding round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA).  Other new and existing investors, including Windham Venture Partners and Nanjing Kaiyuan Growth Capital Investments, also participated in the financing.

PGDx was founded in 2010 by cancer researchers from Johns Hopkins University (JHU), who are pioneers in cancer genome sequencing and liquid biopsy technologies.  Under the leadership of co-founders and JHU researchers Luis A. Diaz, MD, and Victor Velculescu, MD, PhD, the company has achieved consistent growth by successfully commercializing novel clinical and investigational products and services for researchers, drug developers, physicians and patients. PGDx's service offerings for researchers are complemented by the clinical services it provides through its CLIA-certified laboratory. 

University of Maryland (UM) Ventures and Glycocept, Inc. announced today that the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) has granted Glycocept worldwide, exclusive licensing rights to a UMB patent and technology to modify monoclonal antibodies to alter their effector functions. Eric J. Sundberg, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM), and Co-Director, Division of Basic Science, Institute of Human Virology (IHV), and Beatriz Trastoy, Ph.D., post-doctoral fellow at Dr. Sundberg’s laboratory at the IHV/UMSOM are the patent inventors. Biopharmaceutical industry veteran Ronald P. Dudek, who most recently served as Vice President of Commercial Strategy at Juno Therapeutics, Inc., is Glycocept’s President and Chief Executive Officer.

University of Maryland (UM) Ventures and Educational and Scientific LLC (ESL), announced today that the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) granted ESL exclusive licensing rights to its interest in the commercial development of a molecule whose anticancer properties were jointly discovered by ESL and UMB. The molecule has consistently demonstrated its potential for the treatment of a variety of cancers, particularly lung, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, pancreatic and prostate cancer.

Henry Lowe, Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.S.H., an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM) is the Founder of ESL. Dr. Lowe collaborated with Dr. Joseph Bryant, DVM, Associate Professor of Pathology and Director, Animal Models Division, at the UM SOM Institute of Human Virology (IHV) in the realization of this discovery.

Northwest Biotherapeutics (NASDAQ: NWBO) (“NW Bio”), a U.S. biotechnology company developing DCVax® personalized immune therapies for solid tumor cancers, announced today that the Company has entered into agreement for funding of $30 million from Woodford Investment Management in the UK (“Woodford”).

Woodford will purchase $30 million of the Company’s common stock at $5.50 per share, for a total of 5,454,545 shares, raising Woodford’s total holdings to 25,915,937 shares, or about 28.1% of the Company.  The purchase will take place in a closing on or before October 22, 2015.

Baltimore-based AgeWell Biometrics has been selected a member of the inaugural startup class with Relevant Health, a health technology startup accelerator in Rockville, officials of the accelerator said Tuesday. "Relevant Health chose candidates who have a vision and business model for a product that promises significant positive impacts in the health sector," stated Rich Bendis, BioHealth Innovation...

This year’s FLC Mid-Atlantic regional meeting will take place in conjunction with the Innovation 2 Commercialization (I2C) Conference November 2 – 3 at the Universities at Shady Grove Conference Center in Rockville, Maryland. Attendees will have the opportunity to attend a variety of technology transfer (T2) sessions and network with regional entrepreneurs.

Centering on the theme of “Innovation Through Collaboration,” this year’s meeting highlights will include:

• Strategic T2 training sessions
• Technology industry needs panels
• FLC Mid-Atlantic regional awards presentation.

Onevest, a New York based investment crowdfunding platform focused on funding start-up entities, has announced the launching today of its new “1,000 Angles” crowdfunding vehicle. Touted as the “world’s largest digital-first, invitation-only investor network,” Onevest seeks to modernize the way venture capital funds are formed and how they invest.

1000 Angels will include OneVest co-founders Tanya Prive and Alejandro Cremades but the new spin on VC investing has added Erica Duignan Minnihan as Managing Partner, Barry Shereck as CFO and Dasha Sukovatitsyn as Membership Co-ordinator.

Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett has named the 11 local business leaders who will be charged with steering the county's nascent economic development corporation.

The nonprofit Montgomery County Economic Development Corp. will replace the county's Department of Economic Development when it launches in the spring. Change happens fast: Leggett first suggested the idea in February, formally proposed it in May and earned County Council approval in July.

More than 770 health care innovation companies are operating in Washington state, representing 6 percent of jobs in the state’s health-care industry, but producing more than 13 percent of the industry’s overall output, as measured by the value of the goods and services they produce.

Rockville's MacroGenics Inc. is moving deeper into the cancer immunotherapy space with a new big pharma partnership.

The clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, which focuses on antibody-based therapies for cancer treatment and other diseases, announced it will work with Merck to study one of its molecules to treat stomach cancer. The companies will evaluate the antibody created by MarcoGenics in combination with Merck's immunotherapy drug Keytruda in a Phase 1b/2 clinical trial, officials said.

The Startup Maryland bus rolled around the state for three weeks last month.

Mike Binko and company cruised through Baltimore with Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest tour, and made it over the Bay Bridge to Eastern Shore coworking space hotDesks.

One day featured a stop at Spark in Baltimore’s Power Plant Live! and the University of Baltimore. The bus was in Montgomery County, before heading back up to Charm City for Baltimore Innovation Week’s Beta City.

Has venture capital always been a bad model for the life sciences?

Andrew Lo, director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, dismissed the sector outright on stage Sunday at the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit. His rationale:

Nominations are now being accepted for the 2016 FLC awards. One of the most coveted honors in the technology transfer field, the FLC awards have been presented to over 200 federal laboratories since their inception in 1984. To reflect the diversity in scope and number of technology transfer efforts undertaken by federal laboratories and their partners, seven categories of awards will be presented.

138 Startups Now Compete for Fan Favorite and Finalist Designations Until Midday on Friday, November 6

Startup Maryland™ unveils the 138 video pitches from the participants in the 2015 Pitch Across Maryland competition. After posting the video pitches from Maryland entrepreneurs that were captured during the three-week Pitch Across Maryland bus tour, Startup Maryland is proud to announce that the two Video Pitch Competitions are now underway. You can find the various Playlists for each tour stop location where companies pitched on the Startup Maryland YouTube Channel.

Vtesse, Inc. announced today the addition of Elizabeth Berry-Kravis, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Pediatrics, Neurological Sciences and Biochemistry at Rush University Medical Center to its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) and that Michael Massaro has joined the company as Vice President, Clinical Operations. Today’s news comes on the heels of Vtesse’s recent announcement that Rush University Medical Center has enrolled three patients in its pivotal Phase 2b/3 clinical trial with VTS-270 for treatment of Niemann-Pick Type C1 Disease (NPC). Vtesse expects up to 20 sites (across the United States and the European Union) to participate in this clinical trial.  

“We seek SAB members who are both experienced clinicians and diligent researchers, and who also possess a strong passion to develop new treatment options and compassion for patients and their safety,” said Ben Machielse, Drs., President and Chief Executive Officer of Vtesse, Inc. “Dr. Berry-Kravis brings this unique combination to our SAB, which will support the clinical development of VTS-270. Her clinical research experience in rare diseases, such as Fragile X Syndrome, will help us advance our efforts with VTS-270. Dr. Berry-Kravis is serving as a co-lead principal investigator in our Phase 2b/3 clinical study of VTS-270 in addition to joining our SAB.”

Enthusiastic, animated, and innovative, Christopher Meenan left no doubt why he was among UMB’s 2015 Founders Week award winners with an insightful and entertaining Entrepreneur of the Year presentation “Health Informatics: A New Frontier for Innovation in Medicine” on Oct. 21.

Meenan, a faculty research associate in the School of Medicine’s Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, recalled tales of his early career in the finance industry when Y2K was feared to be an “apocalyptic event” and later when he worked at America Online, which was striving “to be innovative” by putting 30 million people on the Internet.

