College kids always close out the party, and Baltimore Innovation Week was no different.

Students and other members of the Johns Hopkins community worked all weekend on MedHacks. The student-run event marked the debut of the healthcare-focused hackathon, and drew more than 400 participants on more than 25 teams.

The UMD BioPark-based PathSensors, Inc. has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The award will fund the development of a multi-sample testing platform for rapid, facile identification of plant pathogens including the bacterium Ralstonia solanacearum and the widespread water mold Phytophthora. The new instrument will enhance the capabilities of the company’s CANARY® biosensors, enabling high throughput analysis of liquid and plant samples.

The award comes on the heels of a successful pilot program for screening plant imports at US Plant Inspection Stations. As part of an ongoing Material Transfer and Research Agreement with the USDA and MIT-Lincoln Laboratory, the originators of CANARY® technology, the PathSensors technology was used to analyze geranium cuttings, from countries not in the APHIS pre-clearance program, entering the US via Linden, NJ and Atlanta, GA for the select agent Ralstonia solanacearum. The bacterium, the most dangerous strain of which is endemic to Europe but has not reached the US, accounts for over $1 billion annually in economic losses to crops such as potatoes and tomatoes.

Novavax, Inc., (Nasdaq:NVAX) a clinical-stage vaccine company focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of recombinant nanoparticle vaccines and adjuvants, today announced it has been awarded a grant of up to $89 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support development of the RSV F Vaccine Phase 3 clinical trial in pregnant women, planned to initiate during the first quarter of 2016. This grant will also support regulatory licensing efforts, providing a path to WHO prequalification. Upon licensure, Novavax has agreed to make the RSV F Vaccine affordable and accessible to people in the developing world.

“Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the leading cause of pneumonia in infants, and currently there are no affordable approaches to protecting children in the developing world from this viral disease,” said Dr. Keith Klugman, Director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Pneumonia Program. “Maternal immunization may provide protective antibodies to infants during the first few months of life, and we hope this vaccine will protect infants from this disease to help them live healthy, productive lives.”

Intrexon Corporation (NYSE: XON), a leader in synthetic biology, announced today that it has entered into its first Exclusive Channel Collaboration (ECC) with a startup backed by an investment fund sponsored by Harvest Capital Strategies, LLC.  The fund is believed to be the world's first fund dedicated to the inventions and discoveries of a single company.  The collaboration with the startup entity, Thrive Agrobiotics, Inc., will seek to utilize Intrexon's ActoBiotics® platform to express nutritive proteins for improving the overall growth and feed efficiency in piglets, thereby expanding the application of this innovative biologic delivery platform to animals.

Circulomics today announced a $1.5 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to create nucleic acid extraction products based on its Nanobind technology.

The firm said in a statement that it would use the grant to develop Nanobind technologies for automated and microvolume clinical sample preparation. It is building a pipeline of chemistries to extract DNA and RNA from sample types including cultured cells, blood, and other fluids, and from pathogens.

Health care remains one of the few services that require people to have a face-to-face interaction to obtain access. But more and more consumers are questioning that reality, and change is on the way. In January 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a new provider reimbursement code for non–face-to-face health care services for patients who have chronic medical conditions. A new CMS code may seem like a tiny matter, but this one emblemizes a larger shift toward delivering health services independently of time and place, enabled by technologies such as smartphones, sensors, and wireless health-monitoring devices — what we in the field call telemedicine.

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center has created a $15 million program to develop the ideas, discoveries and inventions of its faculty and staff members into life-science technologies that can benefit patients.

The Technology Development Program will be operated by Wake Forest Baptist in partnership with Pappas Capital, a science investment firm based in Durham. Pappas Capital will manage the money for the program with Wake Forest Innovations, which is responsible for accelerating the commercialization of the specialized research capabilities for licensing to established companies or startups.

Disruption is coming for the big, regulated industries that were once investment no-nos: education, energy, healthcare and the sciences. And that’s good news for Baltimore.

At least two big trends are causing a flood of interest in these more complicated sectors.

Boston Scientific BSX, +1.51% this week announced the start of the Boston Scientific Connected Patient Challenge, an open innovation contest designed to encourage advancements in the use of remote patient monitoring to enhance patient care. Until January 5, 2016, clinicians, engineers, designers and entrepreneurs can submit their ideas and collaborate on solutions through Medstro's social networking site (www.Medstro.com).

