BHI Weekly Newsletter Archives

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

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Join us for the Illumina Accelerator reception at ASHG. Meet and greet company leaders and industry peers to learn about new opportunities for your genomics startup.

Date: Tuesday, October 6

Time: 6:45 PM–8:30 PM

Location: Illumina Lounge Baltimore Convention Center

DuPont has entered into a license and collaboration agreement with The Johns Hopkins University to commercialize a special garment from Johns Hopkins for the protection of people on the front lines of the Ebola crisis and fatal infectious disease outbreaks in the future. DuPont plans to launch the garment in markets during the first half of 2016.

DuPont has been providing special garments for over 40 years to cater to the safety and protection issues of industrial and healthcare workers. Hence, this alliance will enable the garment to gain faster and wider access to the market. According to the agreement, Johns Hopkins will support DuPont in assessing the sample garments produced by the latter and further help prepare information for users. DuPont, on the other hand, will take care of the commercialization of the garment. Further terms of the agreement were kept under wraps.

Switzerland’s Roche has moved into pole position in the race to launch the world’s first treatment for progressive multiple sclerosis but smaller players are working hard on rival approaches.

While there are a number of treatments for relapsing remitting MS, the most common form of the disease, there are no approved drugs for progressive MS, which is marked by steadily worsening symptoms.

The National Institutes for Health is trying to commercialize its inventions by licensing them out, a new Federal Register notice shows. 

The technology available for licensing includes a mobile app that monitors users’ psychological health by asking them questions throughout the day, as well as research that could be useful in the treatment of cancers. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

AccelerateBaltimore received new funding that will allow a startup in next year’s class to receive additional funding when the company completes the program.

The accelerator, which is run by the Emerging Technology Centers, awards six startups with $25,000 in funding as part of the program. New in 2016, one startup will receive an additional $100,000 in funding.

Accelerator Corporation, a leading life science investment and management firm, today announced that it has secured an additional $11.7 million in new investment commitments, bringing the final Accelerator IV closing to an oversubscribed $62.8 million. This final closing includes new strategic investments from AbbVie, WuXi PharmaTech, and Watson Fund. These new investors join the previously announced Accelerator IV syndicate, which includes Alexandria Venture Investments, ARCH Venture Partners, Eli Lilly and Company, Harris & Harris Group, Inc., Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Inc., The Partnership Fund for New York City, Pfizer Venture Investments and WRF Capital.

Big pharma has a big public perception problem among Americans, according to Gallup poll results released September 14. Of more than 1,000 Americans polled, 43% held an unfavorable view of the industry, compared with just 35% who view pharma favorably. Pharma ranks 23rd of 25 industries for which Gallup solicited opinions; the federal government finished dead last.

Investors, however, hold a more mixed view of traditional drug developers. While shares for most biotechs have zoomed, pharma giants are almost as likely to have seen their total values of all outstanding shares—their “market capitalization”—shrink as grow over the past year. Four of 10 companies appearing on GEN’s List of Top 10 Pharma Firms of 2014 (GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co., and Roche) showed smaller market cap totals on this year’s edition of the List compared with last year. Another five companies, however (AbbVie, Bayer, Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi) showed year-over-year increases in their market caps, which are computed as shares times current market price.

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

Readers of the NIH Director’s Blog know how excited I am about the potential of precision medicine for revolutionizing efforts to treat disease and improve human health. So, it stands to reason that I’m delighted by the positive reactions of researchers, health professionals, and the public to a much-anticipated report from the Precision Medicine Initiative Working Group of the Advisory Committee to the NIH Director. Topping the report’s list of visionary recommendations? Build a national research cohort of 1 million or more Americans over the next three to four years to expand knowledge and practice of precision medicine.

When the president announced PMI during his 2015 State of the Union address, he envisioned a precise new era in medicine in which every patient receives the right treatment at the right time — an era in which health care professionals have the resources at hand to take into account individual differences in genes, environments, and lifestyles that contribute to disease. To achieve this, PMI’s national research cohort would tap into recent advances in science, technology and research participation policies to build the knowledge base needed to develop individualized care for all diseases and conditions.

Thursday, October 15, 2015, 05:00pm – 07:00pm

We are excited to be returning to Growlers in Gaithersburg on October 15th for BioBuzz MoCo with our Sponsor The Biomedical Research Institute(BRI). BRI is a nonprofit organization committed to improving global health through a variety of research and service activities. For over 60 years BRI has been an integral component of the federal government’s aim to reduce the global health burden posed by infectious diseases in developing nations. BRI has made significant contributions focusing initially on cryobiology, subsequently on malaria, and more recently on schistosomiasis, a deadly parasitic disease with over 200 million people affected and a quarter million deaths a year. 

Thursday, October 15, 2015, 06:00pm – 07:30pm

Hear from the Executive Director of the renowned BIRD Foundation, as well as representatives from other funding sources including OurCrowd (crowdfunding platform), the State of Maryland’s Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO), and a venture capitalist. Learn what these entities look for when awarding funding and tips to help you secure the funding that you need.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Without the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), Leesburg-based Disrupt6 wouldn’t exist. Just two years ago Disrupt6 co-founder and CEO Joe Klein was a defense contractor with more than 30 years of cybersecurity experience — he battled his first hacker in the 1980s. But Klein had never been able to get his own business off the ground until he was asked last year to pitch his business idea as part of CIT’s MACH37 initiative to promote cybersecurity startups.

Remember Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster who went on to be founding president of Facebook and then the investor who brought Spotify to the U.S.? He’s now putting his considerable wealth into immuno-oncology, and apparently doing it without his usual “disruptive” style.

The normally brash Parker — the one played by Justin Timberlake in “The Social Network” — has, according to FierceBiotech’s Damian Garde, been doing his homework on T cells and is ready to put his money where his mouth once was. “My role is not to be a disrupter but to be a consistent, long-term funder,” Parker said alongside two Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center researchers, discussing the “new face of cancer.”

Medtronic, the international medical technology and services company, announced that it has received a grant from the Israeli government to launch a digital medicine incubator in the country. Medtronic will reportedly work together with IBM, Pitango Venture Capital and Rambam Hospital in Haifa to establish an incubator called “HealthO2″ that will help digital health companies to receive funding and access. “HealthO2″ will offer companies between $500,000-800,000 in initial funding to develop their ideas. Medtronics recently invested $2 million in Israeli company DreaMed Diabetes, acquiring the company’s artificial pancreas technology.

Health-focused restaurants and retailers, as well as technology-centered businesses, will someday be a part of Inova Health System’s Center for Personalized Health, officials said this week as they prepare to take possession of the 117-acre former Exxon Mobil campus in Merrifield.

All ideas are on the table as Inova imagines what its new “health-focused” concept should look like, said center CEO Todd Stottlemyer during an exclusive tour of the facility.

It was like any other contest where startup founders pitch their ideas to a skeptical audience, except the majority of the people doing the pitching as well as in the audience had either gray or no hair.

Most of the 50-plus people gathered in a conference room at Boston’s Harborside Hotel late last week were seasoned biotech executives and consultants, or people with years of experience trying to develop promising academic discoveries. And the “pitch contest” came at the end of a 27-hour session focused on solving a single, looming question that’s haunted the life sciences for decades: How to make sure that the most promising such discoveries make it into the hands of a company with the knowledge and financing to oversee its development.

The use of a patient’s or tumor’s DNA sequence to diagnose/characterize a disease and select or discover drugs that have the highest likelihood of response with least toxicity is one way of broadly defining Precision Medicine. Although most doctors would agree that medicine is far from precise, President Obama’s state of the union address in early 2015 made ‘precision medicine’ a household phrase drawing public attention to this burgeoning field. Mayo clinic has adopted the phrase individualized medicine in naming its world class center at Rochester, MN. Some even refer to it as genomic medicine but I like ‘personalized medicine’ (PM) better. Major healthcare organizations in US and around the world are early adopters and are already practicing PM.

Five Johns Hopkins-affiliated tech startups were selected as finalists for the pitch competition at next week’s “Rise of the Rest” tour event, where they will vie for a $100,000 top prize.

The five-city “Rise of the Rest” roadshow, launched by AOL co-founder and former CEO Steve Case, kicks off in Baltimore on Monday. The tour is designed to bring attention and funding to startups outside of traditional tech hubs like Silicon Valley and New York City.

On September 11, representatives of Zhongshan City, China, and Montgomery County, Maryland, signed a Memorandum of Understanding launching an economic development relationship between the two jurisdictions.

Through the agreement, the two authorities agree to actively support the other’s “efforts to promote culture, art and education exchanges,” including travel programs for members of their respective communities.

Applications to be a board member of the new Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation (MCEDC) are being accepted until 5 p.m. on Friday, October 2.

The board members will be tasked with marketing Montgomery County, attracting businesses and investments to the County, growing entrepreneurship, as well as helping existing businesses grow and succeed.

Drugmaker AstraZeneca is harnessing the wisdom of crowds to help mix tomorrow’s cancer drug cocktails.

The company said its decision to release preclinical data from more than 50 of its medicines was unprecedented in scale and would help accelerate the hunt for synergistic tumour-fighting drug combinations.

CASI Pharmaceuticals to Raise $25.1 Million in Private Placement of Common Stock and Warrants ROCKVILLE, Md., Sept. 21, 2015 – CASI Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (the “Company”) (Nasdaq: CASI), a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the acquisition, development and commercialization of innovative therapeutics addressing cancer and other unmet medical needs for the global market with a commercial focus on China, announced today that it has entered into definitive agreements for a $25.1 million financing led by a China investment fund manager affiliated with the same management team of our current largest shareholder, IDG-Accel China Growth Fund III, L.P.

Gaithersburg-based biotech MedImmune and a division of 3M unveiled plans Friday to work together on a next-generation cancer immunotherapy drug.

