Vaxin Inc. today announced that it has added key patents to its expanding Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio. The clinical stage vaccine and immunotherapeutics company confirmed that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued a Notice of Allowance for two patents that protect important elements of its Densigen platform technology for immunotherapeutic treatment of Hepatitis B virus infection, and its RespirVec non-invasive adenoviral vector influenza vaccine. The patents include U.S. Application Serial No. 13/977,265 (the ‘265 application) entitled “Fluorocarbon-Linked Peptide Formulation”, and U.S. Application Serial No. 13/426,037 (the ‘037 application) entitled “Rapid and Prolonged Immunologic-Therapeutic”.

A Notice of Allowance is issued after the USPTO makes a determination that a patent can be granted from an application. Vaxin now has 37 patents protecting its products in 13 countries.

The University of Maryland students who join the Startup Shell incubator are all working hard to turn their ideas into successful businesses. As the new executive director of Startup Shell, 20-year-old Chris Szeluga is working just as hard to help make that possible. Now in his third year at UMd, the finance major has been involved in helping grow Startup Shell since it began, during his freshman year. His new role puts a new responsibilities on him though, making Startup Shell rather more than just a club or hobby.

"I consider Startup Shell to be pretty much my full-time job," Szeluga said. "I definitely spend at least 30 to 40 hours a week working on it in some way."

Since Medicaid's creation in 1965, it's become the largest health insurer in the country, covering more than 70 million Americans. Initially covering only poor, single parents and their children, the program now also offers government-subsidized insurance to disabled people, able-bodied adults without kids and some elderly.

The program's expansion may slow down a bit, but it’s not likely to stop anytime soon, and there’s a whole lot of reform going on, along with major shifts in coverage.

It was Coney Island in the early 1900’s. Beyond the Four-Legged Woman, the sword swallowers, and “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” was an entirely different exhibit: rows of tiny, premature human babies living in glass incubators.

Barkers, including a young Cary Grant, called out to passersby, enticing visitors to come see the preemies.

The White House is getting ready to honor five years since the creation of Challenge.gov — the central web portal for government competitions intended to spur innovation and solve problems — with a forward-looking celebration.

Touting the $72 million in prizes awarded across 400 challenges in the last five years, the Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a special event this fall that will highlight some of the major breakthroughs and civic issues solved through the program.

Synthetic Biologics, Inc. (nyse mkt:SYN), a clinical-stage company focused on developing therapeutics to protect the microbiome while targeting pathogen-specific diseases, today announced that it has commenced an underwritten public offering of shares of its common stock. All of the shares in the offering are to be sold by Synthetic Biologics. The Company intends to grant the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 15 percent of the share amount sold to cover over-allotments, if any. The offering is subject to market conditions, and there can be no assurance as to whether or when the offering may be completed, or as to the actual size or terms of the offering.

Jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) represent some of the best opportunities for workers in today’s economy. The work can be rewarding as well as coming with high pay and good benefits (like a 401(k) and health insurance). Diversity in STEM, however is a problem, one that has captured the attention of CEOs like Jeff Bezos and policymakers including the president himself.

The truism about biopharma being a global industry has never been truer than when it comes to the top 20 IPOs for the first half of this year.

The U.S. had exactly half of the therapeutic, diagnostics, and tools/tech IPOs that were completed or began trading their first shares on public markets during January-June 2015. The rest of the world accounted for the other half, with Europe being home to seven of the 10 ex-U.S. top IPOs, followed by China, Canada, and Bermuda with one each.

I’m a huge fan of R&D collaborations between pharma and academia, so I should be thrilled by Sanofi’s latest tie-up with seven top-tier centers – so why do I have mixed feelings?

On first glance, there’s a lot to like: Sanofi has committed $2.4M per year to seven top centers, including Johns Hopkins, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Columbia, to fund about 20-25 seed projects annually, with no strings attached and a wide-open scope. Who knows what will emerge – but it won’t take much for this to look like a pretty good investment for Sanofi.