The Boston Scientific Connected Patient Challenge is seeking submissions designed to improve patient care and/or drive down the cost of health care through the use of remote patient monitoring technologies such as wearable, implantable or ubiquitous sensors, with a preference for innovations in the management of the flow of data and the decision making process. Finalists will be honored at a live event in Cambridge, MA where they will present their ideas to the Challenge sponsors, fellow participants and a live audience. Up to $25,000 of services in kind may be divided among Challenge winners to further develop or pilot their ideas.

An FDA decision summary released today allows DNA-testing company 23andMe to market a genome test that screens for Bloom syndrome, a rare disorder that leads to a predisposition in carriers toward the development of cancer. In February, the FDA announced it would approved the Bloom test, but 23andMe was unable to begin marketing these tests until today's detailed regulations and guidelines were announced. While, on the surface, this may seem like a minor change in policy, it is significant given the complex relationship the FDA has had with 23andMe over the last two years.

If you end up near the Baltimore Convention Center this week, you may notice crowds of people carrying black and teal tote bags. The American Society of Human Genetics is meeting there through Saturday, bringing 8,000 researchers, clinicians and ethicists from more than 60 countries to the city.

We are thrilled to bring our annual meeting back to Baltimore (our most visited venue), where research of all kinds has a long history and still thrives today. Last year, Baltimore institutions including Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland Medical School received more than $800 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — providing a beacon of hope not just for the residents of Baltimore but the entire world. Thanks to funding from NIH, the National Science Foundation and other federal science agencies, Hopkins is ranked number one among all U.S. institutions for research and development expenditures — and has been for 35 straight years.

GE Ventures (NYSE:GE) and health innovation company StartUp Health said they plan to expand their partnership to invest and support startups in the healthcare innovation sector.

The expansion will allow the partners to accept 10 new qualified companies into their “StartUp Health Academy” program. The 2 companies originally launched their startup focused partnership program in 2013 with 15 consumer health companies.

Patient engagement company GetWellNetwork is taking a crack at re-envisioning healthcare with the introduction of the Interactive Care Model for nursing, a five-phase plan to create patient-centric care delivery systems.

“This new model rethinks care delivery and includes measurement of a person’s capacity to engage in his/her health,” representatives of Bethesda, Maryland-based GetWellNetwork’s O’Neil Center wrote in an article published in the October issue of the Journal of Nursing Administration. The O’Neil Center is tasked with supporting “integration of patient and family engagement into healthcare delivery across the care continuum,” according to GetWellNetwork.

In the fall of 2014, the HBS-HMS Forum on Health Care Innovation launched the inaugural Health Acceleration Challenge — a “scale up” competition that focuses on compelling solutions to problems in health care delivery that have already been implemented at a small scale and have the potential for wider dissemination.

The contest produced some useful innovations. Many of them are easily adoptable by other organizations, proving our assertion that there is no shortage of innovations in health care; rather the problem is that they take too long to be adopted by others.

DATE: October 14, 2015 TIME: 3:30 - 5:00 PM

LOCATION: Montgomery County Department of Economic Development, 111 Rockville Pike, Suite 800, Rockville, MD 20850

PRESENTER: Ami Gadhia, J.D., LLM, CLP, Portfolio Director, Technology Licensing, Office of Technology Transfer, The Johns Hopkins University, and  Dinesh Melwani, Esq., Partner, Bookoff McAndrews, PLLC     

ABSTRACT: Ms. Gadhia and Mr. Melwani will discuss Intellectual Property (IP) Licensing Strategies, including technology transfer considerations relating to corporations, universities, and startups. They will provide an overview of the technology transfer function between academia and industry, and the collaborative relationship technology transfer fosters between universities, corporations, and startups.  Our speakers will discuss exemplary contentious issues (including prosecution of patents, improvements based on collaboration, publication, and financial terms), the reasons these issues are typically contentious, and potential solutions for bridging the gap and closing the licensing deal.

BD Life Sciences, a segment of BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) (NYSE: BDX), a leading global medical technology company, and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) have entered into a Corporate Partners Sponsorship Agreement for the university’s business accelerator program, FastForward, which serves as a catalyst for the advancement and commercialization of an array of innovations derived both at the university and elsewhere in Baltimore.

Through the sponsorship, BD will have access to the FastForward innovation hubs including FastForward East in the John G. Rangos Sr. Building located in close proximity to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, as well as the flagship hospital. As a FastForward sponsor, BD will support programs that can accelerate business startup efforts, host social networking events, hold round-table discussions and workshops, and offer lectures on areas likely to be of interest to the startups.