Under the agreement, MedImmune — the biologics research and development arm of U.K. pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN) – licensed an agent called MEDI9197 from 3M Drug Delivery Systems. 3M said it developed the molecule as an injectable treatment for head and neck cancer that stimulates the body’s immune system to attack and destroy tumors.

The Office of Research and Development at the University of Maryland Baltimore currently has 2 openings for the position of Technology Licensing Officer. The Technology Licensing Officers draft and negotiates term sheets and contracts to ensure that University technology and intellectual property (IP) is appropriately commercialized. The incumbents lead negotiations on IP licenses, option agreements and inter-institutional agreements. The incumbents ensure that third parties of University IP meet the contractual obligations to the University and serve as the University’s primary point-of-contact with prospective and current licensees. The incumbents will function as part of an interdisciplinary team that assures the University protects, markets and commercializes its technologies and discoveries.

Vtesse, Inc. today announced that the first three patients have been screened for inclusion in its pivotal Phase 2b/3 clinical trial with VTS-270 for treatment of Niemann-Pick Type C1 Disease (NPC). This clinical trial follows a Phase 1 study conducted by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

NPC is a progressive, irreversible, chronically debilitating – and ultimately lethal – genetic disease. It is caused by a defect in lipid transportation within the cell, which leads to excessive accumulation of lipids in the brain, liver and spleen. Vtesse has worked extensively with regulators in the United States and Europe with the goal of conducting its pivotal study under one global protocol that will evaluate safety and efficacy of VTS-270 to support approval of the drug by regulatory agencies in both regions.

It’s officially election season, which is why I’ll be firing up a big, campaign bus and traveling through Charm City on Monday, stopping for crab cakes, talking to business leaders and meeting with politicians and students. Only our campaign is not about asking for votes in Baltimore; instead, it’s about encouraging the people of Baltimore to continue rallying around startups and entrepreneurs.

For all the tragic news in recent months — and there is real heartbreak along with festering issues that have to be addressed — there’s another chapter being written in the city’s dynamic history. It centers around founders who are starting companies, creating jobs and bringing economic opportunity and growth to Baltimore.

BD Life Sciences, a segment of global medical technology company BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) announced Thursday the availability of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared BD MAX™ Enteric Parasite Panel for use on the BD MAX System.

The BD MAX Enteric Parasite Panel is the latest panel in the BD MAX Enteric suite of assays that aid in the diagnosis of infectious gastroenteritis. This panel joins the BD MAX Enteric Bacterial Panel detecting the pathogens that are responsible for up to 95 percent of the bacteria causing gastroenteritis. With the availability of the BD MAX Enteric Parasite Panel, the majority of pathogens causing this disease can be detected with a fully automated, rapid and accurate platform.

Evidera, a leading provider of evidence-based solutions for the healthcare industry, is pleased to announce Evalytica™, a new software platform designed to support near real-time analyses of virtually any type of real-world data source, including claims, electronic medical records, and registry data. Evalytica™ uses standard data formats and published analytic methods that provide transparency and yield results that may be used in publications or submissions.

“Evalytica™ marks a new frontier for Evidera as a leader in technology enabled tools for generating and communicating evidence of product safety and effectiveness,” said Jon Williams, President and CEO, Evidera. “The increasing focus on real-world evidence for drug safety analysis that has resulted from the FDA Sentinel, the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP), and the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) initiatives make tools like Evalytica™ that much more important.”

The Baltimore City Health Department has received federal grant funding worth up to $22.8 million over four years that will go toward strengthening the city’s HIV prevention strategy.

Baltimore plans to use the money from the Centers for Disease Control to target outreach and prevention programs to men who have sex with men and transgender individuals, two groups at high risk for HIV infection.

Roche Holding AG’s product lineup is so strong that it can grow briskly even if it meets setbacks, the chief executive of the Swiss drugmaker told a newspaper.

“Roche could have six new active pharmaceutical ingredients approved within two years. We never had this before,” Severin Schwan told Finanz und Wirtschaft in an interview published on Friday.

Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels has been awarded Carnegie Corp. of New York’s 2015 Academic Leadership Award, a prestigious recognition that comes with a $500,000 grant to the Baltimore school.

Daniels will use the $500,000 grant to make the university more accessible to students of Baltimore City public schools. He plans to increase support for low-income students through the Baltimore Scholars program, expand partnerships with local K-8 schools and create new initiatives that will help prepare students for college and careers.

The pictured device, produced by Baltimore-based Harpoon Medical, seeks to provide another in a series of recent improvements in mitral valve repair technology. While perhaps less revolutionary in form than Valtech Cardio’s Cardioband that received its CE Mark approval last week, the Harpoon does promise to cut traditional surgeries down to under an hour in length and drastically reduce the required incision size (to 2-inches or less).

Three years ago, MIT finance professor Andrew Lo proposed rallying private investors to raise an eye-popping $30 billion to develop cancer drugs. That idea went nowhere.

A California congressman plans to file legislation next week that would create a more modest version of Lo’s plan: A $400 million fund to finance development of drugs for rare diseases — with the federal government acting as a backstop, providing financial guarantees to attract private investment. If it works, Lo said, taxpayers could profit and patients could get access to new treatments.

Picture this: A global business magazine features a close-up head-shot of a 30-year-old male on its cover.

He’s of Indian descent, with an American upbringing and education, and he’s just concocted a multi-million dollar business out of thin air.

Last month, Baltimore’s burgeoning startup scene earned a top spot in Entrepreneur’s hot U.S. startup cities’ list. With a network of top entrepreneurial resources such as Betamore, Baltimore Angels and Baltimore Corps, as well as educational institutions, it’s not hard to see why Baltimore’s startups are booming.

So, you live in Baltimore, you have a great idea and you are ready make your idea a reality. Where do you start? Before taking any tangible steps, concentrate on the capital with these three questions:

An open science collaboration among academic research institutes, the public sector, and private companies has been in the works since 2006 and now the drug manufacturer AstraZeneca has decided to join the bandwagon. AstraZeneca hopes to harness the open source platform of the DREAM challenge, releasing preclinical data on drugs developed by the company, to discover synergistic cancer drug combinations.

Developed by IBM researcher Gustavo Stolovitzky, PhD, and Columbia University researcher Andrea Califano, PhD, the program has blossomed with multiple cross-collaborative projects across 50 different institutions. About 2 years back, in February 2013, DREAM joined hands with Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit research organization that believes in open sharing of complex biological data, especially big data, to accelerate discovery. DREAM Challenges have touched a variety of healthcare issues, from prostate cancer to odor detection to protein interaction networks.

On a Friday afternoon in June, Staq cofounders James Curran and Mike Subelsky turned over the giant scissors to Greg Cangialosi. Sporting a Staq T-shirt, the tech community leader cut the ribbon on the adtech startup’s new offices.

Located on the fourth floor of a building above 8 Market Place, the ceremony was held one story above a space where DreamIt Health’s Baltimore accelerator program helped six health-focused startups over the winter.

When: Thursday October 15, 2015 from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT

Where: Growlers, 227 E Diamond Ave Gaithersburg, MD 20877

We are excited to be returning to Growlers in Gaithersburg on October 15th for BioBuzz MoCo with our Sponsor The Biomedical Research Institute (BRI). BRI is a nonprofit organization committed to improving global health through a variety of research and service activities. For over 60 years BRI has been an integral component of the federal government’s aim to reduce the global health burden posed by infectious diseases in developing nations. BRI has made significant contributions focusing initially on cryobiology, subsequently on malaria, and more recently on schistosomiasis, a deadly parasitic disease with over 200 million people affected and a quarter million deaths a year.

BioFactura proudly announces the appointment of Dr. Jeffrey Hausfeld as the newly elected Chairman of the Board and Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Hausfeld, a graduate from Yale University School of Medicine, practiced Otolaryngology and Facial Plastic Surgery in the Washington DC area for more than 23 years until he ventured into the business side of medicine. He obtained an MBA specializing in healthcare from Johns Hopkins University and a degree in Organizational Development from George Washington University. Along with having been highly acclaimed during his surgical career, Dr. Hausfeld has been a successful physician entrepreneur as well. He is the President of Memory Care Communities LLC, a syndicate which builds and operates Assisted Living facilities specifically designed for Alzheimer’s and dementia care patients. He is the Managing Director of FMS Financial Solutions, a full service debt recovery firm in Greenbelt, Maryland focusing on medical and multi-family housing debt collections. Dr. Hausfeld is one of the Founders and the Chairman of the Board of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (http://www.sopenet.org ), a global not for profit network focused on educating healthcare and life science professionals in Bioentrepreneurship and Innovation.

A new Science|Business analysis puts the spotlight on the most innovative clusters in Europe, uncovering what it takes to translate research from bench to bedside and highlighting the crucial need for policy support, innovation pull, and access to finance

The leading life sciences clusters in Europe have a long history of excellence in medical research, and with highly educated workforces, state of the art infrastructure, and well-established technology transfer organisations, are making significant progress in translation and commercialisation, according to a new Science|Business report that takes an in-depth look at 17 of Europe’s most innovative clusters.

For years, the Department of Health and Human Services has been taking cues from the private sector’s startup culture, encouraging employees to work on independent technology ideas.

On Thursday, HHS held a demo day for a few teams that joined its summer accelerator program, meant to build out technology ideas that could eventually be implemented in HHS. Here were a few ideas presented at the event:

The Frederick County Council has voted to financially support the expansion of MedImmune’s Frederick manufacturing plant, a project the company says will bring 300 new jobs.

The Frederick News-Post (http://bit.ly/1Kmya4R ) reports that, in a 6-1 vote, the County Council on Tuesday approved the county’s $3.8 million contribution to a $6.8 million conditional loan for MedImmune’s expansion. The agreement guarantees the AstraZeneca-owned firm certain tax credits and access to county resources over the next decade.

