ASTRAZENECA has announced a four-way collaboration which will strengthen the pharmaceutical giant's link with Cambridge University.

The firm, together with its biologics research and development arm MedImmune, has agreed the new collaboration as it prepares to move its global headquarters to the city. It builds on an existing strategic partnership between the organisations.

I joined J&J Consumer Companies about four years ago to start its Digital Center of Excellence. Our role initially was to build capabilities and develop strategy that served multiple brands in multiple regions, so I did a landscape overview to help develop the approach. What I saw was that we had hundreds of different websites and digital platforms that we were operating upon globally. If you want to get a message across globally on your owned assets, you need to do that in the same way across the world.

Bicycle’s founding venture capitalist (VC), Atlas Ventures joined forces this month with SV Life Sciences and three corporate VCs – Novartis (NVS) Venture Fund, GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) SR One and Astellas Venture Management to invest $32m (€25m) in the Cambridge-based biotech company.

Bicycle Therapeutics was established in 2009 as a spin-off of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge), based on the work of the scientific founders Sir Gregory Winter and Professor Christian Heinis from Trinity College, Cambridge. Winter, a renowned scientist in the biotech industry, also founded Domantis and Cambridge Antibody Technology. Founded in the 80s, Cambridge Antibody Technology was a pioneer in British biotechnology, and was listed on the UK stock exchange in 1997, raising £43m. In 2006, AstraZeneca bought the company.

Bioinformatics giant Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) is getting into the accelerator game, along with other players in the life sciences and other fields. On Wednesday it announced the first three startups chosen to start the program this fall at its San Francisco lab space.

San Diego-based Illumina, which makes genomic analysis systems, unveiled the program in February, joining the growing list of academic institutions, venture-backed groups, and life science corporations building start-up space in the Bay Area and beyond. Not least among the benefits of the Illumina accelerator program is access to the company’s high-end gene sequencing systems, which are installed  in the lab space Illumina has leased near the Mission Bay campus of the University of California, San Francisco.

The Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) announced this week the release of the Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund (CRCF) annual report for FY2014, showing growth in new patents, products and innovative companies.

Karen Jackson, Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, said, “CRCF plays an important role in the acceleration of innovation in the Commonwealth by funding essential research and commercialization projects. The investments we make in research commercialization plant the seeds that are growing the New Virginia Economy.”

The Tech Council of Maryland (TCM), Maryland’s largest technology trade association for life science and technology, has been awarded a three-year, $225,000 federal grant designed to help job seekers gain skills in the growing fields of cyber technology and cyber security.

The grant is part of a $15 million federal investment in the Cyber-Technology Pathways Across Maryland (C-PAM) Consortium, spearheaded by Montgomery College. The consortium, which is comprised of 14 community colleges and trade associations, aims to prepare women and other underrepresented populations for jobs in the rapidly growing cyber industry.

Sucampo Pharmaceuticals has announced that it signed an amendment to the existing collaboration and license agreement (Collaboration Agreement) covering the United States and Canada for AMITIZA(R) (lubiprostone) with Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Ltd. The amendment includes various modifications to the Collaboration Agreement including the extension of the current term, minimum commercial investment during the current term and various governance changes allowing Takeda additional flexibility in commercializing AMITIZA.

During the extended term, which will begin on January 1, 2021, Takeda will split with Sucampo the gross profits of branded AMITIZA for any dosage strength and form for the existing indications in the U.S. and Canada. In addition, on April 1, 2015 Takeda will no longer reimburse Sucampo for the product details made by Sucampo sales representatives to healthcare professionals as well as other ancillary costs of the sales force.

University of Maryland, Baltimore’s $200 million proton therapy center will begin treating cancer patients in a year.

The center’s first of five treatment rooms will begin treating patients in October 2015. The entire building is expected to be complete in two years. The 110,000-square-foot building is part of the University of Maryland BioPark in Baltimore off Martin Luther King Boulevard.

