ASTRAZENECA has paid $250m for the rights to develop an antibody that could help in the fight against cancer.

The pharmaceutical firm's research and development arm MedImmune, which is based in Cambridge, has entered into an agreement with Innate Pharma that will allow it exclusive access to the company's anti-NKG2A antibody.

Real estate firms, which have traditionally been slow to innovate, are beginning to embrace new technologies to find clever solutions to old problems. This newfound openness comes as millennials start to enter the workforce, creating a need for tools that appeal to a tech-savvy customer base.

“It’s pretty fascinating when you think about we’re 75 percent millennials in maybe a dozen years. Clearly technology’s going to have an incredibly important impact on real estate; the operation of real estate and what the tenants do and how they do it,” said Joel Marcus, the CEO of Alexandria Real Estate Properties, an REIT that specializes in science campuses.

Among this year’s Mentors-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures are a senior-level biomedical executive, a chief executive at a company developing novel treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, a two-time medical device industry Most Valuable Thought Leader and an American Pain Foundation chairperson.

These are just four of the 14 entrepreneurial leaders serving at Johns Hopkins as Mentors-in-Residence in 2015, the second year of the program. All 14 mentors this year are business leaders, entrepreneurs and development-driven experts with a passion for innovation and growth.

Since 2003, the Johns Hopkins Alliance for Science and Technology Development has brought faculty members and investors together for an annual daylong meeting to foster important biotechnical and pharmaceutical developments.

This year, 14 faculty members or teams of faculty members from The Johns Hopkins University and seven from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, presented work, as did eight startups affiliated with each university. Four Johns Hopkins University researchers received monetary awards for translational development of their inventions at the April 20 annual joint meeting of the alliance and the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Commercial Advisory Board.

United States-based New Enterprise Associates (NEA), which last week raised $3.1 billion in the world's largest venture capital fund, is looking to step up investments in India after going slow over the past two-three years. The venture capital fund, which has backed start-ups such as daily deals firm Groupon and online storage service Box in the US, has said that it will look to sharpen its focus on technology related themes.

Wed, May 6, 2015 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

This is an educational webinar on the NHLBI Phase IIB Bridge and Small Market funding opportunities to support continued development of SBIR/STTR Phase II projects focused on heart, lung, blood, or sleep technologies. The Small Market Awards support projects focused on rare diseases or for pediatric indications.

Phase IIB Bridge RFA-HL-16-009: http://1.usa.gov/1Deb9h5 Phase IIB Small Market RFA-HL-14-012: http://1.usa.gov/1p2cvbi

Presenters: Jennifer Shieh, PhD - NHLBI Small Business Coordinator Gary Robinson, PhD - NHLBI Business Development Advisor

The University of Maryland (UMD) and MakerBot, a global leader in the desktop 3D printing industry, will be holding a grand opening of the new MakerBot Innovation Center at UMD on April 23, 2015. UMD is the first in the Big Ten, and the first in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan area, to launch a MakerBot Innovation Center – a large-scale 3D printing installation that is designed to empower university faculty, students and organizations to innovate faster, increase collaboration and compete more effectively. Grand opening festivities will begin at 2:00 p.m., Thursday, April 23, at the University of Maryland, Technology Advancement Program Building, 387 Technology Drive, College Park, Maryland, with speeches from university staff and representatives from MakerBot.

Virginia will create a new online portal where researchers can post information about their biotech projects — information employers can then use for recruitment and investment opportunities, Gov. Terry McAuliffe said Thursday.

It’s among several specific investments the state needs to make to create a stronger life sciences industry, McAuliffe said. He was at the THRiVE 2015 conference, which attracted 350 bioscience leaders from across the state, to talk about how to better merge the commonwealth’s strength in big data with its growing biotech industry. The portal was among multiple ideas raised by an eager group of business leaders who sought more support from the state in their efforts to commercialize their work.

