BHI Weekly Newsletter Archives

Hundreds of people from more than 140 life sciences organizations based in Maryland are traveling to the BIO International annual conference taking place next week, June 15th-18th, in Philadelphia.

Stop by our Booth (#301), enjoy a cup of espresso, meet key industry leaders, and learn more about the many resources and experts available in Maryland to help you grow your business!

Only a year after its founding, Bethesda-based health tech company Aledade Inc. raised $30 million in a Series B fundraising, it announced Monday.

ARCH Venture Partners led the funding round with an investment from Series A investor Venrock, which first invested $4.5 million in Aledade to start the company last June.

A new health technology accelerator is looking for applicants for its five month program.It is the latest in a steady growth of organizations helping entrepreneurs navigate the long sales cycle and other unique challenges healthcare industry startups face.

Relevant Health, based in Rockville, Maryland, was formed through a partnership between BioHealth Innovation, Montgomery County’s Economic Development department and Product Savvy, which will run the day-to-day operations.

−Drs. Steve Wolpe and Ethel Rubin Named EIRs for National Institutes of Health; Dr. Albine Martin to Serve as EIR Working with Johns Hopkins University and Maryland-Based Health-Technology Companies

−BHI Continues Search for Neurology and Neuroscience Experts to Fill Roles of EIRS for the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)

ROCKVILLE AND BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, June 8, 2015 – BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI) announced today the hiring of three new entrepreneurs-in-residence (EIRs): two for the NIH and one to work with Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and Maryland-based health-technology companies. Additionally, BHI is actively recruiting neuroscience and neurology experts for EIR positions within the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).

Entrepreneurs beat long odds when they launch a company, scale it up and sell it to investors. Smith School alumnus Jason Cohen has done it five times in 15 years with brands such as Sensible Portions low-calorie snacks, Rickland Orchards yogurt, SkinnyPop popcorn and Mrs. Thinsters cookies. Now Cohen and his partners are focusing on identifying high-potential startups that need capital and expertise to grow. Their latest project is a jerky company called Chef’s Cut. “If we invest in your business, then we believe it can be a $50 million to $100 million business,” says Cohen, who lives in New Jersey. “And you’ll get a roadmap from an entrepreneur who has been in your shoes.” Part of that roadmap includes the following seven secrets of Cohen’s success.

There are a couple of common analogies for startups wooing potential investors, said entrepreneur Brian Razzaque — it’s like herding cats, or getting one lemming to lead the others. Most investors are wary of bankrolling an unproven company without someone else’s seal of approval.

Pieris Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (OTCQB: PIRS), a biotechnology company advancing its proprietary Anticalin® biotherapeutic technologies, announced today the completion of enrollment of healthy subjects in a blinded, placebo-controlled Phase I clinical trial for the Company’s PRS-080 program, a hepcidin antagonist to treat anemia. This study was conducted at a single site in Germany.

Startup Maryland (www.startupmd.org), a venture development community forged with Maryland Pride, By Entrepreneurs … For Entrepreneurs, today announced the schedule for the 2015 Raise Your Game entrepreneur bootcamp. Raise Your Game provides the Maryland entrepreneur community with a structured educational program designed to help startup CxOs and founders understand and employ the building blocks of strong startups and startup communities.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) today expressed continuing opposition to The Innovation Act (H.R. 9) as amended and reported by the House Judiciary Committee today, and believes that, without substantial changes, the bill will jeopardize America’s leadership in medical, agricultural and environmental innovation.

BIO consistently has urged Congress to proceed cautiously when addressing any changes to the patent system that could unduly shift the legal balance against legitimate patent owners. Despite some improvements to the bill, the latest version of the Innovation Act remains unacceptable in certain respects, and includes new provisions that require additional careful vetting for potentially negative unintended consequences for patent owners. BIO remains concerned that the bill would impose unreasonable challenges for innovative start-up and other small companies seeking to protect their intellectual property in a timely and efficient manner, and could chill the investment and collaboration that is so critical to the biotech innovation ecosystem.

H.R. 6, the 21st Century Cures Act, includes vital resources for the National Institutes of Health and important policy – See more at: http://energycommerce.house.gov/press-release/21st-century-cures-renews-commitment-biomedical-research-america#sthash.2aIzVevb.dpuf changes that will allow America’s most promising scientists and researchers to unleash the next generation of cures and therapies. As Greg Satell writes in Forbes, “science is what made America a technological superpower” and the 21st Century Cures Act would help to “renew our commitment to science and competitiveness.” The Alliance for Aging Research adds, “the pace of scientific discovery since the turn of the century has accelerated at a speed that was not possible a generation ago. [H.R. 6] was developed after the realization by leaders in Congress that the current health care innovation infrastructure needed improvement to accommodate those advances in science.”

Johns Hopkins University was among seven research institutions selected by French pharmaceutical company Sanofi to play a larger role in helping decide which projects it should fund.

Sanofi on Wednesday unveiled a new grantmaking program that will support up to $2.4 million in research grants a year. The program aims to encourage collaboration among research groups to advance the development of new drugs. A scientific steering committee with representatives from seven research institutions will review proposals for the Sanofi Innovation Program, which will award grants of about $100,000 each.

Scientific American has released its list of the 100 most influential people in biotechnology.

I am honored to be included in this exclusive list and recognized for my thought leadership on the business of biotechnology.

The event will focus on the most innovative life sciences clusters in Europe. It will bring together top level representatives from universities, research labs, science parks, incubators, venture capital, hospitals, start-ups and government agencies, all having a role to play in these regional innovation ecosystems.