This November, Alexandria LaunchLabs™ will open its doors to local, cutting-edge life science startups at 708 Quince Orchard Road in Gaithersburg, MD.

Alexandria LaunchLabs was created by a consortium of world-class partners to fill a specific unmet need in the market for early-stage life science companies. The consortium, which includes Alexandria Venture Investments (the strategic venture capital arm of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc.), BioHealth Innovation, Montgomery County, and the City of Gaithersburg, recognized that in addition to providing early-stage life science companies with specialized state-of-the-art lab and office space, access to first- class supporting resources, services, and capital, is critical for innovation and growth. As such, consortium members will extend their respective networks to Alexandria LaunchLabs’ tenants, while BioHealth Innovation will provide access to its Startup and Entrepreneur-in-Residence programs. Additionally, co-location will provide a collaborative ecosystem in which tenants will be able to further assist one another in identifying resources and sharing best practices. The creative startup environment fostered at Alexandria LaunchLabs will dramatically accelerate the growth of local early-stage life science companies.

A giant sign reading “Made in America” loomed over Shelly Blake-Plock. In front of him was a group of investors from some of Maryland’s top venture capital firms.

But the founder of Baltimore big data firm Yet Analytics was looking beyond both the state and the country.

“I want to create a big company that makes big change in the world,” he said emphatically.

UK drug major GlaxoSmithKline (LSE: GSK) has created an Immunology Network, aiming to link GSK’s work to that of academic scientists focusing on immunology research.

The company is already working with a board of academics who are experts in immunology, and is launching the Immunology Catalyst as a new phase of this initiative. Researchers from GSK will learn new skills from external immunology experts, and these academics will be able to continue their own research while having access to GSK’s technology and learning about pharma research and development. Over the next year, six experts are expected to set up research labs at the GSK facility in Stevenage, UK. After the formal sabbatical has come to an end, collaboration will continue between GSK and the academics.

With $15 million in hand, TCP Venture Capital partners Christopher College and Stuart Sutley look to foster Baltimore’s budding technology scene by investing in 10 to 12 new Baltimore-based startups within the next 12 to 18 months, College tells DC Inno. Those companies, who may be caught between a seed and series A funding round, could each receive anywhere between a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars to help accelerate their growth.

The Columbia, Md.-based institutional investors have raised a new fund, called the Propel II fund, to capitalize off the success of their previous fund, the Propel I fund, which helped support a number of high growth potential Baltimore tech companies—including edtech powerhouse CiteLighter, rising cybersecurity star RedOwl Analytics and eco-friendly product developer Bambeco.

Chris College

On a visit to a clinic in rural India, Carolyn Yarina saw a need for a device that can separate blood into plasma and white and red cells — without electricity to power a centrifuge.

In a West African hospital, her business partner Gillian Henker watched as doctors used what was essentially a cup to collect and reuse blood from internal bleeding after running out of expensive bags of donor blood.

The University of Maryland today announced that the Board of Regents of the University System of Maryland (USM) has approved the naming of UMD’s Mathematics building in honor of William E. “Brit” Kirwan. His highly distinguished 51-year career in public higher education includes 13 years as USM Chancellor and 35 years at the University of Maryland, where he rose from assistant professor of mathematics to department chair and eventually to UMD president. 

The Mathematics building located on Campus Drive will be named William E. Kirwan Hall.

The National Institutes of Health and the Kavli Foundation separately announced today (Oct. 1, 2015) commitments totaling $185 million in new funds supporting the BRAIN Initiative* — research aimed at deepening our understanding of the brain and brain-related disorders, such as traumatic brain injuries (TBI), Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.

The NIH announced today its second wave of grants to support the goals of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, bringing the total NIH investment to nearly $85 million in fiscal year 2015.

As a New York City based entrepreneur, I've been excited to watch as the Big Apple has become the epicenter for innovation on the East Coast. While I mentioned that another industry might be having the biggest 2015, funding for healthcare startups have grown significantly over the past two years. According to a report by Rock Health, over $2 billion has already been invested into health care tech companies this year with a lot of this activity happening locally. In New York, there's an extremely diverse mix of innovators including accelerators, startups and hospitals.

Here's a glimpse of some great organizations that are paving the way for the future of health care.

Among a host of new laws that took effect in Maryland on Thursday is a measure that transfers control of the Maryland Venture Fund to the purview of TEDCO.