The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), the premier global advocate for product development and management professionals, announced today that it has awarded the 2015 Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) Award to BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) BDX, +0.68%

BD’s focus on innovation has provided a framework to integrate the business, make acquisitions and coordinate actions vertically, from the top through operating levels of the company.

Harpoon Medical, a medical device company focused on minimally-invasive, beating-heart, mitral valve repair, announced today that ten patients with severe degenerative mitral valve disease are now enrolled in its ongoing Early Feasibility Study at two clinical study sites in Europe. The company will showcase the results of the Early Feasibility Study, including a 100 % procedural success rate, over 850 total implant days and echocardiographic data on the first two patients with trace MR during their six-month follow up visit, at the upcoming 2015 Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) Conference in San Francisco, CA on October 12, 2015.

Secretary of Commerce Mike Gill is looking for an energetic and focused individual to lead the State’s activities in the life sciences arena. This is a highly collaborative role. Its objective is to advance Maryland as the premier center for biotechnology innovation and entrepreneurial vitality in the nation. The position is based within the Department of Business and Economic Development, and reports to the Managing Director of Business and Industry Sector Development.

Once every three weeks, I spend several days in the heart of Baltimore at the University of Maryland Medical Center for my chemotherapy. On each trip, I pass two magnificent stadiums, a vibrant downtown that includes my own office at the William Donald Schaefer Tower, and thousands of busy workers in a bustling, amazing, beautiful city.

During the riots in April and during my campaign for governor last year, I toured every corner of Baltimore, from Sandtown-Winchester to Fells Point. Everywhere I went, I met people who talked with me about their optimism for a better future for the great city they love.

We told you in our deep dive into the Occupational Employment Statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that since 2009, human resources jobs scored some pretty hefty pay raises. That is true nationwide.

And now, as we show you in the accompanying slideshow, those jobs are growing at a rapid pace, according to the data from 2009 to 2014.

Are you an entrepreneur with or know someone who is? Apply today for the opportunity to make your pitch!

Application deadline September 21.

Apply for a chance to record your 3-minute investor pitch in a mobile video studio on the Startup Maryland bus Montgomery County on September 30.

At each event, 20 entrepreneurs will pitch their companies and network with the business community. Pitches are seen online by VC, angel investors and voted on by fans around Maryland! Fan favorite finalists will present at the TEDCO Entrepreneur Expo on November 17.

The Johns Hopkins University’s new personal protective suit for frontline health care workers in Ebola outbreaks was honored Monday as one of 10 finalists in the Social Good category of Fast Company’s 2015 Innovation by Design Awards.

The suit, intended for use in future Ebola outbreaks like the 2014 epidemic that killed thousands in West Africa, has elements to keep the wearer more comfortable than existing suits, reduce the risk of coming in contact with the virus and protect against other infectious diseases.

Inovalon INOV, +4.11% a leading technology company providing advanced, cloud-based data analytics and data-driven intervention platforms to the healthcare industry, today announced it will partner with The Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS) at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business Collaborative on research efforts that will focus on how digital solutions can be more effectively deployed to address outcomes such as patient safety, healthcare quality, efficiency in healthcare delivery and a reduction in health disparities.

Let’s stop the worrying right now. Baltimore city has its own network of growing innovation clusters.

That doesn’t take anything away from the county or the rest of Maryland or the broader mid-Atlantic region, for that matter. It’s just that it needs to be said that Baltimore’s old urban core is having a revival — and technology, creative and web businesses are playing a real role.

Apply by Thursday, September 24 for a chance to record your 3-minute investor pitch in a mobile video studio on the Startup Maryland bus when it arrives in Montgomery County on Wednesday, September 30.

At each event, 20 entrepreneurs will pitch their companies and network with the business community. Pitches are seen online by VC, angel investors and voted on by fans around Maryland! Fan favorite finalists will present at the TEDCO Entrepreneur Expo on November 17.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University have developed a low-cost diagnostic tool, slightly larger than a coffee mug, that detects chlamydia within 30 minutes.

Scientists hope the apparatus, unofficially called mobiLab, will improve screening for the common and often symptomless sexually transmitted disease that, if left untreated, can cause permanent damage to a woman’s reproductive system and lead to fatal ectopic pregnancies.

The Maryland Board of Regents on Friday approved the University of Maryland University College’s request to create a for-profit business-intelligence company. The new company will offer data-analysis technology and services to universities across the country, and the revenue will go toward the university’s endowment.

The company, called HelioCampus, will provide two main services: the technology to combine and analyze a university’s data, as well as analysts to help administrators understand what the data mean.

There are a lot of rare diseases that strike a small number of people and some of them are actually novel maladies that have to be identified and studied. The National Institutes Of Health (NIH) has just begun a new program to help doctors work with such patients, combining resources at leading institutions across the country to identify the genetic causes of various conditions. Seven centers, including the NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, are participating in the Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) for which a patient portal, called UDN Gateway, has been setup to recruit potential study subjects. Additionally, two DNA sequencing centers will be involved in providing genomic information gathered from patient samples.

When: Thursday October 15, 2015 from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT

Where: Growlers, 227 E Diamond Ave Gaithersburg, MD 20877

We are excited to be returning to Growlers in Gaithersburg on October 15th for BioBuzz MoCo with our Sponsor The Biomedical Research Institute (BRI). BRI is a nonprofit organization committed to improving global health through a variety of research and service activities. For over 60 years BRI has been an integral component of the federal government’s aim to reduce the global health burden posed by infectious diseases in developing nations. BRI has made significant contributions focusing initially on cryobiology, subsequently on malaria, and more recently on schistosomiasis, a deadly parasitic disease with over 200 million people affected and a quarter million deaths a year.

Multiple drugs to combat bioterrorism threats and other life-threatening bacterial infections will be developed under a public-private partnership agreement between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) and AstraZeneca, a global biopharmaceutical company.

The partnership agreement with AstraZeneca uses Other Transaction Authority granted to the Secretary of HHS under the Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness Act of 2006. The agreement becomes the second such strategic alliance ASPR’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has forged with a private company to develop a portfolio of drug candidates with dual uses in treating illnesses caused by bioterrorism agents and antibiotic-resistant infections.

On Tuesday, Rare Genomics Institute (RG), announced that it is launching ten separate crowdfunding campaigns to help patients with rare diseases pinpoint the causes of their illnesses. All amounts raised will go towards exome sequencing, which is a method of partial genome sequencing to find the genetic causes of diseases.

This effort is part of Amplify Hope, initiated by RG to determine the most effective crowdfunding programs and measure their effect on scientific education. Amplify Hope is a new RG study funded by the John Templeton Foundation that provides crowdfunding training to rare disease families and tracks the overall reach and scientific impact to help rare disease patients.

Google Capital has invested $32.5 million in Oscar, a health insurance startup, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The new funding values Oscar, which had in April raised $145 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, at $1.75 billion.

Join more than 400 of the region’s business and government leaders for the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore’s Annual Meeting, November 4, 2015 at the Hilton Baltimore.

While Maryland is known for its history and culture, food and beautiful landscape, this year’s annual meeting will celebrate one of the region’s greatest assets – the people – as they tell their stories. The program will recognize the region’s growing companies and those who make our community a world-class market in which to live, work, learn and invest.

Looks like San Diego life sciences and tech investment firm Avalon Ventures is in the midst of compiling its eleventh fund, looking to raise $300 million.

Fund XI, according to an SEC filing, has raised $103.5 million of the proposed $300 million from 26 investors.

It can be considered an opportunity on wheels. Startup Maryland has kicked off its statewide tour to hear Marylanders pitch their best business ideas on Monday.

The tour made its first stop in Pocomoke City and invited entrepreneurs to hop in a bus to share their ideas for a chance to expand.

The MACH37™ Cyber Accelerator announced today that it has selected seven cybersecurity startups to participate in the Fall 2015 (F-15) three-month mentorship-driven startup program. With this announcement, MACH37™ will have launched 29 cyber companies in the past two years. The top candidates were selected as a result of a highly competitive selection process from the largest application pool to date.

As a focused business accelerator, MACH37™ brings together domain experts, successful cybersecurity entrepreneurs, and investors familiar to the security market to create a platform for success for innovators and their startups. The MACH37™ program consists of an intense 90-day program in which the selected startups are mentored in all aspects of creating a sustainable and successful business.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University have found molecular evidence of how a biochemical process controls the lengths of protective chromosome tips, a potentially significant step in ultimately understanding cancer growth and aging.

In a paper recently published as the cover story in the online journal eLife, biologist David C. Zappulla and graduate student Evan P. Hass show how in baker’s yeast cells, two proteins work together to usher a key enzyme to the chromosome tip, the telomere, to restore its length, which diminishes with each round of cell division.

IBM and Medtronic are part of a group that have won a grant from the Israeli government to open a digital medicine incubator, according to a statement from the Office of the Chief Scientist with the Israeli Ministry of Economy. It’s part of a long-running economic stimulus program to improve investment in Israeli technology startups and create jobs.

The statement was translated from Hebrew with Google Translate.

For years, Maya Nieder suffered from severe developmental delays, including difficulty communicating and hearing loss. She endured multiple operations and countless tests before exome sequencing revealed a mutation in her genes that had never been seen before. For Maya and her family, the power of sequencing her DNA found an answer and ended a four year search for the cause of her medical illnesses. Maya was the world’s first crowdfunded gene discovery innovated through Rare Genomics Institute. Now her parents know the cause, and they can stop searching.

TEDCO recently awarded BHI with a $10,000 grant to support up-and-coming biohealth enterprises. The funding comes from TEDCO’s 2016 Incubator Assistance Program (“The Program”), to which BHI submitted a proposal earlier this year. The Program is intended to assist Maryland’s incubators in providing added value to their client companies.