There is always talk, sometimes tongue-in-cheek but mostly sort of serious, that a lot of jobs will be replaced by robots or computers. Maybe that new iPhone I just bought will replace me by year end. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla thinks that the most doctors’ current functions will be replaced by algorithms; many believe that lots of white collar jobs, such as lawyers, accountants, and bankers will be replaced by machines with warmer personalities. Venture capitalists have already been “supplemented” with algorithms and, no doubt, there are plenty of people who would like to see us replaced by nearly anything metal—spatula, can opener–if they had their way. In Iron Man we see a world of robot-based soldiers going to war and in real life the echo of that is not so far off.

Two years ago, a television cartoon in Pakistan made waves for its star, a superheroine named “Burka Avenger,” who promotes positive social change while clad in the titular billowing black silk outfit. With the tagline “don’t mess with the lady in black,” the show presents plotlines promoting gender equality, environmentalism and health.

Dubai based startup Fetchr has raised Series A funding worth $11 million led by New Enterprise Associates and participation from Delta Partners, Dhabi Holdings, Triple Point Capital, Ben Narasin, Roland Berger and 500 Startups, reports the Wall Street Journal. Fetchr will use the funds to launch its mobile app on Android and iOS and product development.

When Open Works makes its debut in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District next year, Will Holman hopes it will become just the kind of place where he can set up shop. An architect by training and furniture maker, Holman is also the project director for Open Works, a $10 million incubator Baltimore Arts Realty Corp. is developing in a warehouse across from Greenmount Cemetery.

Come to this information breakfast to learn about Relevant Health, the new accelerator located in the Rockville Innovation Center, now accepting applications from health tech startups for its Fall 2015 class. Relevant Health’s five-month program involves an intensive product-focused curriculum that gives founders of health tech startups the skills to define, develop, position and launch a viable health tech product. Companies admitted to the accelerator will have access to the cowork facility along with other support that includes up to $50,000 in funding, mentorship, development support from a pool of software engineers, and access to the local health tech ecosystem. Interested applicants should visit http://www.relevanthealth.md to complete the online application. The final deadline for application submissions is July 31, 2015. Free, breakfast will be served. Park in designated GIC parking spots only.

Hundreds of people from more than 140 life sciences organizations based in Maryland are traveling to the BIO International annual conference taking place next week, June 15th-18th, in Philadelphia.

Stop by our Booth (#301), enjoy a cup of espresso, meet key industry leaders, and learn more about the many resources and experts available in Maryland to help you grow your business!

The Incubator Company of the Year Awards is an opportunity to highlight Maryland’s impressive incubator system and recognize the breadth and depth of technology talent that we have throughout Maryland. In determining the winners, judges considered factors such as technology and product development, increase in employee numbers, growth in revenue, and the attraction of outside investors. The Incubator Company of the Year Awards represent some of the best companies in Maryland that have recently been started and have gone through incubator programs. With BioHealth Innovation’s assistance, Avhana Health has been able to create a category-defining product, triple it’s workforce and gain funding from outside investors.

Tech award season rolled on in Maryland on Thursday night at the American Visionary Art Museum. The Maryland Incubator Company of the Year Awards recognized startups in a host of categories like life sciences, health technology and technology services.

Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development Secretary Mike Gill offered the keynote address, detailing a few specifics of how Gov. Larry Hogan’s administration wants to make the state more business-friendly. That will include a new name for the department, and will likely mean a new title for Gill.

Personal Genome Diagnostics has raised $4.3 million in private financing, the firm said in a document filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday.

A spokesperson for the firm said that the financing was in the form of a convertible note funding and is part of a larger Series A round currently underway. No further details were disclosed.

Gemstone Biotherapeutics, a Baltimore company developing treatments to promote wound healing, has raised $2.45 million in a seed round of investment, company officials said.

The company plans to use the money to further test its technologies and pursue regulatory review and clinical trials. It is developing biosynthetic “scaffold” technology that has shown in animal tests it can help skin regenerate and prevent scarring when applied to burn wounds.

Investment to accelerate momentum behind cloud-based electronic health record software for behavioral health market

June 2nd, 2015 | Rockville, MD – Credible Behavioral Health, Inc. (“Credible”), a leading provider of electronic health record (“EHR”) and practice management Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) solutions to the behavioral health market, today announced that it has secured a $30 million minority investment from Goldman Sachs. The investment will allow Credible to further pursue its mission of helping behavioral health agencies improve their quality of care by scaling its presence across the clinic, community, residential, and inpatient behavioral health market. Credible plans to accelerate product development, build out its sales and marketing team, and opportunistically pursue acquisitions.

Gaithersburg-based Novavax Inc. — known for its work developing vaccine candidates for the flu, a pediatric respiratory illness and Ebola — expanded into a new 54,000-square-foot research and development space where it plans to house its vaccine work.

“It’s a very important signal of our continued growth,” said Buck Phillips, chief financial officer of Novavax (Nasdaq: NVAX) of the new space at 21 Firstfield Road, across the street from its headquarters.

OpGen, Inc. (Nasdaq:OPGN), an early commercial-stage molecular testing and bioinformatics company, today launched its expanded, comprehensive molecular testing and bioinformatics program for detecting and managing Gram negative multi-drug resistant organisms, or MDROs. These products and services are designed to enable healthcare providers to rapidly identify and help manage hospital patients who are colonized or infected with life-threatening, drug resistant organisms.

OpGen also announced that it has been selected to participate in the White House Forum on Antibiotic Stewardship, being held today in Washington, D.C. The event brings together key federal and private-sector constituencies involved in the development, promotion and implementation of antibiotic stewardship activities to ensure the responsible use of antibiotics nationwide. A live stream of the opening session will be available beginning at 8:00 a.m. Eastern time via www.whitehouse.gov/live.

Strand Life Sciences is hoping for a bigger seat at the table in the U.S. next-generation sequencing (NGS) market with the launch of an expanded version of its Stranddvantage pan-cancer genomic profiling test.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan today announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the University of Maryland (UMD) and the headquarters of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China’s top science and technology research and educational organization.