Funding and Research Opportunities

The following funding opportunity announcements from the NHLBI or other components of the National Institutes of Health, might be of interest:

Notices:

• Request for Information (RFI): Inviting Comments and Suggestions on the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program (the National Children's Study Alternative)
• (NOT-OD-15-117) National Institutes of Health 

Request for Applications:

• Collaborative Projects to Accelerate Research in Organ Fibrosis (R01) 
• (RFA-HL-16-003)
• National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
• Application Receipt Date(s): October 22, 2015 and October 21, 2016, by 5:00 PM local time of applicant organization.
• Sickle Cell Disease Implementation Consortium (SCDIC): Using Implementation Science to Optimize Care of Adolescents and Adults with Sickle Cell Disease (U01)
• (RFA-HL-16-010)
• National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
• Application Receipt Date(s): November 12, 2015
• Data Coordinating Center for Sickle Cell Disease Implementation Consortium (SCDIC): Using Implementation Science to Optimize Care of Adolescents and Adults with Sickle Cell Disease (U24)
• (RFA-HL-16-011)
• National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
• Application Receipt Date(s): November 12, 2015
• Facile Methods and Technologies for Synthesis of Biomedically Relevant Carbohydrates (U01)
• (RFA-RM-15-007)
• NIH Roadmap Initiatives
• Application Receipt Date(s): October 15, 2015
• Novel and Innovative Tools to Facilitate Identification, Tracking, Manipulation, and Analysis of Glycans and their Functions (R21)
• (RFA-RM-15-008)
• NIH Roadmap Initiatives
• Application Receipt Date(s): October 15, 2015
• Novel and Innovative Tools to Facilitate Identification, Tracking, Manipulation, and Analysis of Glycans and their Functions (U01)
• (RFA-RM-15-009)
• NIH Roadmap Initiatives
• Application Receipt Date(s): October 15, 2015

Please note that most links to RFAs, PAs, and Guide Notices will take you to the NIH Web site. RFPs will take you to FedBizOpps. Links to RFPs will not work past their proposal receipt date. Archived versions of RFPs posted on FedBizOpps can be found on the FedBizOpps site using the FedBizOpps search function. Under “Document to Search,” select Archived Documents.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) awards a two-year $19.7M contract to Emergent Biosystems (NYSE:EBS) to develop and manufacture cGMP (current good manufacturing practice) lots of three Ebola monoclonal antibodies in CHO (Chinese hamster ovary) cell lines at a scale of 2,000 liters.

American companies continued to attract eye-watering sums of money from venture capitalists in the last quarter, according to a report released Friday.

U.S. firms picked up more than $17 billion in 1,189 deals through the second quarter of 2015, the highest amount since 2000, according to the report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, which is based on data from Thomson Reuters.

Last fall, David Narrow and his colleagues reached a critical juncture in the development of their fledgling medical technology company, Sonavex. As Narrow puts it, their brainchild needed nurturing, and a suitable—and affordable—environment for it to happen in.

The company's core concept, he says, was worth the TLC. Narrow and Johns Hopkins Hospital plastic surgeon resident Devin O'Brien Coon, who met while studying in Johns Hopkins' biomedical engineering graduate program in the Whiting School's Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design, had identified a clinical problem that needed addressing. Each year, more than 550,000 people in the United States undergo medical procedures—soft-tissue reconstruction, organ transplants, bypass surgeries—in which arteries or veins are surgically connected, exposing the patient to the risk of a blood clot. Detecting the clot in a timely manner, before it blocks the vessels and leads to catastrophic complications, becomes paramount. What's needed, Narrow says, is a real-time clot-monitoring device that can be used by nurses post-surgery.

Symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease include tremor, muscle stiffness, and slowed movement that make it difficult to execute such simple tasks as holding an eating utensil steady, and patients currently have few options for relief outside of a hospital or clinic. Some medications can help, but over time they tend to become less effective. To give Parkinson’s patients another in-home option, a research team of Johns Hopkins University graduate students have invented a headband-shaped device that delivers noninvasive brain stimulation to help suppress symptoms.

The May 15 groundbreaking ceremony for Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures’ new FastForward East location at 1812 Ashland Ave. was about more than just the much-needed additional space the new location will provide the innovation hub.

The ceremony represented the robust growth of the Johns Hopkins innovation culture that is driving economic development in Baltimore, and it signified Baltimore’s strong prospects for becoming a home for tech-savvy companies, offering a wide range of new jobs to Baltimore residents and cultivating a booming, technology-based economy.