George Mason University unveiled its new $40 million Advanced Biomedical Research building Thursday, signaling its expansion in genomics and precision medicine research.

The university simultaneously renamed its Manassas campus its Science and Technology campus.

How much venture capital money is out there for healthcare start-ups?

Apparently, quite a bit.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, medical start-ups in the United States raised around $3.9 billion in venture capital during the first quarter of this year. Here are eight key trends from the report:

The University of Louisville announced today that a grant from the National Institutes of Health will combine with matching funds from the university to create a new $6.1 million initiative to commercialize discoveries made by UofL researchers.

UofL is one of just three institutions in the United States selected as a Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hub (REACH) by the NIH. The REACH award consists of $3 million over three years matched by an additional $3.1 million from UofL.

Pharmaceutical company Teva has offered to buy fellow drug maker Mylan in a deal that could be worth $40 billion.

In the proposal, confirmed yesterday (April 21), Teva offered Mylan $82 per share.

Last week, Mylan’s executive chairman Robert Coury dismissed rumours of a merger with Israel-based Teva.

The Food and Drug Administration is making as much as $1 million in grant funding available for mining a large database of electronic health records to conduct postmarket surveillance of drug safety.

The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) will award a one-year grant by summer to a single bidder to develop “new analytic methodologies” to look for signs of pharmaceutical-related safety problems in the Mini-Sentinel Distributed Database, an FDA-funded pilot with access to 178 million medical records.

CORE PROGRAM APPLICATION  DEADLINE 5 PM, FRIDAY, MAY 1ST  

The Core Program is Leadership Montgomery’s (LM) hallmark program. It is a highly interactive and life-enriching nine-month course that makes a significant contribution to Montgomery County’s well-being by providing intensive hands-on study and in-depth discussion of current issues facing the County, including, transportation, education, public safety, business, planning, economic development, communities diversity and the arts. Click here to read about a session. Click here to see the session agendas.

A hallmark of Parkinson's disease is the progressive loss of nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons. We derived human neuroepithelial cells from induced pluripotent stem cells and successfully differentiated them into dopaminergic neurons within phase-guided, three-dimensional microfluidic cell culture bioreactors. After 30 days of differentiation within the microfluidic bioreactors, in situ morphological, immunocytochemical and calcium imaging confirmed the presence of dopaminergic neurons that were spontaneously electrophysiologically active, a characteristic feature of nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons in vivo. Differentiation was as efficient as in macroscopic culture, with up to 19% of differentiated neurons immunoreactive for tyrosine hydroxylase, the penultimate enzyme in the synthesis of dopamine. This new microfluidic cell culture model integrates the latest innovations in developmental biology and microfluidic cell culture to generate a biologically realistic and economically efficient route to personalised drug discovery for Parkinson's disease.

What if the answer to reducing health costs of the most expensive patients stems from listening to the hunches of home care workers with little — if any — medical training?

That’s the premise tech startup Care at Hand Inc. used to predict and prevent an estimated $6.5 million in Medicare spending by reducing hospitalizations among aging patients in Massachusetts.

The City of New York Early-Stage Life Sciences Funding Initiative represents an unprecedented public-private partnership across world-class academic institutions, industry leaders, top-tier investors, and the philanthropic community.

Established by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) with at least $50 million in matching funds from top-tier venture capital partners including Celgene Corporation, GE Ventures, and Eli Lilly & Company, the funding partnership will deploy a minimum of $150 million and seeks to launch 15 to 20 breakthrough ventures by 2020.

The Qiagen campus in Germantown is large, open and modern looking.

Its 25-acre site on Germantown Road houses a mostly glass office building connected to a newer addition that provides space for manufacturing and packaging the company’s biotech products.

NO one who lived through the 1990s would have suspected that one day people would look back on the period as a golden age of bipartisan cooperation. But in some important ways, it was. Amid the policy fights that followed the Republican victories of 1994, President Bill Clinton and the new majorities in Congress reached one particularly good deal: doubling the budget for the National Institutes of Health.