The Eastern Shore Entrepreneurship Center (ESEC), Rural Maryland Council (RMC), and Maryland Capital Entreprises (MCE) have joined together to offer the third annual Eastern Shore Business Competition.  All three organizations strive to advance and expand the entrepreneurial ecosystem on Maryland's Eastern Shore, as well as throughout Maryland, and collaborate to execute a business competition that will draw greater attention to the Eastern Shore and attract entrepreneurs to the opportunities and resources available in the region.  The application process for the competition has begun and we are looking forward to your submissions!  

The purpose of the competition is to promote and encourage the startup of new businesses and in turn the creation of new jobs on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) has announced grant awards for three projects focused on enabling technologies from the International Space Station (ISS). These awards stem from the CASIS Request for Proposals (RFP) “Enabling Technology to Support Science in Space for Life on Earth.” CASIS is the nonprofit organization managing research onboard the ISS U.S. National Laboratory.

The purpose of this RFP was to identify and support technology development projects that would enable increased use of ISS for Earth benefits—for example, improvements in hardware/capabilities or methods to improve bandwidth, throughput, or quality of future research projects.

The global accelerator DreamIt Ventures has announced that it is now accepting applications for DreamIt Health Baltimore, a four-month acceleration program based in one the country’s leading cities for health. With access to institutions like Johns Hopkins Medicine and the University of Maryland, healthtech startups chosen to participate in this class will get the opportunity to tap into resources essential to the development, improvement, and market utility of their products.

As the tech industry falls back in love with urban America, Joel Marcus, landlord to the booming biotechnology business, is perfectly positioned to strike it rich.

In Manhattan, overlooking the East River and sandwiched between New York University Langone Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital, two gleaming 16-story towers act as beacons to the booming biotech sector.

Completed in 2010, the 310,000-square-foot Alexandria Center for Life Science is already 100% occupied. It contains a hub for Eli Lilly’s cancer business and a Pfizer PFE -1.69% lab dedicated to exploring leads generated by academic researchers. The second building, some 410,000 square feet of labs and office space, was finished in January and is already 60% full. Roche, the anchor tenant, says moving 250 clinical trial specialists there from Nutley, N.J. has resulted in 25 new collaborations with charities, biotechs and New York hospitals. There’s also an accelerator for startups, an enviro-friendly garden and fancy restaurants to feed all those scientists.

QIAGEN N.V. (NASDAQ: QGEN)(Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) announced today that its business area, QIAGEN Bioinformatics, has been named by Genomics England (GeL) an assessment winner for the UK100K project, along with other life science technology providers. The company will be providing project researchers access to Ingenuity® Variant Analysis™, a powerful web-application that allows users to rapidly identify and prioritize disease causing genetic variants using advanced analytics powered by published biological evidence and large numbers of sequenced genomes.

Antibiotic resistance is taking its toll on the pharmaceutical industry: Drugs are getting retired from clinical circulation, because many are starting to get rendered ineffective, according to an article from Washington University of St. Louis. It highlights the work of WUSTL’s Michael Kinch, associated vice chancellor of its Center for Research Innovation in Business:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a pilot program to help life science entrepreneurs commercialize their technology, based on a course developed by the University of California, San Francisco. The course was first taught last fall by the Entrepreneurship Center at UCSF and Steve Blank, architect of the Lean LaunchPad framework. UCSF and Blank adapted the Lean LaunchPad methodology to be applicable for life science and healthcare ventures.

Chairs: we sit in them, work in them, shop in them, eat in them and date in them. Americans sit for most of their waking hours, 13 hours every day on average. Yet chairs are lethal.

This grim conclusion may surprise you, but 18 studies reported during the past 16 years, covering 800,000 people overall, back it up. In 2010, for example, the journal Circulation published an investigation following 8,800 adults for seven years.