It's part of a a new program called Imprimis Cares that will make over 7,800 FDA-approved generic drugs available at an affordable price.

A pharmaceutical company announced Thursday that it plans to introduce a significantly lower-cost version of Daraprim, the drug that made headlines last month after jumping from $13.50 per pill to $750.

Like Disney and the Dodgers before it, Cedars-Sinai is partnering on an industry-specific technology accelerator in Los Angeles. The nonprofit hospital in the Beverly Grove neighborhood has teamed on the first-ever Techstars Healthcare Accelerator.

The program will offer 10 entrepreneurs and startups in the global healthcare industry $120,000 in funding plus mentorship and guidance from senior leadership at Cedars-Sinai and access to Techstars’ network of more than 7,000 founders, mentors, investors and corporate partners. At the end of three months, the participating companies will participate in a demo day, presenting their work to investors, mentors, company executives and the community at large.

Doctors have just discovered a previously unknown relationship between the long-term recovery of spinal cord injury victims and high blood pressure during their initial surgeries. This may seem like a small bit of medical news—though it will have immediate clinical implications—but what's important is how it was discovered in the first place.

This wasn’t the result of a new, long-term study, but a meta-analysis of $60 million worth of basic research written off as useless 20 years ago by a team of neuroscientists and statisticians led by the University of California San Francisco and partnering with the software firm Ayasdi, using mathematical and machine learning techniques that hadn’t been invented yet when the trials took place. 

When Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes agreed to be interviewed at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.D Live conference here in Laguna Beach, California, she didn’t know that the event would end up taking place a week after the Journal published an in-depth exposé charging that the company’s blood-testing system had serious problems and that it was actually using commercially available devices for much of its work.

MedImmune, a Greater Washington biotechnology cornerstone, is racing to fill the pipeline for parent AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN) with drug candidates that harness the power of the immune system, even against cancer. And it's using precision medicine to do it.

A production delay of the FluMist flu vaccine has U.K. pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca scrambling to alleviate shortages at doctors offices this flu season.

Only 5 million doses of the vaccine made by Gaithersburg-based MedImmune, the biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca PLC (NYSE: AZN), has been delivered so far this season. AstraZeneca originally said it planned to distribute 15 million doses.

Free tasty food, brightly coloured bicycles and high salaries are well-known hallmarks of the Googleplex—Google’s famed headquarters in Mountain View, California. But it was not these perks that led cardiologist Jessica Mega to pause her thriving academic career at Harvard Medical School to become the chief medical officer of the company’s life-sciences team. She was lured by the ambitions of the effort, soon to be incorporated under Google’s parent firm Alphabet. Nurtured by Google’s expertise in data analytics and engineering, the biology team is expected to create miniaturized electronic devices and to use these and other means to collect and analyse more health data, more continuously, than is possible today.

UC San Francisco (UCSF) has launched a collaboration with international pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK) to promote early-stage research with the potential to translate into new therapies for cancer, obesity and antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Through the collaboration, researchers from UCSF will work alongside GSK scientists to identify and jointly expedite promising basic research. In a shift from traditional sponsored-research agreements, the program will provide early-stage funding for validating academic discoveries that are not otherwise supported by traditional grant mechanisms.

GlaxoSmithKline and five other major drugmakers have teamed up with the UK government to launch the world’s first venture capital fund dedicated to finding new ways to prevent and treat dementia.

The Department of Health, the charity Alzheimer’s Research UK and the six pharmaceutical firms have raised $100m (£65m) to invest in early-stage, novel treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and other forms of dementia. GSK’s boss, Sir Andrew Witty, has been one of the main driving forces behind the initiative, in which the company is joined by the US drugmakers Johnson & Johnson, Biogen, Eli Lilly and Pfizer, and Japan’s Takeda.