“BHI continues to be a leader in identifying and supporting biohealth companies that will make a difference in our region,” said TEDCO’s President and Executive Director Rob Rosenbaum. “Our Incubator Assistance Program—which has become highly competitive—is designed to reward those incubators that will have a significant impact and continue to maximize Maryland’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are pleased to present this funding to BHI.”

Secretary of Commerce Mike Gill is looking for an energetic and focused individual to lead the State’s activities in the life sciences arena. This is a highly collaborative role. Its objective is to advance Maryland as the premier center for biotechnology innovation and entrepreneurial vitality in the nation. The position is based within the Department of Business and Economic Development, and reports to the Managing Director of Business and Industry Sector Development.

MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, and Cancer Research UK today said they have opened a new laboratory focused on the discovery and development of new biologic cancer treatments and diagnostics.

The CRUK-MEDI Alliance Laboratory in Cambridge, UK, on Granta Park, was opened this week by UK Life Sciences Minister George Freeman, MP. The new lab reflects an alliance involving MedImmune, Cancer Research UK, and its commercialization and development subsidiary Cancer Research Technology.

Monday, September 21, 2015 from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM (EDT)

This event is to gather interested small businesses seeking assistance from the Small Business Innovation Research grants program from the National Institutes of Health. This is a free event brought to you by BioHealth Innovation. Hear from the SBIR managers on current Institute funding priorities. Meet one-on-one with program managers regarding your current project. Learn of SBIR assistance provided by BioHealth Innovation.

Billionaire physician-entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong seems to be orchestrating an entire M&A ecosystem within his own entities.

Two more Nant companies reporting mega-funding: NantOmics has raised $150 million and NantCell has raised $100 million, both from a single investor, according to two SEC filings (here and here). These startups fall under the umbrella company NantWorks that was launched by Soon-Shiong in Los Angeles in 2011.

The project team includes leading behavioral health, family practice, and implementation scientists at Drexel University, the University of California Los Angeles, Northwestern University, and multiple primary care and behavioral health organizations and practice sites. This contract is for the enhancement of the referral relationship and the data dashboard components of www.BH-Works.com. It will help all sizes of networks, including Performing Provider System (PPS), Accountable Care Organization (ACO), and other kinds of provider groups and organizations, to improve the management of their patient populations as related to behavioral and mental health. mdlogix will apply its Relational Network Optimization (RNO) methodology to guide and measure continuous improvements in referral relationships.

Rockville-based RegenxBio Inc. has priced shares for its initial public offering, which could raise as much as $121 million.

RegenxBio will offer 5,555,555 shares of common stock, with a planned price range of $17 to $19 per share. Underwriters also have the option to buy an additional 833,333 shares.

BHI is a public-private partnership with a mission of fostering commercialization of health and life sciences assets with a focus on the Central Maryland region that stretches from Baltimore to the suburbs of Washington, DC. BHI is known for providing commercial assistance to scientists and founders in the early-stages of forming new ventures and supporting the early growth of these ventures. Our goals are aimed at infusing a new class of growth companies in the vibrant biohealth ecosystem in Central Maryland and support the continued growth to be one of the leading clusters of biohealth economic activity in the world. BHI realizes this mission through our partnerships with the leading institutions from industry, government, academia and investment communities with a record of prominence and success within the industry. Our distinguished partners include MedImmune, Qiagen, Becton Dickinson, Roche, Emergent Biosolutions, Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals, Adventist HealthCare, SR One, NEA, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, M&T Bank, Greenspring Associates, Johns Hopkins University, and the University System of Maryland.

The Johns Hopkins University and Luminox-Health, a leading Israeli startup hub focused on digital health, have entered into a multiyear collaborative agreement connecting Israeli entrepreneurs with Johns Hopkins medical expertise, faculty thought-leadership, technology, and network of business partners and investors. Johns Hopkins faculty members will have the opportunity to team up with Israeli entrepreneurs to build solutions to modern medical challenges, which will enable Johns Hopkins to take a leadership role as a pioneer in identifying and driving e-health innovation in the U.S. and abroad.

The agreement brings together one of the world’s pre-eminent medical research institutions and the unique emerging digital health innovation ecosystem of a country that has been called startup nation. Israel is home to more startups per capita than anywhere else in the world. In spite of the proliferation of startups, Israeli entrepreneurs find it challenging to gain access to strategic U.S. partners to further develop their ideas into real-world solutions and grow their companies in the international marketplace.

Six new research professorships have been endowed with $14.9 million in private donations and state funding, the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED) announced Wednesday. The state funds were committed through the Maryland E-Nnovation Initiative, which matches private donations to universities for basic and applied research in scientific and technical fields.

The University of Maryland, College Park; University of Maryland Baltimore; and Johns Hopkins University each received $2.1 million through the program to be split among a pair of new professorships at each school.

After more than a year, MOVE continues to bring business to the county

The MOVE program continues to offer financial incentives to companies moving to Montgomery County a little more than a year after it was inaugurated. The county launched the program in February 2014 following its announcement by County Executive Isiah Leggett. It was actively marketed on both the our websites, through direct mail, with digital and print ads, along with a radio advertising campaign.

The first company to take advantage of the program was computer pioneer L-Soft. In October 2014, L-Soft’s Founder and CEO Eric Thomas moved his company’s operation from Virginia to Montgomery County.

Global venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) today announced the appointment of Stephen Oesterle, MD, as Venture Partner. Dr. Oesterle is a former Senior Vice President for Medtronic, Inc., the world’s largest medical device company, and brings to NEA more than two decades of experience spanning health technology investment, corporate strategy, and general management.

“Dr. Oesterle is one of the most widely known and respected leaders in the medical device industry, and it is an honor to welcome him to the NEA team,” said Dr. Josh Makower, NEA General Partner and founder of several medical device companies. “Steve brings with him a vast global network of relationships across the academic, technical, clinical, entrepreneurial, and venture communities. His experience in the health technology investment space coupled with his business development and general management background will be invaluable resources to the companies in our portfolio and to the NEA partnership.”

AstraZeneca, in a move to increase its biologics manufacturing capacity in the United States, has acquired a high-tech biologics bulk manufacturing plant in Boulder, Colo., from Amgen Inc.

Fifteen Maryland technology startups and one medium-sized company are partnering with faculty members from the state’s public universities for projects that bring new products closer to market, University of Maryland officials announce today.

Approved through UMD’s Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program, the research and development projects, worth $3 million, span the state, its universities and technologies, including products that advance clean or efficient energy, biotechnology, software, construction, chemical sensors and aquaculture.

Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center on Thursday will break ground on its planned $100 million, 184,00-square-foot cancer center.

The Skip Viragh Outpatient Cancer Building, named for Maryland mutual fund investment leader and former Hopkins patient Albert P. “Skip” Viragh Jr., is expected to open in 2017 at the northeast corner of Fayette Street and North Broadway. Hopkins first announced the project in May 2014.

University System of Maryland (USM) schools once again have been recognized among the nation’s top universities in recent rankings by multiple publications.

The U.S. News & World Report 2016 edition of America’s Best Colleges released this month recognizes several USM institutions for academic excellence.

On September 11, 2015, at 10 a.m. the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), in the A. James Clark School of Engineering, will celebrate the opening of the Texas Instruments Discovery Lab, where first-year engineering students are being exposed to basic electrical and computer engineering concepts in a revolutionary, hands-on way. This lab opening at UMD is part of a company-level commitment by Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) to ensure young engineering students are engineering- and industry-ready by inspiring them at the inception of their academic careers.

The Texas Instruments Discovery Lab is the setting for a unique approach to engineering curriculum. The Lab will house “ENEE 101: What’s Cool in ECE.” This course, being piloted this semester, is an introductory course meant to anchor students in the A. James Clark School’s electrical and computer engineering program. ENEE 101 features hands-on activities that highlight the role of electrical and computer engineering in the real world. Required for all incoming freshman students, it will allow them to understand the relevance of the technical subjects they will study and their relationship to the profession.

After 16 years, Johns Hopkins University returned to the top 10 on the U.S. News and World Report list of best national universities.

Hopkins ranks No. 10 on the 2016 list, up from No. 12 last year.

October 13, 2015, 2-3 pm ET

No one chooses to spend their time or resources on a project that is destined to be unsuccessful; but, 99% of innovative project ideas will indeed fail. While trial and error is a fundamental component of scientific investigation, recent retrospective analyses of biopharmaceutical project failure have determined that in at least 50% of the cases failure could have be predicted prior to experimentation. The objective of this webinar is to identify some of the most common causes for biopharmaceutical project failure, how they can be recognized, scored and, potentially, worked around before they occur. Not only is project success and timely tractability dependent on understanding and avoiding these, but also the attractiveness of one’s project to potential investors and partners.

Relative to other affluent countries, the United States devotes disproportionate resources to health care with disappointing results. Complex insurance rules and distorted market signals create massive inefficiencies, frustrated patients, and providers burdened by excessive paperwork. Recognizing these problems, entrepreneurs are increasingly applying information technology to health care equipment, monitoring, treatment, and service delivery, creating a sector known as digital health. These technologies, once embedded and distributed around the country, hold the potential to substantially alter the efficiency and quality of health care through the better generation, processing, and use of information; the reduction of overhead costs; and the empowerment of patients.

Research involving editing the human genome, including research with human embryos, is essential to gain basic understanding of biology and germ cells and should be permitted, according to one of the first global meetings to debate the controversial new techniques.

The bold statement was published today (Thursday, Sept. 10) by the Hinxton Group, a global network of stem cell researchers, bioethicists, and experts on policy and scientific publishing, who met in Manchester, England, September 3–4.

San Francisco and Boston accounts for the most investment in digital health and the largest volume of deals. But research from The Brookings Institution shows another way to size up digital health investment beyond these two bookends by looking at the proportion of VC money in metropolitan areas going to digital health.

Peter Thiel knows a promising tech startup when he sees one. The investor was the first outside investor in Facebook. But does he have the same touch in biotech?

The prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist’s investment fund has put its largest ever bet on a biotech company called Stemcentrx, a private and all-but-unheard-of San Francisco company developing cancer drugs that debuted this week with a spectacular valuation worth billions (see “Peter Thiel Backs Biotech ‘Unicorn’ Fighting Cancer Stem Cells”).

The Buzz of BIO at the BIO Investor Forum competition featured 19 nominees pulling in over 3,000 votes. Winners receive one complimentary registration to the BIO Investor Forum, a complimentary Company Presentation and promotion to industry leaders including a spotlight in BioCentury Extra.

The Buzz of BIO contest drew a record breaking 3,000 collective votes. This year’s winners will join more than 120 companies presenting at the BIO Investor Forum. New presenters are continuously being added. For updates on the list of presenting companies, please visit here. If you are interested in becoming a presenter, please submit an application here. The typical audience for company presentations features public, institutional and private equity investors, research analysts, investment bankers and industry executives.

Remedy Pharmaceuticals, a company focused on the development and commercialization of CIRARA™, a breakthrough drug for treating acute central nervous system conditions, announced that a prospective multi-center open-label pilot study of CIRARA in patients with acute traumatic cervical spinal cord injuries.

Following a $2 billion merger between DTZ and Cushman & Wakefield, David Gillece will head up the firm’s newly combined offices in Baltimore.

Gillece was regional managing principal with DTZ and before that held the same position with brokerage Cassidy Turley, which combined with DTZ last year.

emocha Mobile Health, a digital health startup that’s using telemedicine as a way to confirm medication adherence, has won the support of the South Africa department of health to roll out its program for multi-drug resistant tuberculosis patients across the country following a pilot, according to a company statement.

The program, referred to as miLINC, was developed to identify, track and support these patients. For patients in primary care clinics, healthcare professionals collect critical data such as a national identification number, medical record number, mobile number, and specimen barcode. Lab results are matched against enrollment data from the clinic on emocha’s cloud-based server. Linkage Officers check results and follow up with patients. Specialized nurses check patients into specialized clinics for MDR TB.

Monday, September 21, 2015 from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM (EDT)

This event is to gather interested small businesses seeking assistance from the Small Business Innovation Research grants program from the National Institutes of Health. This is a free event brought to you by BioHealth Innovation. Hear from the SBIR managers on current Institute funding priorities. Meet one-on-one with program managers regarding your current project. Learn of SBIR assistance provided by BioHealth Innovation.

Cerecor, a Baltimore pharmaceutical firm planning an preliminary public inventory providing, has launched a brand new medical research of an antidepressant it says will help sufferers who aren’t responding to plain remedies.

The corporate is conducting a randomized double-blind experiment to check a drug generally known as CERC-301 on 104 topics who’re experiencing extreme depressive episodes regardless of receiving different remedies. It’s a Part 2 medical trial, which suggests it’s in search of to show the drug triggers a organic response and has some effectiveness in comparison with a placebo.

In the growing age of virtual reality (VR), a startup launched by University of Maryland researchers has designed new technology to help transport your senses from wherever you are to wherever you want to be—a music concert or sporting event far away—in a way that will make you believe you are actually there.

The co-founder of VisiSonics Corporation (link is external), Professor of Computer Science Ramani Duraiswami of the University of Maryland Institute of Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) (link is external), explained that it all started with some key inventions in the general area of 3D sound.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Johns Hopkins University are among 12 universities that will share a $20 million grant for groundbreaking nanotechnology research.

The institutions are all part of the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The five-year, $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation will support the center research of how nanoparticles interact with live beings and the environment.

Since Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act on July 10th, one Big Pharma company has already moved to capitalize on the legislation even before it has been passed by the Senate and become law. A good introduction to the bill can be found in this piece. In short, the bill is designed to speed up the route to market for certain therapeutics. Senate passage is estimated for around December. In the last piece I paid particular attention to one of the most consequential aspects of the Act – that it would promote the development of brand-new antibiotics. In response to the Act, there have been two interpretations of this likely influx of therapeutics.

Mark Lafferty has joined UM Ventures Baltimore as a venture associate. In this role, he provides financing and business planning advice to new companies, prepares valuations for startup companies and new products, and evaluates financial aspects and terms for licensing deals.

Synthetic Biologics, a microbiome-focused clinical-stage biotechnology company, is moving its offices to the Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus. Synthetic Biologics previously had its corporate headquarters at the VisArts incubator space in downtown Rockville but is moving its staff of 15 to the JHU campus, with plans to add more staff members in the future. The company has its administrative and financial offices in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The company is developing drugs to protect the gut microbiome in an effort to maintain the natural balance of bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract, which is important to our overall health, said Kris Maly, the company’s vice president of corporate communications.

Don’t miss out on this UNIQUE and FREE networking happy hour.

Meet Rockville business owners and learn more about the resources available to your business.

Some of our resource partners in attendance will be:

• BioHealth Innovation
• Rockville Economic Development, Inc.
• Maryland Women’s Business Center
• Rockville Chamber of Commerce
• Maryland Economic Development Association

Please join us and take advantage of this opportunity to find out what REDI can do for you.

You will want to also be there when this year’s “Rockin’ in Rockville” award is presented!

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Maryland is the top state in the nation on its “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” index. Despite this strong environment, the first few years of a startup can be a financial headache.

If you are like many startups and in need of funding, or if you are looking to stretch the funding that you do have, one of the most effective strategies is to take advantage of one of the tax incentives that Maryland has created for technology companies.

University of Maryland Medicine (the University of Maryland Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine) and its Center for Metabolic Imaging and Image-Guided Therapeutics (CMIT) has begun to use MRI-guided focused ultrasound on a deep structure within the brain related to Parkinson’s disease – the globus pallidus.

In the first clinical trial of its kind, researchers from the Departments of Diagnostic Radiology & Nuclear Medicine, Neurosurgery and Neurology at CMIT are using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to guide ultrasound waves through the intact skin and skull to the globus pallidus. The University of Maryland is one of only two sites in the United States to offer this treatment to Parkinson’s patients.

Application Deadline: September 11, 2015

An Information Session Webinar about the NIH-CAP is scheduled for Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 2:00 pm EDT (11:00 am PDT). For more information and to register for the info session, please click here. This session is open to small businesses for which HHS SBIR and STTR Phase II, Phase IIB, or Phase II portion of Fast-Track award is or was active in the past 5 fiscal years. Projects that ended before August 2010 are not eligible. Awardees from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can also attend.

In a message to the Johns Hopkins community today, university President Ronald J. Daniels outlined recent initiatives the university and health system are undertaking to “help bend the trajectory of our city.”

As he welcomed students, faculty and staff to the start of a new academic year, Daniels recounted connections that Johns Hopkins has made with Baltimore residents through the Summer Jobs Program, school uniform drive, and ex-offenders hiring program. He also highlighted a new public school partnership, research projects, workforce training, and the upcoming launch of the HopkinsLocal economic inclusion initiative.

Roche said on Friday it had won breakthrough therapy designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for an experimental haemophilia medicine, aiming for a piece of the $11 billion haemophilia drug market.

The Swiss drugmaker said its U.S.-based Genentech unit’s ACE910 secured the fast-track designation as the company prepares separate Phase III trials in 2015 and 2016, the first in patients with haemophilia A with factor VIII inhibitors and the second for patients without inhibitors.

Cross border deals involving digital health startups in Israel are on the rise. In the most recent example, Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures has inked a multiyear agreement with Israeli digital health business Luminox that will set up an accelerator for Israeli digital health startups, among other things.

Luminox refers to itself as a digital health hub. It helps connect early stage companies with U.S. institutions, corporates and strategic partners.

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.

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:

• OMB Approval for Form Changes Underway – Continue to Use Current Forms Until Further Notice
• (NOT-OD-15-146) National Institutes of Health
• eRA Commons Help Desk Rebranded as eRA Service Desk
• (NOT-OD-15-147) National Institutes of Health

Requests for Applications:

• Abuse Liability Associated with Reduced Nicotine Content Tobacco Products (R01)
• (RFA-OD-15-006)
• Office of Disease Prevention
• U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Center for Tobacco Products
• National Cancer Institute
• National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
• Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
• National Institute on Drug Abuse
• Application Receipt Date(s): December 11, 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.

Baltimore’s tech scene will get some time in the spotlight later this month when Steve Case’s “Rise of the Rest” tour rolls into town. The five-city roadshow, through which the AOL co-founder and former CEO plans to invest $1 million in early-stage technology ventures, kicks off in Baltimore on Sept. 28.

The bus tour, which is designed to bring attention and funding to startups beyond traditional tech hubs like Silicon Valley or New York City, will also give Johns Hopkins University a chance to show the part it plays in supporting Baltimore’s bubbling culture of tech innovation.

Are you an entrepreneur and thinking of starting your own company? Are you a small start-up looking for local resources that will help your company succeed? Are you a small company looking to expand and enter the next stage of commercial success? If you said “Yes” to any of these questions, then this WIB event is for you!

Our panel of industry experts from MD TEDCO, BioHealth Innovation, and the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development will provide you with invaluable information about resources their organizations provide to the local business community, including idea/product development, early and late stage funding, and business accelerator programs.

ADC Therapeutics (ADCT), an oncology drug discovery and development company that specializes in the development of proprietary Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADCs) targeting major cancers, today announced that it has raised $80 million through a private placement of equity. New investors include leading European and US-based investors alongside founding investor Auven Therapeutics and participation from AstraZeneca.

The proceeds will be used to progress ADCT’s product portfolio, including ADCT-301 for lymphoma and leukemia now in Phase I and a collaboration to develop up to two ADCs for commercialisation with MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca. ADCT’s ADCs are highly targeted drug constructs which combine monoclonal antibodies specific to surface antigens on particular tumor cells with highly potent pyrrolobenzodiazepine (PBD)-based warheads. ADCT anticipates having seven drug candidates in human clinical trials in 2017.