Johns Hopkins works not only to foster startups whose products have the potential to improve the well-being of people all over the world, but also to produce savvy investors with business acumen and a strong sense of market dynamics.

Earlier this year, a team of Johns Hopkins University graduate student investors-in-training won the Entrepreneurs’ Choice award at the 2015 mid-Atlantic regional final of the Global Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC), during which judges evaluate the competencies of teams of student venture capitalists.

The Francis Crick Institute, the UK’s newest biomedical research facility, and GSK, the UK’s largest pharmaceutical company, are to partner on an open innovation collaboration exploring new avenues of medical research and drug discovery across a broad range of diseases, with a view to achieving breakthroughs in the understanding of human disease.

This is the first collaboration to be established between the Crick and a pharmaceutical company.

Researchers who are developing miniature models of human organs on plastic chips have touted the nascent technology as a way to replace animal models. Although that goal is still far off, it is starting to come into focus as large pharmaceutical companies begin using these in vitro systems in drug development.

“We are pretty excited about the interest we get from pharma,” says Paul Vulto, co-founder of the biotechnology company Mimetas in Leiden, the Netherlands. “It’s much quicker than I’d expected.” His company is currently working with a consortium of three large pharmaceutical companies that are testing drugs on Mimetas’s kidney-on-a-chip. At the Organ-on-a-Chip World Congress in Boston, Massachusetts, last week, Mimetas was one among many drug and biotechnology firms and academic researchers showing off the latest advances in miniature model organs that respond to drugs and diseases in the same way that human organs such as heart and liver do.

Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, and United Therapeutics Corporation (NASDAQ: UTHR) today announced a collaboration to build and operate a lung restoration center on the Mayo campus. The goal is to significantly increase the volume of lungs for transplantation by preserving and restoring selected marginal donor lungs, making them viable for transplantation. The restored lungs will be made available to patients at Mayo Clinic and other transplant centers throughout the United States.

Sharath Mekala’s two-person tech startup isn’t a textbook government contractor.

Village Defense, spawned through a startup incubator called 1776, develops a free app that lets neighbors send real-time alerts to one another if they notice suspicious activity. A premium version, which costs $125 a month, is designed for homeowners associations.

William (Brit) Kirwan has been a top university administrator over nearly three decades of vast change in higher education.

During that time he's seen the rise of online learning, a change in the funding dynamic of public colleges, an increased emphasis on obtaining a college education and much, much more. The 77-year-old Kirwan retired last month from his 13-year chancellorship of the University System of Maryland.

Conventional wisdom has long blamed age-related hearing loss almost entirely on the death of sensory hair cells in the inner ear, but research from neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins has provided new information about the workings of nerve cells that suggests otherwise.

In a paper published July 1 in The Journal of Neuroscience, the Johns Hopkins team says its studies in mice have verified an increased number of connections between certain sensory cells and nerve cells in the inner ear of aging mice. Because these connections normally tamp down hearing when an animal is exposed to loud sound, the scientists think these new connections could also be contributing to age-related hearing loss in the mice, and possibly in humans.

We are excited to be returning to Growlers in Gaithersburg this month for BioBuzz MoCo with our Sponsor Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII), a TEDCO program, as we host one of their “Meet TEDCO Program Managers Happy Hour“. The networking event will feature a short presentation followed by happy hour allowing you to network with program managers and your peers. MII is designed to foster the transition of promising technologies with significant commercial potential from the Maryland academic research institutions: Johns Hopkins, Morgan State, and University of Maryland College Park, Baltimore and Baltimore County campuses. The program is designed to promote commercialization of research conducted in the partnership universities and to leverage each institution’s strengths.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly today in favor of a bipartisan bill that would speed the development of lifesaving drugs and medical devices and provide additional funding for biomedical research.

The bill, called the 21st Century Cures Act, includes provisions that attempt to make the drug approval process less unwieldy and also calls for an additional $8.75 billion in funding for the National Institutes of Health. The bill passed by a 344-77 vote on Friday morning; it now moves to the Senate.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) has provided critical contributions to critical challenges with systems engineering and integration, technology research and development, and analysis. Our scientists, engineers, and analysts serve as trusted advisors and technical experts to the government, ensuring the reliability of complex technologies that safeguard our nation’s security and advance the frontiers of space. We also maintain independent research and development programs that pioneer and explore emerging technologies and concepts to address future national priorities.