The Seattle-based Microsoft Ventures Accelerator is a four-month program that connects startup founders with mentors and gives them the tools to help grow their business. The accelerator has 24 graduates to date, and is looking for its next class.

Specifically, Microsoft Ventures is looking for companies that focus on machine learning.

Rockville-based health care IT provider DrFirst has secured $25 million in equity financing from Goldman Sachs, elevating its raise in the last year to $42 million.

DrFirst, which specializes in electronic prescription software services, said in a news release it will use the new investment to expand sales and marketing resources. It will also develop resources for new and existing products.

Roche (SIX: RO, ROG; OTCQX: RHHBY) announced today that it has received FDA approval for the cobas® HBV and cobas® HCV viral load tests, the first assays approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use on the cobas® 6800 and cobas® 8800 Systems. The fully automated systems offer the fastest time to results, the highest throughput and the longest walk-away time available among automated molecular platforms, providing laboratories both improved operating efficiency and flexibility to adapt to changing testing needs. The new tests are the next generation of Roche's viral load tests, which clinicians use to manage the treatment of patients chronically infected with hepatitis B or hepatitis C virus.

On October 8, 2011, I said goodbye to my loved ones and didn’t know if I would ever see them again. 15 hours later I was in the ICU having become the 11th person in the United Kingdom to undergo an intestinal transplant at The Churchill Hospital, Oxford.

As part of transplant I had an ileostomy. This is where part of the intestine is brought to the outside of your body and your bodily waste is collected in a pouch known as an ostomy pouch. You lose control of the very thing you take for granted. On top of that, everyone wants access to output data and the only way of doing this is manually emptying into a jug. There had to be an alternative.

MedImmune, the biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, recently joined the Human Vaccines Project to develop vaccines and immunotherapies for infectious diseases and cancer, according to a press release.

The Human Vaccines Project aims to accelerate vaccine development by deciphering the human immune system with the support of leading academic research centers, governments and nonprofit groups.

Entrepreneur Office Hours: Get Answers Now! Two Locations: College Park and Baltimore  

Free, Open Entrepreneur Office Hours for University of Maryland Students, Faculty and Staff, and Regional Entrepreneurs with Bio or Tech-Based Startups or Ideas  

Get answers now from experienced entrepreneurs and legal/business professionals on how to build a successful startup company. Receive free and impartial advice, brainstorm business strategies, investigate funding opportunities and learn about the vast resources available to entrepreneurs.

The California Life Sciences Institute (CLSI), the non-profit partner of the California Life Sciences Association (CLSA), today formally joined forces with the Bay Area BioEconomy Initiative (BAB), a non-profit organization committed to strengthening the life science economy of the San Francisco Bay Area by fostering innovation and collaboration.

Founded in 2013, under the leadership of Tony Coles, Una Ryan, and Matthew Hudes, BAB has worked with industry, universities, investors, medical centers, health insurers and payors, high-tech companies and government to advance several key strategic imperatives to support the Bay Area life sciences industry. As a result, BAB has emerged as a new model for cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Even more than usual, fragmented and redundant digital healthcare innovation threatens to frustrate the innovation ecosystem. Dave Francis of RBC Securities put it well: “There are a lot of zombie digital health start-ups that get $1.5 million and a customer from a regional health system, and go no further.” He spoke at the October, 2015 Health 2.0 Conference.

The start-ups whose pitches I attended at Health 2.0 illustrate this point well. Out of about 35 pitches that I attended, close to half were pursuing markets that I know several other companies are also pursuing, including a dozen or so that overlapped with other companies presenting at the conference, e.g.:

PURPOSE: 65% of registration proceeds will go towards the ROAR campaign to renovate vacant & abandon Baltimore homes for families, in need.

WHEN: Tuesday, October 20, 2015 | 6:30pm-8:30pm

WHERE: Johns Hopkins East, 1101 East 33rd Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 | 3rd Floor Conference Room.

PRESENTER: Dr. Jayfus Tucker Doswell | President/CEO Juxtopia