A lot of time, effort and money goes into the creation of new drugs. A new game Big Pharma, which came out Thursday, is giving users the opportunity to see for themselves by running a virtual pharmaceutical company.

Not unlike Big Pharma in real life, one of your biggest priorities is money. It’s up to you whether or not you want to sacrifice efficacy to make cheaper products and yield more profit.

A digital health fund to invest in Israeli digital health startups recently made its first investment — Intendu. The company provides a way for people with neurological problems stemming from traumatic brain injury to age-related cognitive decline to train the brain through a series of personalized exercises that involve body-controlled adaptive videogames. The goals are customized to each user.

Partners for digital health venture fund eHealth Ventures include Cleveland Clinic Innovations, which is providing resources to the company in exchange for equity, and one of Israel’s largest HMOs, Maccabi Healthcare, are also supporting the fund.

Google is making another move into the profitable sphere of diabetes management: Its Life Sciences arm—which will soon fall under Google’s new parent company, Alphabet—is announcing a partnership with Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company, to build new treatment products for diabetes. The two firms will collaborate on product development and new methods for monitoring the condition.

Transplant surgeons have started using a device that allows them to “reanimate” hearts from people who have recently died, and use the organs to save others.

The “heart in a box” is a wheeled cart with an oxygen supply, a sterile chamber, and tubing to clamp onto a donor heart and keep it fed with blood and nutrients. Doctors say it may extend the time a heart can last outside the body and is letting them recover hearts from donors who haven’t been eligible before.

If there’s one thing that’s a nearly universal anxiety among cities, it’s brain drain, or the loss of educated residents to other places. I’ve written about this many times over the years, critiquing the way it is normally conceived.

Since brain drain seems to be a major concern in shrinking cities, I decided to take a look at the facts around brains in those places. Looking at the 28 metro areas among the 100 largest that had objective measures of shrinkage – in population and/or jobs – between 2000 and 2013, I looked what what happened to their educational attainment levels.

Planning is officially underway for the 2016 FLC national meeting scheduled for April 26-28 at the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago. This year, a new technology ‘pitch’ session is under development with The Defense Innovation Initiative – Experimental (DIUx) that will feature a panel of investors who are familiar with early stage technologies, including lower Technology Readiness Level (TRL).

Pitching Ideas

All laboratories are invited to pitch their technologies to the panel of investors! The most promising ideas will be given the opportunity to receive additional support and resources to further assess and develop their concepts for commercialization through licensing, identification of potential collaboration partners, etc. Don’t miss the chance to interact with investors and gain valuable exposure of your lab’s technologies in front of an investment audience.

To submit your technologies for the ‘Pitch’ session, please download and follow the instructions on the attached flyer! For additional questions about tech submissions, contact Program Chair Kathleen McDonald at Kathleen_m@lanl.gov.

Many American cities are distinctly shaped by ties to other parts of the world. Washington has its Ethiopian community, and the restaurants that have come with it. Chicago has its Mexican neighborhoods, Minneapolis its Hmong culture, Miami its links to Cuba.

These differences — products of proximity or history or happenstance — are part of what makes New York feel culturally different from Atlanta. And they reflect the fact that New York and Atlanta look different to people living abroad.

Product development of any kind is challenging and full of unknowns, obstacles and pivots.

Medical device product development is certainly no different.

With med devices, when you throw in regulatory bodies, such as FDA and others internationally, it only complicates matters further.

D.C.-based startup incubator 1776, which filed with regulators last year to raise its first seed fund, announced Tuesday it has closed the fund at $12.5 million, half of what it had expected to raise.

1776 has backed 20 companies since launching the fund, co-investing with other groups including 500 Startups, Silicon Valley Angels and GovTech Fund. The fund typically invests an average of $100,000 in pre-Series A startups focused on highly regulated industries, such as health, education, energy and transportation.

Monday, September 21, 2015 from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM (EDT)

This event is to gather interested small businesses seeking assistance from the Small Business Innovation Research grants program from the National Institutes of Health. This is a free event brought to you by BioHealth Innovation. Hear from the SBIR managers on current Institute funding priorities. Meet one-on-one with program managers regarding your current project. Learn of SBIR assistance provided by BioHealth Innovation.

Revolve Biotechnologies, Inc. has been awarded a $450K Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to develop iRFP-Max, a near-infrared fluorescent protein research tool that will enable in vivo imaging of brain and other tissues up to ten-fold deeper than currently available tools. Current fluorescent protein tools operate at wavelengths at which tissue absorbance allows scientists to image only close to the surface. This tool will enable a range of new applications and has the potential to become the industry standard for pre-clinical in vivo imaging for drug development and neuroscience research for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

When Japanese doctors Ryuji Ueno and Sachiko Kuno came to Bethesda two decades ago, they already had a drug company back home. They founded what would become Sucampo entirely with their own capital in 1996 to see if they could sell treatments to a much larger American market.

Two decades later Sucampo is under new leadership, and is buying out its Japanese predecessor R-Tech Ueno for $278 million in cash and stock.

BioMarker Strategies, LLC, a private company, has developed SnapPath®, a cancer diagnostics system that automates and standardizes functional ex vivo profiling of live solid tumor cells from fresh biopsies or other fresh, unfixed samples such as xenografts or tumorgrafts, according to the company’s website (see here: www.BioMarkerStrategies.com). SNNLive spoke with Jerry Parrott, President and CEO of BioMarker Strategies at the BioMaryland Booth at BIO International 2015 in Philadelphia, PA.

The transformations in healthcare have gotten the attention of many healthcare investors, including private equity firm NaviMed Capital. It closed a $110 million healthcare fund last month. I recently spoke with Managing Director Bijan Salehizadeh about its investment priorities and how he regards the digital health sector.

The firm’s mandate is to do small buyout deals of profitable companies in healthcare.

QB3@953, a San Francisco, USA-based incubator created by QB3, a University of California research institute and biotech accelerator, has announced an agreement with UK pharma company GlaxoSmithKline (LSE: GSK).

Together the companies will identify and facilitate collaborations to translate early drug target concepts into medicines that benefit patients. It formalizes an existing relationship between QB3@953 and GSK’s Discovery Partnerships with Academia team.

Symbiomix today announced the completion of patient enrollment in a Phase 3 clinical study, the second pivotal trial of SYM-1219, which is a single-dose, oral product candidate for the treatment of bacterial vaginosis (BV). Earlier this year Symbiomix announced positive results from the first pivotal trial for SYM-1219. Symbiomix expects to finish this second pivotal trial by the end of 2015, which would enable a New Drug Application (NDA) filing with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in mid-2016.

Symbiomix also announced that the FDA has granted Fast Track designation to SYM-1219. The FDA’s Fast Track program is designed to facilitate the development and expedite the review of drugs that are intended to treat serious conditions. Earlier this year Symbiomix announced that the FDA had designated SYM-1219 as a Qualified Infectious Disease Product (QIDP) for the treatment of BV. QIDP designation makes SYM-1219 eligible for certain benefits, including priority review. Further, if ultimately approved by the FDA, SYM-1219 would be eligible for a five-year extension of exclusivity in addition to new chemical entity (NCE) market exclusivity.

In 2011, the World Well being Group compiled an inventory of each illness, dysfunction, and ailment recognized to man. The listing ultimately crested the 14,000-ailment mark when it was full. However amongst all of those illnesses, it is debatable that none attracts extra consideration from drugmakers or the general public than most cancers.

TOPIC: “Innovating through the U.S. Economic Development Administration”

PRESENTER: Julie Lenzer Kirk, Director Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship U.S. Economic Development Administration

ABSTRACT: Housed within the U.S. Economic Development Administration, the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE) works to foster a more innovative U.S. economy focused on turning new ideas and inventions into products and technologies that spur job growth and competitiveness while promoting economic development. Ms. Kirk will discuss OIE programs including: • Promoting and supporting high-growth entrepreneurship. • Accelerating commercialization of federally funded research. • Working with other agencies and the White House to collaborate on policies and programs to support entrepreneurship and commercialization. • Supporting the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE), which is chaired by the Secretary of Commerce. • Leading the $15 million 2014 Regional Innovation Strategies Program competition.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have been working on a new solution for sepsis, a complication of infection that affects more than a million people in the U.S. each year and kills between 20 and 40% of them.

But this tool for treating sepsis isn’t strictly a medical intervention — it’s a computer code.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015 2:00 pm

Patents help define the scope of your invention. In this two-part webinar, we shall provide a simple overview of the patent litigation process in the U.S., some options to defend against a patent infringement lawsuit brought against you, and how to protect your patent rights from being infringed by others.

Heading up the Johns Hopkins Medicine Technology Innovation Center, Gorkem Sevinc, MSE, CIIP, focuses the bulk of his attention on partnering with clinical and research personnel within Hopkins Medicine to collaboratively build innovative Health IT tools. Software development, IT infrastructure, workflow and collaboration tools are all part of his purview.

Sevinc started the informatics research laboratory in the Department of Radiology at Johns Hopkins Medicine along with his director and chair-elect of SIIM, Paul Nagy, PhD. They grew it to serve all of Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Health IT needs, but the department of radiology continues to be the lab’s anchor.

The Daily Record’s Innovator of the Year recognizes individuals and companies that have created a product, service or program that has had a positive effect on their business, industry or community.

Innovators make the extraordinary ordinary. They make the impossible possible. In many ways, they turn dreams into realities. We congratulate this year’s winners! Event:

Thursday, October 15, 2015 The Center Club 100 Light St. #16, Baltimore, MD 21202

The Cordish Companies proudly announce Baltimore’s newest collaborative workspace for creators and innovators: Spark. Spark, designed by Baltimore based Verve Design, will be ideally located in the central business district at The Offices at Power Plant Live!. Baltimore’s tech community is thriving, creating a need for non-traditional, businesses to work collaboratively under the same roof. Spark will be uniquely set-up to help businesses connect with different industry professionals, from education to health IT to finance.