Signed on June 2nd by UMD President Wallace D. Loh and CAS President Bai Chunli at CAS headquarters in Beijing, the MOU encourages joint research activities, student exchanges, and other related and mutually beneficial activities. CAS is composed of 104 research institutes, two universities, 12 academies, and over 100 key national labs.

For decades, a postdoctoral appointment in a university laboratory has been the “default” next step for new Ph.D. researchers in biomedical sciences and, increasingly, in other sciences as well. In those positions, scientists encounter such well-known issues as low pay, long hours, and little or no preparation for career opportunities outside academe.

Governor Larry Hogan joined Maryland companies RTKL and Marriott International, as well as officials from the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, for a ceremony during which agreements were signed with Chinese companies and educational institutions. Among the partnerships, Marriott International has agreed to work with R&F Real Estate Development in China to operate the 350-room Ritz-Carlton in Harbin; and global design firm RTKL signed an agreement with Beijing Thaihot Jiaying Real Estate Development Co. to provide design consulting services for the Shijingshan Galaxy Business Area. In addition, two emerging Chinese companies – Shanghai Tongji Biological Product Co. and Ankang Shimao Biotechnology Co. – announced plans to set up U.S. operations in Maryland’s International Incubator at the University of Maryland, College Park, which is already home to a number of Chinese firms.

For at least three days this month, Philadelphia will be the Silicon Valley of biotech.

Nearly 40 startups and small businesses funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with innovative biomedical technologies based on fundamental research will be in Philadelphia June 15-18 at the 2015 BIO International Convention, the world’s largest gathering of the biotechnology industry.

The big data movement is redefining the way we approach biotech – opening up new opportunities for engineers and mathematicians. It also is helping entrepreneurs launch an entirely new kind of biotech startup – one at the nexus of tech and biotech.

So there’s a lot of talk about how best to entice the tech-savvy into the life sciences – because the silos remain very real. How do we bridge the gap between tech and biotech?

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:

• Clarifying Publication Reporting Instructions for Research Performance Progress Reports (RPPR) and Renewal Applications
• (NOT-OD-15-091) National Institutes of Health
• Reminder of Timeline for Administrative Changes to NIH Domestic Awards to Transition to Payment Management System Subaccounts
• (NOT-OD-15-105) National Institutes of Health
• Request for Information: NIH Precision Medicine Cohort – Strategies to Address Community Engagement and Health Disparities
• (NOT-OD-15-107) National Institutes of Health
• Delays in Grant Application Submission due to Severe Summer Weather and other Natural Disasters/Emergencies
• (NOT-OD-15-108) National Institutes of Health

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.

Revolution LLC plans to raise $450 million for its next fund, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The raise comes right as the previous fund — which backs growth-stage companies and was also valued at $450 million — is reaching its limit for initial investments. D.C.-based Revolution has invested in 11 companies from that fund since its 2011 inception, with one or two more new investments expected.

Take a poll of most of biotech’s venture capitalists—the ones that survived the financial crash, anyway—and you might find that just about all of them have reloaded with new funds over the past few years. Today, you can add Clarus Ventures to the list.

Clarus—a VC firm with offices in the bi-coastal biotech hotbeds of Cambridge, MA, and South San Francisco, CA—has raised its third fund, a $500 million haul called Clarus Lifesciences III LP that’ll it’ll use to invest in both early and mature drug developers.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities will break ground next week on The Alexandria Center, an 11-story biotech building at 400 Dexter Ave. N.

Juno Therapeutics will be the anchor tenant, taking about 90,000 of the 285,000 square feet. Juno will lease the top four floors and has an option on three more.

The Human Genome Project was one of mankind’s greatest triumphs. But the official gene map that resulted in 2003, known as the “reference genome,” is no longer up to the job.

So say scientists laying plans for a new universal map they say will combine the genomes of hundreds, and eventually thousands, of people to create a true reference that reflects all of humanity.

The TechConnect World Innovation Conference is an annual event uniquely designed to accelerate the commercialization of innovations out of the lab and into industry. The Technical Program spotlights applications focused innovations, materials and devices emerging from industrial, government and academic laboratories worldwide. The Innovation Partnering Program gathers market-ready, commercially-viable, innovations into the largest global technology accelerator program.

Early-stage companies are reviewed and selected by our board of corporate and investment partners. Technical submissions are reviewed and selected by our symposium chairs and program review committee. The 2015 TechConnect World Innovation event encompasses the 2015 SBIR/STTR National Conference, the 2015 National Innovation Summit and Showcase, and Nanotech2015 – the world’s largest nanotechnology event.

One of the two boards that oversee the Virginia Biotechnology Research Park has adopted bylaw changes and added members as part of a plan to support innovation in the entire Richmond region economy.

The Virginia Biotechnology Park Corporation Board, which is the nonprofit leadership entity for the 34-acre park in downtown Richmond, has changed its named to the Innovation Council — a “placeholder” name, for now, that is expected to change as the council works on a rebranding program.

Lawmakers on the Legislature’s powerful budget committee trimmed Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed $300 million two-year funding cut to the University of Wisconsin System to $250 million, which if it stands would be tied for the largest cut in System history and would mark the fifth time in the last six budget cycles that the universities took a significant funding cut.

Entrepreneurs and other private-sector innovators will soon, for the first time, have access to voluminous federal healthcare data stores, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Tuesday. This reverses a longstanding rule that researchers could not use CMS data for commercial purposes.

Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt presented the new policy Tuesday at Health Datapalooza, an event focused on open healthcare data.

June 18th at 1:30pm

This webinar is intended to help enhance the productivity of scientific research–most of which is conducted in teams– by creating awareness of the National Research Council’s recently published report, “Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Sciences.”.