The decision was bipartisan, because health is both a moral and financial issue. Government spends more on health care than any other area. Taxpayers spend more than $1 trillion a year for Medicare and Medicaid alone, and even more when you add in programs like Veterans Affairs, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Indian Health Service.

The life sciences community presented a vision this week in which the Washington, DC region becomes a top 3 biotech hub by 2023. What role will economic development incentives play in achieving this status?

Industry, academic, nonprofit, investment and government partners participated in the Regional Biotech Forum: Growing Our Ecosystem, a program spearheaded by BioHealth Innovation, AstraZeneca, MedImmune and the Tech Council of Maryland and supported by BioMaryland, Virginia Bio, Montgomery County, MD among others.

From Christy Wyskiel,Senior Advisor to the President, Johns Hopkins University

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that Neil Veloso will join Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures as the executive director of technology transfer, effective May 18, 2015.

Neil has extensive experience in technology transfer and commercialization. He has spent the last nine years of his career in a variety of roles at Cleveland Clinic Innovations (CCI) in Ohio. Currently, he is serving as the senior director of innovation management, a role in which he directs technology commercialization at Cleveland Clinic and at seven of CCI's Innovation Alliance Partners. In this role, Neil focuses on commercialization strategy across a broad portfolio of both academic and hospital system assets. He manages a team that advises inventors, administers intellectual property, and promotes commercialization through licensing, new venture creation and the development of industry partnerships. Neil's collaborative leadership style and ability to work with myriad constituents has been cited repeatedly as one of his great strengths by former colleagues and industry partners.   

A few months into 2015, D.C.’s tech industry is continuing to prove itself a major region for venture capital investing interest. Based on an NVCA/PwC report provided to DC Inno, the District is ranked No. 9 among major U.S. regions for investments during Q1. In a quarter that saw vibrant deal flow and exceptional venture raises, the D.C. focused software sector did especially well by raising $220 million in investment dollars.

MaxCyte® Inc., the pioneer in cell therapies using scalable, high-performance cell transfection systems, today announces a strategic research collaboration with Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to develop unique Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies, which harness patients’ own immune systems to combat cancers.

MaxCyte’s unique approach to CAR cell therapy allows targeting of solid tumor cancers by enabling control over the on-target, off-tumor toxicity, which limits other CAR therapies to hematological cancers. MaxCyte achieves this by introducing the CAR construct as a transiently expressing messenger RNA (mRNA), thus allowing control of the duration of expression and toxicity against target antigens in normal tissue. This unique approach also avoids the cell expansion step required for standard approaches, dramatically reducing manufacturing time and expense for CAR therapies from days or weeks to a matter of hours.

The end may be near for Montgomery County’s Department of Economic Development.

County Executive Ike Leggett, speaking in North Bethesda as a panelist during the Washington Business Journal’s inaugural On the Road event, announced Tuesday he intends to replace Montgomery County's economic development agency with a public-private authority, along the lines of Fairfax County’s Economic Development Authority.

The list of the top five health systems in the Baltimore area was static this year, with Johns Hopkins at No. 1 and Mercy Health Services at No. 5.

The data comes from our List of Health Systems in the Baltimore area, which is available to subscribers.

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:

Reminder: NIH Policy on Application Compliance
(NOT-OD-15-095) National Institutes of Health

Notice of Availability of Frequently Asked Questions for RFA-HL-16-002 "Sudden Cardiac Death in the Young: Population Based Studies (U01)" and the Sudden Death in the Young Case Registry 
(NOT-HL-15-258)
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute

Requests for Applications:

Undiagnosed Diseases Gene Function Research (R21)
(RFA-RM-15-004)
NIH Roadmap Initiatives
National Institute of General Medical Sciences
The Common Fund/Office of Strategic Coordination
Application Receipt Date(s): June 24, 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.