The changes result in a consolidation of two of the state’s largest early-stage economic development arms under TEDCO, a quasi-public agency that makes investments in startups.

Baltimore education technology company Citelighter and data analysis firm Yet Analytics were crowned the winners of the Beta City pitch competition.

The pitch day was the kickoff event for Beta City, the Oct. 1 entrepreneurship showcase organized by Betamore and Plank Industries, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank’s private investment arm. Beta City also served as the public debut for Plank Industries’ City Garage, the 133,000-square foot former city bus garage converted to an innovation hub for Under Armour and technology startups.

University of Maryland Research Park today takes home top honors as the Association of University Research Parks' 2015 Outstanding Research Park, at the AURP Annual Awards of Excellence, hosted by Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. This award program recognizes the achievements of outstanding university research parks and those who direct them, and encourages the development of best practices.

The UM Research Park is a public-private partnership between Corporate Office Properties Trust and the University of Maryland (UMD). UMD works with all Research Park companies to provide synergistic and collaborative opportunities. The Research Park offers locations from incubator space for start up companies to build-to-suit options for larger technology clients.

The Kavli Foundation and its university partners announced this morning the founding of three new neuroscience institutes, including one at Johns Hopkins. The new Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute at The Johns Hopkins University, expected to launch in early 2016, will bring an interdisciplinary group of researchers together to investigate the workings of the brain.

The Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute, to be funded by a joint $20 million commitment by Kavli and Johns Hopkins, is designed to integrate neuroscience, engineering, and data science—three fields in which the university has long excelled—to understand the relationship between the brain and behavior.

Whether you care about the emphasis on entrepreneurship or the money, AOL co-founder Steve Case’s Sept. 28 visit was big for Baltimore.

This week Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), the largest and leading office REIT uniquely focused on collaborative science and technology campuses in urban innovation clusters, hosted Converge at Alexandria at the Alexandria Center® for Life Science – New York City. Converge at Alexandria is a quarterly thought leadership series that brings together stakeholders from across the disease continuum to engage in provocative discussions around key topics at the intersection of life science, healthcare and technology. By convening academic and industry experts, community leaders, physicians, patients, philanthropists and other advocates, Converge at Alexandria aims to bring these key issues to the forefront to catalyze new collaborations and partnerships. Surrounded by world-renowned academic and medical institutions, leading scientific talent, top-tier investment capital and an emerging commercial life science industry, New York City provides a unique backdrop for the Converge community to explore the intersection of life science, healthcare and technological innovation.

Before Nick Hanauer was a Seattle billionaire and political activist, he was an early investor in Amazon. Now, he says the city’s next big thing is curing cancer.

Hanauer called out Juno Therapeutic’s (Nasdaq: JUNO) innovative immunotherapy cancer treatments during the GeekWire Summit in Seattle on Thursday. The treatments involve engineering patients’ cells to better battle disease and infusing those blood cells back into the body.

“We are Commerce.”

You’re going to see those three simple words from us a lot in the coming weeks. We are Commerce.

We are marking our transition to the Department of Commerce from the Department of Business and Economic Development today, but this isn’t just about some fresh letterhead and a new logo. (Check it out, it’s really sharp.) This is a cause for some excitement. Our move to Commerce is rooted in a sentiment that has long been pervasive through Maryland’s business community — we can be better. We should be better. We’d better be better if we’re going to compete in the 21st Century.

The U.S. health care system is one in which price gouging is completely legal and cost inflation is out of control. According to a recent study from the Institute of Medicine, 30% of U.S. health care bills are waste, and if food-price inflation since 1945 matched that of health care, today we would be paying $55 for a dozen eggs. New doctors enter systems where financial incentives are in treating people as needed rather than keeping them healthy, and where legacy programs have no good reason to change.

On Sept. 30, former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Chief Technology Officer Bryan Sivak announced on Twitter that he has joined the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

Sivak became the CTO for D.C. in 2009 before becoming the CIO of Maryland and then CTO for DHHS. Sivak announced his departure from DHHS earlier this year.

Back in 2010, in a landmark analyst note (not exactly a phrase we hear very often), Andrew Baum, then at Morgan Stanley MS +0.00%, observed that while many pharma companies were ostensibly trying to discover and develop drugs, most weren’t very good at it and, and should probably stop. Instead, he suggested, they should shift from R&D to “S&D” – “Search and Develop” – and seek to in-license promising early-stage (or late-stage) products that innovative biotechs were making.