Bioresearch just got a shot in the arm. On March 23, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that three proof-of-concept hubs would join three already existing Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hubs (REACH).

Those new REACH awardees are:

• The Long Island Bioscience Hub: Stony Brook University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory
• The University of Louisville
• The University of Minnesota

Partnering with other pharma companies and academic institutions has been a cornerstone strategy for Eli Lilly and Company for close to a hundred years. One of the first major collaborations in the industry occurred in the 1920s when Lilly partnered with Frederick Banting and Charles Best from the University of Toronto. Banting and Best discovered insulin, and Lilly used its resources to develop and commercialize it. Today millions of people continue to benefit from the result of that successful collaboration.

BioMarker Strategies, LLC, today announced the appointment of Samuel Broder, M.D., as Chairman of its Scientific Advisory Board and his election as a member of the Company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately.

“We are privileged to bring a leader of Dr. Broder’s distinction and scientific experience back to our Company. His record of accomplishment in internal medicine and oncology are well known, and we look forward to benefiting from his scientific and strategic insight in the years ahead,” said Jerry Parrott, President and CEO, BioMarker Strategies. “I am particularly pleased that Dr. Broder has agreed to take on the important role of Chairman of our Scientific Advisory Board. We expect to announce the members of our newly constituted SAB in the near future.”

MedImmune and the University of Cambridge today said they have launched a new five-year, multiproject collaboration with the school’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (CEB) focused on research in biopharmaceutical development including cell engineering. The value of the collaboration was not disclosed.

QIAGEN N.V. (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) today announced the commercial launch of its QIAGEN Clinical Insight® (QCI™) bioinformatics content and software platform for clinical testing labs to interpret and report on genomic variants identified in next-generation sequencing (NGS). The first two supported applications for the bioinformatics platform are in oncology, for somatic and hereditary cancer testing. QIAGEN will demonstrate the QCI software at the upcoming ClinGen/DECIPHER Meeting (May 27-28, Washington D.C.), ASCO Annual Meeting (May 29-June 2, Chicago), and European Society of Human Genetics Conference (June 6-9, Glasgow).

ProMetic Life Sciences Inc. (PLI)(otcqx:PFSCF) (“ProMetic” or the “Corporation”) announced today that it has entered into an agreement for the acquisition of Emergent BioSolutions’ (“Emergent”) plasma collection center located in Winnipeg, Canada. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.

Emergent’s plasma collection center is an FDA and Health Canada licensed plasma collection facility. The plasma collection center is conveniently located in close proximity to the existing Emergent Winnipeg based cGMP manufacturing facility, which was recently announced as providing ProMetic with up to 250,000 liters of annual plasma processing capacity. The plasma collection center will start operating under ProMetic’s ownership upon granting of the regulatory licenses, in ProMetic’s name, by the requisite regulatory authorities. All existing center employees will then transition to be employed by ProMetic.

Technology Digest Inc., an information technology consulting and product development firm, has made its new home at Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus.

The firm is the brainchild of Sarah Iranpour, a first-generation immigrant to the United States from Iran. Iranpour spent years working for others in the IT field. When her son went to college, she decided to “go after my dream developing something substantial for health and medical.”

New Enterprise Associates is planing on making a $5 million investment in Speedinvest’s newly launched second fund. NEA is anticipating that it will provide $50 million in follow-on funding for Speedinvest’s portfolio companies. Speedinvest’s second fund will focus on backing European startups.

Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory has been the hidden mastermind behind some of the nation’s most influential technologies for 73 years.

Now the Howard County institution is going deeper into the medical world, while maintaining its foothold in national security and space exploration projects.

Forest City-New East Baltimore Partnership, a joint venture between Forest City Enterprises, Inc. and Presidential Partners LLC, is building a new innovation hub for life sciences in East Baltimore, just north of the Johns Hopkins medical campus. The project is called 1812 Ashland Avenue and is expected to cost $65.6 million.

Ground was broken on Friday, May 15. The new laboratory and office building will have seven levels and about 168,000 square feet of space. It will be the newest addition to the Science + Technology Park at Johns Hopkins and part of the 88-acre East Baltimore Development Inc. renewal area, which is also developed by Forest City-New East Baltimore Partnership.

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is proud to announce the 2015 Tibbetts Awards to 23 small businesses, six individuals, and – for the first time – three supporting organizations for their exemplary roles in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs.

The 2015 Tibbetts Award recipients will be formally honored in Washington, DC, on June 15 during a White House ceremony featuring keynote speaker Cady Coleman, accomplished scientist and NASA Astronaut noted for her six-month expedition to the International Space Station. Tibbetts Awardees will also be honored at the June 16 kickoff of the National SBIR/STTR Conference where thousands of the best and brightest in the innovation ecosystem convene annually.

BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a public-private partnership and innovation intermediary is seeking an energetic and motivated life science professional for the role of an Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) with product development experience and subject matter expertise in the fields of neurology and neuroscience. The EIR will reside within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will also support intramural and extramural initiatives on an as needed basis.

The EIR program was established at BioHealth Innovation to:

• Retain and bring entrepreneurial talent to the Maryland ecosystem
• Connect resources including institutions, technology assets, people and capital within Maryland that include federal institutions, labs, academic institutions, small businesses, disease foundations and the investor community
• Build/support sustainable life science startups that will add value within the healthcare system and also build upon the existing infrastructure

The EIR will work with BHI leadership to ensure that the activities and outcomes are aligned with BHIs strategic focus.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015 from 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM (EDT)

Tech Transfer Speakers Series Free monthly program offered through the Gateway to Innovation: Montgomery Welcome Center for Federal and Academic Tech Transfer. For more information and additional calendar items, please visit TechTransferConnection.com. Engage with others in the tech transfer field by joining the Gateway to Innovation LinkedIn Group. Brought to you by: Montgomery County…

THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2015 8:30 am – Institute for Bioscience & Biotechnology Research (IBBR)

Manufacturing Science Analytics: Predictors of Biotherapeutic Product Quality

Industrial, federal, and academic researchers will gather to discuss the current trends in process modeling and its relation to the biotherapeutic “fingerprint.” On Thursday, June 25, 2015 at 8:30 am join the thought-leaders, policy-makers, and creators of biosimilars as we present current trends, ideas, and predictions.