Tokai Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:TKAI), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing novel therapies for prostate cancer and other hormonally-driven diseases, today announced that scientists in the laboratory of Vincent Njar, PhD, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine presented preclinical data showing that galeterone and novel analogs of galeterone inhibited growth, survival and migration of human pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) cells.

These data were presented in a poster presentation titled, “Galeterone and Its Novel Analogs Induce Profound Anti-Cancer Activities in Human Pancreatic Cancer Cell Lines,” abstract number 1764, at the 2015 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Thanks to our back to back April/May sponsor, The University of Maryland's Biotech Research and Education Program (BREP), who is sponsoring the upcomig event in Rockville on May 20th at the @AmericanTapRoom. BioBuzzMoCo events always draw an awesome crowd so join BREP for an awesome evening in the heart of the region's growing BioHub.

MAY 12, 2015, 2-3 pm ET

The landscape of potential customers for biomedical products can be complicated, with patients, providers and payers assigning different values to new technologies. Companies must navigate this landscape to find the individuals who will actually make the decision to purchase their products. In this webinar, entrepreneur and educator Rana Gupta will talk about how customers can not only help biomedical innovators to define the value proposition for their products, but can also guide and fund their product development work.

The Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS), created in 2007, is an inter-disciplinary, multi-departmental team of collaborative investigators within the University of Maryland School of Medicine led by Claire M. Fraser, Ph.D., one of the world’s preeminent genome scientists.

IGS uses large-scale, cutting-edge experimental and computational tools to better understand gene and genome function in health and disease, to study molecular and cellular networks in a variety of model systems, and to generate data and resources of value to the international scientific community.

Blood draws typically require trained professionals to perform and can be both frightening and painful to patients. Tasso, Inc., a spinoff of the Unviersity of Wisconsin-Madison, has developed a device that can be applied by the patients themselves to nearly painlessly draw blood.

The device works thanks to capillary action, slowly pulling in blood through a tiny channel over a two minute period. Once the process is complete, the patient simply takes the device to a clinical lab for testing. Since current methods require refrigeration of blood samples during shipment, DARPA is giving Tasso $3 million to work with other firms to develop a way to extend to a week the time the blood samples can be safely stored at up to 140° F (60° C).

The tech incubator 1776 is a collegial place, with offices painted in lively colors, couches to greet visitors, and members who share seats, desks and the fixings for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

It’s an atmosphere carefully cultivated by its founders, Evan Burfield and Donna Harris, and it helped position the outfit as a caretaker, connector and capital provider for tomorrow’s big technology companies.

In the face of growing criticism and impatience with the Meaningful Use EHR incentive program, National Health IT Coordinator Dr. Karen DeSalvo remains upbeat but aware of the tough work ahead to achieve the vision of a learning health system underpinned by a network of interoperable EHRs.

“Interoperability is a priority, but it is still just a means to an end,” De Salvo said Thursday morning in a keynote session on the last day of HIMSS15 at McCormick Place in Chicago. Without interoperability, it will be difficult to achieve healthcare payment and delivery reform, she added.

Washington companies raised more venture capital funding in the first quarter than they have during the first three months of any year in more than a decade, building on momentum the industry mustered up late last year.

During the first quarter, 38 Washington companies hauled in roughly $329.9 million from venture capitalists, a 55 percent increase over the $212.5 million raised by firms in the region during the same period last year, according to the latest round of data from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. While that’s down slightly from a surge last quarter, in which investors poured $363.5 million into local companies, it’s well above last year’s sluggish quarterly average ($270.4 million) and the largest first-quarter haul since 2001.

Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) and the bwtech@UMBC Cyber Incubator announced today that continuous monitoring solutions provider DB Networks® will be the fifth cyber startup to graduate from the highly successful Cync Program. A ceremony marking the occasion is scheduled for next week during the RSA Conference 2015 in San Francisco, California.

OptioLabs of Baltimore joins Cync this month as the newest cyber startup accepted into the program since it began in 2011.