Synthetic Biologics, Inc. (NYSE MKT: SYN), a biotechnology company developing novel anti-infective biologic and drug programs targeting specific pathogens that cause serious infections and diseases, announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Orphan Drug designation to the Company's proprietary SYN-005 monoclonal antibody (mAb) combination for the treatment of Pertussis, more commonly known as whooping cough. In the U.S., Orphan Drug Designation provides a variety of incentives, including seven years of market exclusivity, should SYN-005 receive FDA approval for the treatment of Pertussis.

Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is planning to acquire the over-the-counter arm of global healthcare group Novartis.

The Commerce Commission is currently considering GSK’s application, the commission says in a press release.

Ideas are the juice that powers our economy with innovation happening fast on multiple technology fronts. Rapid developments are in play in areas as diverse as 3D printing, Ultra HD, sensors, health care, automotive electronics, agriculture, transportation, biotech and genetic mapping.

The $211 billion consumer electronics (CE) industry is at the vanguard of innovation. Just last year, the U.S. Patent Office issued a record 277,835 patents. We are at the beginning of a surge of technology advances that we will all benefit from.

On a massive bus in the heart of America, a group of tech entrepreneurs and investors are spreading glad tidings about entrepreneurship and startups in cities that don't exactly scream innovation. Many people have tried to jumpstart the innovation engine across the country, but few have as much experience and clout to pull it off as Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, and chairman of DC-based investment firm Revolution.

Becton Dickinson (NYSE: BDX) has acquired GenCell Biosystems, a privately-held Irish biotech company that has developed proprietary technologies that address key biological analysis protocols – from library preparation of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) to genotyping for agricultural applications.

"We are excited with the GenCell Biosystems acquisition as it provides BD entry into the Next Generation Sequencing market, a fast-growing segment with the potential to have a significant impact on healthcare," said Linda Tharby, Group President, BD. "The acquisition gives BD access to the NGS market with a differentiated platform that will provide a base to further grow our genomics offerings."

Don’t miss the third annual full-day Innovation 2 Commercialization (I2C) conference featuring three informative plenary sessions to help launch, commercialize and fund YOUR technology to make your business venture profitable!

Hear panels on innovation, commercialization and financing featuring speakers from MedImmune, Brain Sentry, Naval Research Lab and more. Plus, learn about the "Amplimmune Story" and enjoy lunch as you discuss issues affecting your innovation or small business with a subject matter expert from a federal lab, university tech transfer office, venture capital firm, business service organization and others who serve as your table host.

A Johns Hopkins neuroscientist hopes to fuel future research projects by turning his expertise into a video game that stars a dolphin.

Hopkins neuroscientist John Krakauer, who studies movement and human obsession with movement, worked with Hopkins software architects Omar Ahmad and Promit Roy, and Baltimore artist Kat McNally to create the game “I Am Dolphin.” The game was released through iTunes Oct. 9 and costs $2.99.

T, business, human capital and other stakeholders can now use cloud-based analytics to more effectively attract, acquire, serve and engage customers, Deloitte Digital announced today. Deloitte Digital has created an analytics offering for Wave, the Salesforce Analytics Cloud that is designed to offer greater flexibility than on-premises solutions. Deloitte Digital's approach to cloud-based analytics is designed to help companies create strategies for success in a new environment. An example of Deloitte Digital's commitment to Salesforce Analytics Cloud is its Member Connect solution, a health care industry-focused accelerator with an intuitive approach to the customer journey focusing on omni-channel interactions and a holistic view of the customer.

Of the 115 healthcare accelerators in the world, 87 are in the U.S., most of them are geared to digital health and are under two years old. Although many accelerator companies have created jobs and there have been some exits, most have yet to show anything for the investment in them. That’s understandable given the age of the average accelerator and given that it can take seven years before a company can realize a return on capital for investors. But the consensus of a new report published by the California HealthCare Foundation is that we should expect some consolidation soon.