The Emerging Leaders (EL) Program provides rising leaders with the skills and connections essential to professional success and effective community leadership. Through eight monthly interactive sessions, participants will gain unique exposure to the issues, resources and key players impacting Montgomery County, while strengthening their professional skill sets.

If you experience any difficulty creating an account or filling out the application, please contact Carol Ippolito carol.ippoito@leadermont.org or 301-881-3333

In the 21st century, health care innovation is happening at lightning speed. From the mapping of the human genome to the rise of personalized medicines that are linked to advances in molecular medicine, we have seen constant breakthroughs that are changing the face of disease treatment, management, and cures. Health research is moving quickly, but the federal drug and device approval apparatus is in many ways the relic of another era. We have dedicated scientists and bold leaders at agencies like the NIH and the FDA, but when our laws don’t keep pace with innovation, we all lose.

If we want to save more lives and keep this country the leader in medical innovation, we have to make sure there’s not a major gap between the science of cures and the way we regulate these therapies.

Boston-based venture capital firm SV Life Sciences is working on its sixth fund, with a fundraising target of $400 million, according to a Form D filing on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s website. The firm invests in biotech, medical devices, health IT and healthcare services.

At Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCoE) we are looking for innovative ways to improve the lives of our nation’s service members, veterans and their families by advancing excellence in psychological health and traumatic brain injury prevention and care. Join our Mental Health and TBI Care Challenge starting May 4 to share your idea on how to fill gaps in care and improve the well-being of people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Awards recognize best practices in university-based economic development

The University Economic Development Association (UEDA) is currently seeking applications for its annual Awards of Excellence program, which recognizes cutting edge university-based economic development initiatives from across the country. The Awards of Excellence Program spotlights higher education institutions and their partners who are transforming their campuses and communities into engines of economic prosperity through creative initiatives in five categories:

Funding: Biotechnology Investor Incentive Tax Credit (BIITC)

Maryland’s Biotechnology Investment Incentive Tax Credit (BIITC), created to assist the state’s early stage life sciences companies raise funding, is one of the most generous programs of its kind in the country. The program provides refundable income tax credits equal to 50% of an eligible investment to investors in qualified Maryland biotechnology companies (QMBCs). Although recipient companies must be based in Maryland, investors from outside the State (including outside the U.S) are encouraged.

Investments from $25,000 to $500,000 per individual investor are eligible, with a company limit of 15% of the annual budgeted credit amount ($1,800,000 of credit per company in FY2016 [July 1, 2015 – June 30, 2016]). To date, 75 companies have taken advantage of the program, receiving $69M in credits and later $450M+ in follow on investment.

Relevant Health, a newly launched innovative health technology startup accelerator focused on bringing products to market, announced that it is now accepting applications from health tech startups for its Fall 2015 class. Additionally, the accelerator launched its website and the portal to its streamlined application process. U.S. and international startups are encouraged to apply.

Relevant Health’s five-month program involves an intensive product-focused curriculum that gives founders of health tech startups the skills to define, develop, position and launch a viable health tech product. The new accelerator will be based out of a brand-new cowork space in the Rockville Innovation Center, centrally located in the heart of the Montgomery County (Maryland) life sciences corridor. Companies admitted to the accelerator will have access to the cowork facility along with other support that includes up to $50,000 in funding, mentorship, development support from a pool of software engineers, and access to the local health tech ecosystem.

Montgomery County is already one of the country’s leading life science centers, and a Rockville business hopes to add several more companies to that community.

Relevant Health is partnering with the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development, Rockville Economic Development Inc. and others to create a health technology “accelerator,” designed to help foster life science companies.

THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2015 8:30 am – Institute for Bioscience & Biotechnology Research (IBBR)

Manufacturing Science Analytics: Predictors of Biotherapeutic Product Quality

Industrial, federal, and academic researchers will gather to discuss the current trends in process modeling and its relation to the biotherapeutic “fingerprint.” On Thursday, June 25, 2015 at 8:30 am join the thought-leaders, policy-makers, and creators of biosimilars as we present current trends, ideas, and predictions.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015 from 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM (EDT)

Tech Transfer Speakers Series Free monthly program offered through the Gateway to Innovation: Montgomery Welcome Center for Federal and Academic Tech Transfer. For more information and additional calendar items, please visit TechTransferConnection.com. Engage with others in the tech transfer field by joining the Gateway to Innovation LinkedIn Group. Brought to you by: Montgomery County…

BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a public-private partnership and innovation intermediary is seeking an energetic and motivated life science professional for the role of an Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) with product development experience and subject matter expertise in the fields of neurology and neuroscience. The EIR will reside within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will also support intramural and extramural initiatives on an as needed basis.

The EIR program was established at BioHealth Innovation to:

• Retain and bring entrepreneurial talent to the Maryland ecosystem
• Connect resources including institutions, technology assets, people and capital within Maryland that include federal institutions, labs, academic institutions, small businesses, disease foundations and the investor community
• Build/support sustainable life science startups that will add value within the healthcare system and also build upon the existing infrastructure

The EIR will work with BHI leadership to ensure that the activities and outcomes are aligned with BHIs strategic focus.

Six months after the search began, 1776 is proud to announce that judges selected Twiga Fruits as the 2015 Challenge Cup Champion.