GlaxoSmithKline is bringing on board the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Centre to work on a programme aimed at eradicating cancer stem cells to treat leukaemia and other diseases.  

The bench-to-bedside project is part of GSK’s Discovery Partnerships with Academia programme, where academic partners become core members of drug-discovery teams to expedite promising basic research into drug discovery and development.

This morning as the House considers H.R. 6, the 21st Century Cures Act, more than 100 patient groups and organizations are voicing their support for the bill’s Innovation Fund to help boost research and support scientists. Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) has led this effort for a year and a half, keeping patients at the forefront from the beginning. Speaking in support of the bill last night, Upton said, “There is not a single person in this chamber or watching at home today who has not been touched by disease in some way. And it’s time we did something about it.” H.R. 6 is that something. The patient groups listed below voiced their opposition to any attempts to undermine these investments.

Learn about the Target Product Profile (TPP) – a tool used by many biomedical innovators to define, stage, and allocate resources to different aspects of product development work, to frame discussions with stakeholder groups, and to track regulatory interactions and milestones.

Ask questions via the chat window during the live event!

Dina Link may not be a household name, but she holds one of the most important jobs in the American economy: high school science teacher. At Northwest High School in Germantown, Md., she helps mold the next generation of scientists so that they can compete for jobs in an economy dominated by science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.

Tuesday, July 14th, 12 p.m. ET

In Silicon Valley, Big Data drives decisions. In health care, half the country runs on paper charts. In Silicon Valley, the biggest tech companies collaborate to drive innovation. In health care, applications barely talk to each other.

According to athenahealth EVP and COO, Ed Park, that needs to change. In this special webinar event, he’ll discuss:

BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) and Guidepoint today announced BD & Guidepoint Mentor, a new program providing selected start-up healthcare companies with free access to Guidepoint's expert network services.

BD is currently mentoring several start-ups that are developing cutting-edge technologies to improve healthcare delivery and outcomes and, with the help of a dedicated Guidepoint research manager, each start-up entrepreneur will be able to directly engage with industry experts across the entire healthcare ecosystem, gaining insights that help them shape their strategic plans.

Baltimore gene analysis firm Personal Genome Diagnostics Inc. has raised $4.32 million in a larger financing round underway.

The new funding is a convertible note that is part of a Series A financing round the company expects to complete later this year. Officials declined to give details about investors, the total amount the company seeks to raise or a timeline for closing the round.

Southern Research has been awarded a seven-year contract of up to $22 million to support research that could contribute to the cure of HIV disease. Under this contract, Southern Research will develop and standardize assays that quantitate latent reservoirs of HIV.

“This is a revolutionary area in HIV research that is opening up new avenues for us in infectious diseases,” said Southern Research President and CEO Art Tipton, Ph.D. “It supports our 24-year legacy in HIV drug discovery and development for government and pharmaceutical clients.”

The Government of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea announced an agreement with industry partners, Marathon Oil Corporation, Noble Energy Inc. and AMPCO, to sponsor the clinical development of Sanaria® PfSPZ Vaccine against malaria, including a series of clinical trials from 2015 until 2018.

Malaria is one of the leading causes of infant and childhood mortality in the world, particularly in Africa. The World Health Organization estimated that in 2013 there were 198 million clinical cases and 584,000 deaths caused by malaria, primarily by Plasmodium falciparum malaria. Malaria directly reduces the Gross Domestic Product of African countries by at least 1 percent annually. This economic impact is estimated based on lives lost, healthcare costs, reduced learning capabilities by students, loss of worker productivity, and a range of other factors.

Trophogen, Inc., a U.S.-based emerging biotechnology company founded in 2001, today announced that it was awarded the second year of its Phase 2 Fast Track component of $756,000 for a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop novel VEGF analogs for targeted imaging of undifferentiated thyroid cancer. The two principal investigators, Dr. Mariusz W. Szkudlinski, Vice-President & CSO and Dr. Bruce D. Weintraub, President and CEO, have now brought their total NIH and FDA highly competitive SBIR funded grants to 10 for a total of nearly $10 million.