Sept. 17th, 2015, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, Washington DC, 1619 Massachusetts Ave NW Washington, DC, 20036

Are you an entrepreneur and thinking of starting your own company? Are you a small start-up looking for local resources that will help your company succeed? Are you a small company looking to expand and enter the next stage of commercial success? If you said “Yes” to any of these questions, then this WIB event is for you!

Our panel of industry experts from MD TEDCO, BioHealth Innovation, and the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development will provide you with invaluable information about resources their organizations provide to the local business community, including idea/product development, early and late stage funding, and business accelerator programs.

Pharmaceutical companies are running hard to keep pace with changes brought about by digital technology. Mobile communications, the cloud, advanced analytics, and the Internet of Things are among the innovations that are starting to transform the healthcare industry in the ways they have already transformed the media, retail, and banking industries. Pharma executives are well aware of the disruptive potential and are experimenting with a wide range of digital initiatives. Yet many find it hard to determine what initiatives to scale up and how, as they are still unclear what digital success will look like five years from now. This article aims to remedy that. We believe disruptive trends indicate where digital technology will drive the most value in the pharmaceutical industry, and they should guide companies as they build a strategy for digital success.

Is the U.S. market for consumer wearable devices headed toward the trough of disillusionment on the Gartner Hype Cycle? A new report suggests that explosive growth in demand for fitness bands, smartwatches, smart glasses (think Google Glass) and the like peaked in January and has been headed downward ever since.

On the surface of a living cell at any given time, hundreds of tiny bubbles are popping into existence, surrounding and incorporating proteins, hormones, fats, and the occasional bacteria or virus. But until now the details of this activity were inferred – you couldn’t actually see it. The problem wasn’t just that the structures taking part in this bustling activity are too small, but that our bodies work on an invisibly fast time scale—important changes are taking place over fractions of a second.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has hired Jason Hardebeck to work on internet access issues for the city.

Hardebeck will serve as “Broadband Coordinator” for the city. He recently left his role as director of DreamIt Health Baltimore. The mayor made the announcement at a weekly media availability at City Hall.

A blood test that could quickly detect a brain injury and measure the damage it has done could help doctors provide better care for the millions of people suffering from such injuries, potentially improving their chances of avoiding long-term disabilities.

The trick is identifying proteins that appear in the blood in elevated amounts only after a brain injury and then developing tests that can both detect those markers and determine medically relevant information from them. Two companies, Quanterix and Banyan Biomarkers, have identified promising biomarkers and are devising and evaluating diagnostic tests.

In the future, Baltimore will basically be part of Washington, D.C.

So says Ted Leonsis, owner of the Washington Capitals and Wizards, who predicts in a blog post that Baltimore will be the northern edge of a D.C. supercity. Leonsis writes: “By 2050 – DC will be like London, it will take up about 100 miles end to end, we will think of it as a area that goes from Middleburg to well north of Baltimore on 95.”

Wednesday, September 16, 2015 12:00 pm-1:15 pm, Silver Spring Innovation Center, 8070 Georgia Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20910

The Angel Venture Forum is starting up its annual educational training series to prepare business owners to make their pitches in front of 30 angel investors on November 10 at the National Press Club. Angel investor Valerie Gaydos will explain the process and give a few highlights from the training series. Learn the six basic lessons that every entrepreneur should know and what investors want to know about you before investing: 1) Funding 2) Term Sheets & Cap Tables 3) Financials 4) Intellectual Property Protection 5) Leadership 6) Valuation & Price. Free, a light lunch will be served. Parking is available in the garage adjacent to the Silver Spring Innovation Center.

The company is just so much better known its medical countermeasures against biological threats like anthrax than for its cancer work, and that’s a problem.

United Therapeutics (Nasdaq: UTHR) is selling a voucher designed to speed up approval for rare pediatric disease treatments to Chicago-based pharmaceutical company AbbVie Inc. for a record $350 million.

The Wall Street Journal reports the Silver Spring-based biotechnology company landed the voucher when it received approval from the Food and Drug Administration for Unituxin, its drug designed to treat neuroblastoma.

This event is to gather interested small businesses seeking assistance from the Small Business Innovation Research grants program from the National Institutes of Health. This is a free event brought to you by BioHealth Innovation. Hear from the SBIR managers on current Institute funding priorities. Meet one-on-one with program managers regarding your current project. Learn of SBIR assistance provided by BioHealth Innovation.

Most consumers are familiar with the idea of probiotics — particularly when it comes to gastrointestinal health. But could they actually benefit HIV and AIDS patients?

That’s a question being examined in a medical probiotic product created by Gaithersburg startup ExeGi Pharma LLC. That product, Visbiome, is planned for launch this fall and was originally designed to help the treatment of patients with ailments such as ulcerative colitis or irritable bowel syndrome.

Novartis has agreed to buy all remaining rights to Ofatumumab from Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline for up to $1 billion, boosting the Swiss drugmaker’s stable of multiple sclerosis (MS) treatments.

Basel-based Novartis had previously acquired the rights to Ofatumumab for oncology indications, but it is currently being developed for relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis and other auto-immune conditions.

The world’s first malaria vaccine got a green light on Friday from European drugs regulators who recommended it should be licensed for use in babies in Africa at risk of the mosquito-borne disease.

The shot, called RTS,S or Mosquirix and developed by British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline in partnership with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, would be the first licensed human vaccine against a parasitic disease and could help prevent millions of cases of malaria in countries that use it.

Cloud-based data company Inovalon Holdings will acquire D.C. health research and advisory firm Avalere Health in a deal worth $140 million, the companies announced Monday.

The move will enable Bowie-based Inovalon (Nasdaq: INOV) to expand into the pharmaceutical market and fuel growth in the use of big data analytics at life sciences companies, officials said. The deal is expected to close Sept. 1.

September 8th, Cattail Creek Country Club, Glenwood, MD

Biotech execs play for free in the tournament that will benefit The Little Things for Cancer & the Zaching Against Cancer Foundation organizations.

Welcome to the 2015 Biotech Invitational, a DogDenGolf managed event that is being supported by top executives at Medimmune, other Biotechnology companies and Vendors in the region. This year’s event will be held on September 8, 2015, at Cattail Creek Country Club in Glenwood, MD and will determine the Biotech Executive Golfers of the Year.

Proceeds from this event will benefit The Little Things for Cancer, a local non-profit providing support and services to cancer patients, and their caregivers. For detailed information on the programs and services that The Little Things provides, visit their website at www.tlt4c.org.

We are looking for the Most Rockin’ Business in the City!

Is it yours?

The 2nd Annual “Rockin’ in Rockville” Award is set to be handed out at this year’s REDI Resource Meetup (R2M) event in September.

This award, created to highlight the success, community engagement, and innovative practices of a Rockville-based company, is given out during Maryland Economic Development Week.

“The startup scene is starving for seed-stage investment right now.”

If you’ve ever spent time around a startup hub then you’ve probably heard some version of this comment before. Whether it’s currently the case in the D.C. area may be a fair question, and one that we’ve put to venture capitalists from some of the region’s most prominent firms—Revolution, New Atlantic Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

TOPIC: “Innovating through the U.S. Economic Development Administration”

PRESENTER: Julie Lenzer Kirk, Director Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship U.S. Economic Development Administration

ABSTRACT: Housed within the U.S. Economic Development Administration, the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE) works to foster a more innovative U.S. economy focused on turning new ideas and inventions into products and technologies that spur job growth and competitiveness while promoting economic development. Ms. Kirk will discuss OIE programs including: • Promoting and supporting high-growth entrepreneurship. • Accelerating commercialization of federally funded research. • Working with other agencies and the White House to collaborate on policies and programs to support entrepreneurship and commercialization. • Supporting the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE), which is chaired by the Secretary of Commerce. • Leading the $15 million 2014 Regional Innovation Strategies Program competition.

BrainScope Company, Inc., a privately held neurotechnology company with an initial focus on traumatic brain injury (TBI) and concussion assessment, is feeling a lot of positive momentum these days as it recently announced an additional $500,000 funding from GE and the NFL, and a host of new appointments intended to move the company forward.

In July, the company announced that it had received an additional $500,000 award from GE and the National Football League (NFL) to further enhance its portable concussion assessment system, as one of six final winners of the GE NFL Head Health Challenge I. In February 2014, Brainscope was selected as one of the initial 16 recipients from more than 400 entries from 27 countries of the up to $10 million Challenge, which was created by GE and the NFL to award entrants for proposals focusing on “identifying breakthrough technologies and approaches that will improve the diagnosis and prognosis of mild traumatic brain injury (TBI).”

Startup Maryland and LAUNCH! Annapolis today announced a teaming relationship under which both organizations present the 2015 Maryland Open Bloody-Mary and Crab-Soup Competitions. Contested over two rounds, the Maryland Open will be held during the Pitch Across Maryland tour and celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Round One begins on Saturday, September 12 during a tailgate at the University of Maryland. Round One continues the following week Saturday, September 19 during a tailgate at the United States Naval Academy. The Final Round will be announced during the Pitch Across Maryland tour.

The WIB-DC/Baltimore Mentors, Advisors, and Peers (MAPs) Committee is thrilled to announce the initiation of our 1:1 Mentoring Program. This program is designed to match mentees in the early stages of their careers to mentors who can help guide them based on different areas of interest. We are looking for volunteers interested in being part of this new program.

Sara Nayeem will participate in the Biotechnology Industry Organization webinar entitled, “Capturing Investor Interest in a Hot Biotech Climate,” on Tuesday, August 18th at 1PM EST. The panel will explore the strong biotech market and answer questions from start-ups seeking funding in their venture.