Twiga has created a market solution to solve the problem of rising food prices across Africa. Its solution offers farmers a formal guaranteed prices, handles the produce with care to eliminate loss and delivers directly to thousands of independent kiosks

The statistics are staggering: 1 in 2 women and 1 in 3 men will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. This means that cancer will very likely affect each and every one of us at some point in our lives — whether it is through our own personal diagnosis or through that of someone we love. In light of this, I’d like share eight things that we as survivors and potential targets of this disease need to know.

The region’s biggest venture capital raise of the year belongs to RegenxBio.

The Rockville-based biotech company has closed a $70.5 million Series D round led by new investor Vivo Capital, a Silicon Valley health care backer, and existing investors Venrock and Brookside Capital.

QIAGEN today announced the opening of its new principal office in Malaysia to serve its growing base of customers for Sample to Insight solutions, enabling them to help fight diseases using molecular diagnostics, break new ground in research for the life sciences and pharmaceutical industry, and protect the public through food safety and forensics testing applications.

Funding: Biotechnology Investor Incentive Tax Credit (BIITC)

Maryland’s Biotechnology Investment Incentive Tax Credit (BIITC), created to assist the state’s early stage life sciences companies raise funding, is one of the most generous programs of its kind in the country. The program provides refundable income tax credits equal to 50% of an eligible investment to investors in qualified Maryland biotechnology companies (QMBCs). Although recipient companies must be based in Maryland, investors from outside the State (including outside the U.S) are encouraged.

Investments from $25,000 to $500,000 per individual investor are eligible, with a company limit of 15% of the annual budgeted credit amount ($1,800,000 of credit per company in FY2016 [July 1, 2015 – June 30, 2016]). To date, 75 companies have taken advantage of the program, receiving $69M in credits and later $450M+ in follow on investment.

When this year’s winners of the InvestMaryland Challenge were announced, Bricata stood out.

Amid the Maryland companies who finished atop the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development competition, the cybersecurity company was listed as hailing from Vienna, Va.

The NIH has jumped onto the whole startup challenge-meets-accelerator trend – using it as a way to galvanize the private sector into licensing the government’s own technology.

It recently announced the winners of its Neuro Startup Challenge – a competition in which teams of students from various universities were tasked with with building out business plans around the NIH’s intellectual property. The teams worked to find ways to commercialize predetermined therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices sanctioned by the government for startup use.

Baltimore entrepreneurs cleaned up at the Maryland Technology Development Corp.’s annual ICE Awards, which recognize some of TEDCO’s most successful portfolio companies.

Analytical Informatics, Lookingglass and Opiatalk CEO Tom Popomaronis, all based in Baltimore, took top honors for innovation, corporate excellence and entrepreneurship.

Baltimore City was among five urban locales to be selected for the first-ever City Accelerator initiative.

Run by Citigroup’s Citi Foundation and Living Cities, the initiative is providing money to five cities in order to promote innovation in local government.

Annapolis, Maryland – Speaking proposals are now being accepted for the 2015 CyberMaryland Conference, held October 28-29 in Baltimore, Maryland. This year’s theme, “Leading the Cyber Generation,” offers unparalleled opportunities that demonstrate how continuing development of cyber assets on the human and technological side will drive business and job growth.

CyberMaryland Conference seeks presenters with new ideas in the areas of cyber workforce development, threat intelligence, innovation and policy. Case studies in cyber product integration, social applications, digital health and wireless technology security, big data analytics and intrusion software are highly valued. In addition to topics related to intrusion software, trends in anti-malware software and new data protection applications are sought.

Donna Harris reaches for her bag, which is slumping against an overstuffed beige couch in the basement kitchenette of a Washington, D.C., theater.

“I’ll be back,” she calls to her business partner, Evan Burfield, a tall 38 year old whose forearm tattoo is hidden under a checkered shirt sleeve. He’s sitting at a nearby lunch table, simultaneously checking email and interrogating a nervous entrepreneur about revenue projections.

Pharma firms need better incentives to create novel antibiotics to head off an ‘apocalyptic scenario’ where commonplace infections become deadly once more. And the latest report from economist Jim O’Neill, who has been commissioned by the UK government to investigate how to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR), offers two ways to make developing antibiotics more attractive to industry. He recommends rewarding firms that develop a new antibiotic with a substantial lump sum. Secondly, a global innovation fund should be set up with $2 billion (£1.3 billion) to be invested over five years to boost blue skies research into drugs and diagnostics. But questions remain over how to run such a scheme and where the money would come from.

Yet another report’s pointing out biotech’s bullish venture appeal – and how medical device investment continues to flag.

In fact, biotechnology funding for human therapeutics is so strong that its venture funding outpaces pharmaceuticals sevenfold, a PricewaterhouseCoopers venture analysis of the first quarter of 2015 life sciences sector found.

The U.S. congress has proposed budgets cuts for research, but more and more scientists are turning to crowdfunding to bring their projects to light.

On May 20, 2015, the US House Republicans voted to place limits on funding for scientific research. The bill, which passed 217 votes to 205, still has to through the Senate, but it sets an ominous tone for future research.

When it came to deciding where drug giant AstraZeneca would expand its work making biologic medicines, there was no question the project would happen in Maryland, the company’s top U.S. official said this Wednesday. “I don’t know where else we would go in terms of innovation,” said Paul Hudson, AstraZeneca’s U.S. president as the company unveiled progress on its $200 million expansion in Frederick.

Circulomics Inc has been awarded a $1.5M Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to develop its Ligo-miR microRNA assay platform. This award follows a previous $400k Phase I award and will create a comprehensive portfolio of Ligo-miR products designed to address broad swaths of the microRNA market.