Joel S. Marcus, founder, chairman, and chief executive of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, has focused the real estate investment trust on developing properties for the life sciences industry. While it operates in other biotechnology and medical technology hubs from New York to San Francisco, the Pasadena, Calif., company’s largest cluster of properties is in Greater Boston, where it owns 3.5 million square feet of space in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, along Route 128, and in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area. On a visit to Cambridge, the 67-year-old Marcus spoke with Globe reporter Robert Weisman. Here’s what he found out:

Downtown Partnership of Baltimore Inc. is launching a grant program aimed at getting more tech firms to consider moving downtown.

The nonprofit is offering six $10,000 grants to tech firms willing to give office space a try downtown for at least a year. Firms must locate to within Downtown Partnership's "management authority area," a 106-block area that includes the central business district, part of midtown's west side and the west side of downtown up to Greene Street.

Another incubator is ready to test Y Combinator's theory that it is possible to get a biotech-related startup off the ground with smaller sums of money than ever before. VC shop SOS Ventures is offering startups working broadly in biology $35,000 in seed funding, mentors and lab space at incubators in San Francisco and Cork, Ireland.

Like Y Combinator, SOS Ventures is casting its net beyond traditional biotech startups to include any company developing products, processes or software that have a basis in biology. Synthetic biology is an area of particular interest for the team behind the incubator--called IndieBio--and was the focus of a 6-startup pilot accelerator SOS Ventures ran in Cork earlier this year. The VC firm is now scaling up its incubator ambitions.

The University Senate made progress on the policies and guidelines that address non-tenure-track faculty — or professional track faculty, as they will soon be addressed, after a proposal passed in the senate yesterday.

The proposal, which passed by a vote of 61–12 with four abstentions, aims to create an overall title for faculty who are not on the tenure track but contribute to the university through teaching, research or service.

As Alexandria Real Estate Equities (NYSE: ARE) marks the 20th anniversary of its founding, the provider of state-of-the-art real estate for the science and technology industries is seeing occupancy, demand and new development all reach record levels.

“It’s an interesting time because we’re seeing the innovation economy doing miraculously well,” said Joel Marcus, founder and CEO of Pasadena, Calif.-based Alexandria.

MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of Anglo-Swedish drug major AstraZeneca,…

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For creative writing, Joyce Carol Oates got it right when she advised, “Be daring, take on anything.”

But when you are trying to make a good first impression on you future boss, concision and confidence sets a qualified applicant apart from one who doesn’t sound sure of her own experience.

Swiss drug major Roche (ROG: SIX) has acquired exclusive rights to a primer extension-based target enrichment technology and associated patent applications filled by therapeutic target discovery company AbVitro.

AbVitro and Roche scientists are to collaborate on the development and application of the technology, which will be used to support next-generation sequencing directly from blood or other biological samples, a key advantage for clinical sequencing applications. It will be incorporated into Roche’s sequencing unit research and development pipeline to support the strategy of providing a full next-generation sequencing workflow solution for clinical sequencing.

The National Institutes of Health on Thursday awarded almost $32-million in grants to more than two dozen institutions to devise innovative ways of helping researchers handle huge sets of data seen as increasingly central to future medical discoveries.

The grants are the first outlay in a project, announced last year and known as Big Data to Knowledge, that’s expected to involve more than $600-million in spending by 2020. Its goals include developing and distributing methods, software, and tools for sharing, analyzing, managing, and integrating data into medical research.

Join the BioBuzz networking group at our next free event. Along with 100's of the region's bioscience workers, you too could be making new connections, getting jobs and helping to build a stronger, more connected industry through the BioBuzz community!

The event is always free and we offer free drinks to the first 50 to 100 who arrive depending on how much we've been sponsored on a given month. People from all around the the region are coming out each month for this unique and welcoming monthly happy hour. It's a great place to meet up with coworkers past and present, make new connections or just catch up on the latest industry gossip If you're new and haven't yet made it out to an event, then we hope that you'll join us this month and see what all the Buzz is all about.