The biotech market is stronger than ever with more than $5B invested in 2015 so far. With the influx of capital flowing in the biotech pools, the panel will advise startups on what to look for when interviewing investment firms, what due diligence is needed to find appropriate investment partners, and what steps a company should take to ensure that the partnership runs smoothly.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is a major consumer technology developer and Internet services giant which is involved in an incredibly diverse array of innovative tech fields. The company is best known for its Internet search engine, which processes an average of about 40,000 search queries every second, but in our Companies We Follow series we’ve seen them develop everything from robots with humanoid personalities to medical emergency response drones. We’ve covered Google acquisitions that have pulled the company into the sphere of digital wallet tech as well as patenting activities in the field of autonomous vehicles. It’s clear that the tentacles of the corporate octopus that is Google stretch wide and far away from each other.

With the financial aid of a biotechnology executive whose daughter may need a lung transplant, U.S. researchers have been shattering records in xenotransplantation, or between-species organ transplants.

The researchers say they have kept a pig heart alive in a baboon for 945 days and also reported the longest-ever kidney swap between these species, lasting 136 days. The experiments used organs from pigs “humanized” with the addition of as many as five human genes, a strategy designed to stop organ rejection.

In the May 15, 2014, edition of the journal Nature, Floyd Romesberg’s chemistry lab at San Diego’s Scripps Research Institute published a paper titled “A Semi-Synthetic Organism with an Expanded Genetic Alphabet.” Romesberg and his colleagues had created a bacterium incorporating chemical building blocks that, as far as anybody knows, have never been part of any earthly life form.

There had been previous claims to “creating life.” Genome pioneer Craig Venter led a team that manufactured a genome for a germ that causes pneumonia in cows, but their effort used the familiar chemical bases of DNA, known by the letters A, G, C, and T. Romesberg’s group, on the other hand, added two additional letters, dubbed X and Y. When the bacteria successfully replicated X and Y in succeeding generations, Romesberg’s lab could claim to have made the first living thing with an expanded genetic code.

Bayer HealthCare has launched its own digital health accelerator program in Berlin, Germany called “Grants4Apps,” selecting five digital health startups from around the globe that will advance their business ideas and technology in areas such as hormone tests, patient adherence, breathing patterns, clinical trials and vitamin deficiency. The selected five digital health startups will receive financial support of up to 50,000 Euro and will work out of the company’s pharmaceutical division in Berlin. Over the next four months, the startups will work with Bayer executives and seasoned entrepreneurs

Durham venture capital fund Hatteras Venture Partners plans to announce Monday that it has raised more than $90 million for its fifth investment fund, giving it roughly 60 percent of its $150 million goal.

“We’re humbled and gratified that people would continue to have this level of confidence in us,” said Clay Thorp, co-founder and general partner.

Biotech MacroGenics Inc. is growing its footprint, recently leasing 122,000 square feet of wet lab space in the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville.

The clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, which focuses on antibody-based therapies for cancer treatment and other diseases, will use the space for its commercial manufacturing of early clinical stage molecules, CEO Scott Koenig said.

Every year, around 8,000 people die waiting for an organ transplant. There just doesn’t seem to be enough human organs available for those who need them. Biotech company United Therapeutics has been investigating ways to grow pig organs to be used in humans, and in the four years its researchers have been working on it, the company has become the largest commercial backer of xenotransplantation (transplants between species) and has found some initial success.

Mere months after a major venture capital fundraise, Rockville-based biotech RegenxBio Inc. says it’s ready to go public. UPCOMING EVENTS AUGUST 18, 2015 , 11:45AM Washington Business Journal: Lead Generation Seminar

In an initial regulatory filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it would trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol RGNX. It has yet to say how much it plans to raise and set either a price for the stock or date for the initial public offering. Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC (NYSE: MS), BofA Merrill Lynch, Piper Jaffray and Chardan Capital Markets LLC will manage the IPO.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. EBS, -1.75% today announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has exercised options under contract 200-2012-52242 for the supply of Vaccinia Immune Globulin (VIGIV) into the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile. VIGIV is a therapeutic licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of complications due to smallpox vaccination. The contract options, valued at $44 million over two years, will require Emergent to collect plasma for future manufacturing in addition to current collection requirements, conduct manufacturing runs, and conduct additional activities in support of maintaining the FDA licensure of VIGIV.

Inovio Pharmaceuticals has begun collaboration and sold the exclusive rights to an HPV types 16 and 18 vaccine to MedImmune, the biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, for $700 million, according to a press release.

“[The] collaboration with Inovio leverages our deep internal expertise in the use of vaccines to drive antigen-specific, T-cell responses,” David Berman, MD, PhD, senior vice president and head of MedImmune’s oncology medicine development unit, said in the release.

Roche (ROG.VX) is buying U.S. diagnostics firm GeneWEAVE BioSciences for up to $425 million, expanding the Swiss group’s commitment to fighting so-called “superbugs” as the threat from drug-resistant microbes grows.

Roche said on Thursday it would pay shareholders in the privately held Californian company $190 million upfront and up to a further $235 million depending on the future success of its products.

Gliknik Inc., a privately held biopharmaceutical company, today announced that its licensee Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) has received notification from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that its autoimmune candidate drug GL-2045, a recombinant Intravenous Immune Globulin (IVIG)-mimetic, has been granted orphan drug designation for Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIDP). CIDP is a rare neurological disorder characterized by progressive weakness and impaired sensory function in the legs and arms.

TOPIC: “Innovating through the U.S. Economic Development Administration”

PRESENTER: Julie Lenzer Kirk, Director Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship U.S. Economic Development Administration

ABSTRACT: Housed within the U.S. Economic Development Administration, the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE) works to foster a more innovative U.S. economy focused on turning new ideas and inventions into products and technologies that spur job growth and competitiveness while promoting economic development. Ms. Kirk will discuss OIE programs including: • Promoting and supporting high-growth entrepreneurship. • Accelerating commercialization of federally funded research. • Working with other agencies and the White House to collaborate on policies and programs to support entrepreneurship and commercialization. • Supporting the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE), which is chaired by the Secretary of Commerce. • Leading the $15 million 2014 Regional Innovation Strategies Program competition.

Aeras announced today a new leadership structure for the nonprofit biotech organization with Jacqueline E. Shea, Ph.D., the current Chief Operating Officer (COO), assuming the role of Chief Executive Officer (CEO), effective August 12. Thomas G. Evans, M.D., will step down as CEO to become Acting Chief Scientific Officer (CSO). Ann M. Ginsberg, M.D., Ph.D., will continue as Chief Medical Officer.

Dr. Evans will serve as Acting CSO while Aeras considers how it wishes to fill the position permanently. “I am extremely happy that Dr. Shea will be leading Aeras as we continue our important work of tuberculosis (TB) vaccine development,” said Dr. Evans. “She is an outstanding choice and I am tremendously pleased to know that Aeras leadership will be in her capable hands. This is the right time for me and the organization to make this change, after five years with Aeras first as CSO, then CEO. As Acting CSO, I will be able to focus on the work I most enjoy. There is much unfinished work for me to do in the science arena, and I am looking forward to having the time to concentrate on a number of exciting TB projects.”

BioMark Diagnostics Inc. (“BioMark” or the “Company”) (CSE:BUX) (FSE:20B), a leader in next-generation diagnostics using metabolites, announces its strategy to expand operations into the U.S. with headquarters in Maryland’s world-class biotechnology center. “Expansion of operations into the U.S. market is a critical step in our growth plan,” said Rashid Ahmed, BioMark’s President and CEO. “This move will support our ability to build upon our leadership position in developing highly sensitive diagnostics that can detect cancer at its very early stages using our proprietary metabolite approach. We are making significant progress in strengthening the clinical validation for our metabolite approach and we are looking to build on the BioMark brand in the U.S. market.”

Scientists throughout are celebrating the scoop that the arena’s first vaccine towards malaria has been authorized by way of the .

The vaccine, named Mosquirix, used to be given the fairway gentle on Friday after , detailed in 230,000 pages of knowledge. It now signifies that the vaccine might be tested via the Global Well being Organisation and, if authorized, may well be administered to youngsters throughout Africa inside of the following few years.

WuXi PharmaTech (Cayman) Inc. (“WuXi” or the “Company”) (NYSE: WX), a leading open-access R&D capability and technology platform company serving the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries with operations in China and the United States, today announced that it has entered into a definitive Agreement and Plan of Merger (the “Merger Agreement”) with New WuXi Life Science Limited (“Parent”) and WuXi Merger Limited (“Merger Sub”), a wholly owned subsidiary of Parent.

It turns out that bacteria could hold a key to transforming how doctors treat disease — at least that’s what Editas, a privately held company that just raised $120 million from investors including Bill Gates, seems to think.

First, a bit of background Editas was founded in 2013 through $43 million in venture funding from the likes of Flagship Ventures and Polaris Partners and the company is researching a fascinating gene-editing technique based on the immune system of bacteria.

Entrepreneurs who want to pitch their business plan to Steve Case when his Rise of the Rest venture tour comes to Baltimore next month should start preparing now. A pitch competition with a $100,000 prize will be a highlight of the tour’s Sept. 28 stop in Baltimore. The contest starts before entrepreneurs hit the stage — in other cities more than 100 entrepreneurs have applied to the contest. Eight are selected to pitch their business to Case and a panel of local judges.

Announcing the Buzz of BIO: Recognizing the most innovative companies at the 2015 BIO Investor Forum™

Are you an early-stage company looking for your next financing round, or a late-stage private company hoping to make the valuable connection needed to take your product to the next phase? Nominate your company to be the Buzz of BIO at this year’s BIO Investor Forum.

Winners receive complimentary conference registration, a Company Presentation and promotion to industry leaders including a spotlight in BioCentury Extra.