Emergent BioSolutions announced that a new phase I study has begun at the University of Oxford that will evaluate the use of its modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) Ebola Zaire vaccine candidate as a prime boost to GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK – Analyst Report) Chimp Adenovirus type 3 Ebola vaccine candidate.

The study will enroll 38 volunteers and be conducted in the UK and is being supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department for International Development. Emergent BioSolutions manufactured the supply of MVA Ebola Zaire vaccine candidate to be used in this phase I study.

On April 30, 2015, KeyGene USA, celebrated the opening of its new R&D facilities co-located at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR) in Rockville, Maryland. The R&D facilities include offices, molecular biology labs, a state-of-the-art greenhouse and access to modern growth chambers, tissue culture facilities and other resources. KeyGene USA is part of KeyGene, a leader in molecular breeding and translational agriculture with its headquarters in Wageningen, the Netherlands. KeyGene USA’s research programs will primarily be focused on crops of significance to the North and South American markets.

Like almost everyone else, doctors and nurses now use smartphones on a regular basis. So what’s the best way for the healthcare industry to take advantage of that?

That was the theme of many of the projects being developed in this year’s DreamIt Health Baltimore program, an intensive four-month bootcamp for health-tech startups that began in January. For the second year in a row, Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine co-sponsored the accelerator program in Baltimore, with the six startups setting up shop at an Inner Harbor work space.

Internet2 has announced the establishment of a new award, honoring the lifelong contributions of the chancellor of the University System of Maryland (USM). The Internet2 William “Brit” Kirwan Mentorship Award will be presented annually, beginning in 2016, to a member of the Internet2 community who embodies the spirit of Kirwan’s role as a mentor to countless professionals in the research and education (R&E) community. He is well known for his ability to connect people in higher education and inspire others, and for giving his time to serve the community. Kirwan, a long-time Internet2 supporter and member of its Board of Trustees, will step down from his USM chancellorship next month.

Funding: Biotechnology Investor Incentive Tax Credit (BIITC)

Maryland’s Biotechnology Investment Incentive Tax Credit (BIITC), created to assist the state’s early stage life sciences companies raise funding, is one of the most generous programs of its kind in the country. The program provides refundable income tax credits equal to 50% of an eligible investment to investors in qualified Maryland biotechnology companies (QMBCs). Although recipient companies must be based in Maryland, investors from outside the State (including outside the U.S) are encouraged.

Investments from $25,000 to $500,000 per individual investor are eligible, with a company limit of 15% of the annual budgeted credit amount ($1,800,000 of credit per company in FY2016 [July 1, 2015 – June 30, 2016]). To date, 75 companies have taken advantage of the program, receiving $69M in credits and later $450M+ in follow on investment.

BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a public-private partnership and innovation intermediary is seeking an energetic and motivated life science professional for the role of an Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) with product development experience and subject matter expertise in the fields of neurology and neuroscience. The EIR will reside within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will also support intramural and extramural initiatives on an as needed basis.

The EIR program was established at BioHealth Innovation to:

• Retain and bring entrepreneurial talent to the Maryland ecosystem
• Connect resources including institutions, technology assets, people and capital within Maryland that include federal institutions, labs, academic institutions, small businesses, disease foundations and the investor community
• Build/support sustainable life science startups that will add value within the healthcare system and also build upon the existing infrastructure

The EIR will work with BHI leadership to ensure that the activities and outcomes are aligned with BHIs strategic focus.

A mid-stage trial of Roche Holding AG’s experimental immunotherapy showed that it doubled the likelihood of survival for lung cancer patients with the highest levels of a specific biomarker.

The drug, known by the code name MPDL3280A, is part of a new class designed to help the body’s immune system fend off cancer by blocking a protein known as Programmed Death receptor (PD-1), or a related target known as PD-L1, used by tumors to evade the body’s defenses.

Luis Branco didn’t originally plan to head to the front lines of the Ebola crisis.

His Germantown-based startup, Zalgen Labs LLC, was testing its diagnostic kits in Sierra Leone last May for a different illness called Lassa Fever, which is endemic in West Africa and kills scores of people there every year. But then, Ebola began to spread.

As a serial entrepreneur who now runs an Israel-based platform that helps companies raise money from investors, Jon Medved has seen more than a few locales.

“If you’re looking for innovation outside of Silicon Valley in the states, you can really do no better than Maryland,” said Medved, the CEO of OurCrowd.

Continuing on its current investment spree, Chinese internet giant Tencent has now led a $750K seed funding round for Tissue Analytics, a tele-medicine app that guides you to take care of chronic wounds.

Existing investor DreamIt Health — the Philadelphia-based accelerator program which Tissue Analytics is an Alumni of (the startup got a pre-seed fund from the accelerator program), also participated in the round along with numerous other angel investors from Philadelphia.

A U.K. government-appointed review team into the issue of antibiotic resistance, headed by economist Jim O’Neill, has urged the global pharmaceutical industry to fund a $2 billion innovation fund to kick-start research into new antibiotics. O’Neill argues that without the fund, the incentive for major pharmaceuticals to develop new antibiotics is not there. This is due to the low return-on-investment and too great a focus on short-term profit-and-loss. The issue of “who pays for new antibiotics?” was recently posed by Magnus Steigedal, director of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Strategic Research Area on Health, who came to a similar conclusion that the world cannot wait around for big pharma alone.

Forest City Enterprises and its partners on Friday will break ground on a $65.6 million, 165,000-square-foot building at 1812 Ashland Ave. that will be a hub for Johns Hopkins University’s efforts to commercialize research.

Construction is expected to be completed in August 2016.

In just three months, demand for lab and office space at the Johns Hopkins innovation hub, FastForward East, has exceeded supply. The FastForward program, designed to move academic findings through translational research into the commercial marketplace, was introduced to East Baltimore earlier this year in an interim facility in the Rangos Building at 855 N. Wolfe St. In that time, all of its offices and lab benches have been rented.

Currently, preparations are being made to expand FastForward East from 6,000 square feet to 25,000 square feet of office and lab space. This facility will be a part of a new seven-level, $65.6 million laboratory and office building development, 1812 Ashland.

The NIH is the premier biomedical research center for the world. Its 27 Institutes and Centers employ approximately 18,000 employees doing a vast array of jobs, all supporting efforts for a healthy nation. For information on the NIH mission, goals, and Institutes and Centers, visit NIH Overview

This position is located in the Transfer Technology Center (TTC) of the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. The candidate selected for this position serves as a member of one of the Technology Transfer Center Units with responsibility for advising on and performing the full range of services that facilitate the transfer of new technologies and research materials, particularly with the private sector, for further research or commercial development as appropriate. Works closely with industrial, academic and federal scientists in the development and execution of complex Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs). Manages and monitors the processes for handling CRADAs and potential inventions and licenses. Originates Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs), Confidential Disclosure Agreements (CDAs), Clinical Trial Agreements (CTAs), and other agreements required by the organizations serviced. Advises scientists on the suitability of each agreement for desired research project. Collaborates with the NIH Office of Technology Transfer to ensure that the interests of the NCI are represented in all technology transfer matters. Advises researchers and administrators on matters involving both domestic and foreign patent rights, policies and procedures. Participates in the development and conduct of educational programs designed to train NCI intramural and extramural scientists and administrative staff about inventions, patents, licensing, trade secrets, copyrights, and research and development agreements. Provides advice and guidance in resolving intellectual property issues in a variety of grants and contract initiatives. For more information, please visit http://ttc.nci.nih.gov/

The Tech Council of Maryland (TCM), Maryland’s largest technology trade association, last night announced the winners of its 27th Annual Industry Awards. The celebration and ceremony, which took place at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center, was attended by more than 700 technology and business leaders from around the state.

“The breadth of accomplishments of this year’s award recipients is impressive – from the innovations being developed here in Maryland to the leadership of executives and educators to foster inspired workplace and school environments,” said Phil Schiff, TCM’s CEO. “We are proud to honor this year’s winners, which underscore the quality and value of the state’s technology and life sciences communities, and the importance of their work around the world.”

Soligenix, Inc. (OTCQB: SNGX) (Soligenix or the Company), a late-stage biopharmaceutical company developing products that address unmet medical needs in the areas of inflammation, oncology and biodefense, announced today that it has initiated a development agreement with Emergent BioSolutions to implement a commercially viable, scalable production technology for the RiVax™ drug substance protein antigen. RiVax™ is a vaccine candidate being developed to protect against ricin exposure. Soligenix will transfer the manufacturing processes and analytics to Emergent to conduct process development work that could potentially lead to a future commercial manufacturing collaboration.

Cancer is costly, pervasive and a growing problem for businesses.

It already accounts for between 10 percent and 15 percent of employers’ health costs. As employees work longer before retiring, the bill could get bigger. That’s why Johns Hopkins Medicine is launching a new program that could reduce the business costs of cancer by helping employees better prepare for and cope with it.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015 – Wednesday, July 15, 2015 – Bethesda, MD

MedCity ENGAGE is an executive-level event featuring the most innovative thinking from payers, providers, policymakers, health IT and beyond to highlight best-in-class approaches to one of the biggest challenges in healthcare: patient engagement. It will feature speakers discussing the current attempts to innovate in care delivery and reimbursement, along with the innovations that will form the backbone of technological infrastructure. We’re here to help.

If you have questions regarding registration contact events@breakingmedia.com

AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN) announced that it has entered an agreement with Abbott (NYSE: ABT), a global healthcare company, to develop companion diagnostic tests to identify patients with severe asthma who are most likely to benefit from the investigational biological therapy, tralokinumab. To date, no companion diagnostic blood tests have been approved for use in asthma.

Under the terms of the agreement, Abbott will develop and commercialise diagnostic tests to measure serum levels of the proteins periostin and DPP4 (dipeptidyl peptidase-4), which have been identified as potential predictive biomarkers of up-regulated IL-13 in severe asthma. The tests will be developed in conjunction with AstraZeneca’s Phase III trial of tralokinumab, a potential treatment for patients with severe, inadequately controlled asthma, developed by the company’s biologics research and development arm, MedImmune. Periostin has been previously described as a potential biomarker for asthma1, and DPP4 is a novel and promising predictive biomarker identified by MedImmune.

A new phase 1 study has begun at the University of Oxford that will investigate the use of a modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) Ebola Zaire vaccine candidate (MVA EBOZ) as a prime-boost to GSK’s Chimp Adenovirus type 3 (ChAd3) Ebola vaccine candidate. The study, being conducted by the clinical research group of Professor Adrian Hill of the Jenner Institute, has received regulatory approval to begin from the United Kingdom’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

May 31-June 3, 2015 – Washington, DC

Health Datapalooza is a national conference focused on liberating health data, and bringing together the companies, startups, academics, government agencies, and individuals with the newest and most innovative and effective uses of health data to improve patient outcomes.

A lot of people make news in the biopharma business. Few of them are influential.

Influence, simply put, is the ability to make your mark in such a way as to get other prominent people in this business to rethink the way they do business. Last year, that definition caused us to put GlaxoSmithKline’s ($GSK) Deirdre Connelly on the list for her plan to do away with sales quotas in the U.S. The influential idea then was that ethics had to come before numbers–a big issue at a company that has been challenged time and again by an unethical approach to business that spurred a series of sordid messes and a second take at a painful reorganization.

How many types of cells are there in the human body? Textbooks say a couple of hundred. But the true number is undoubtedly far larger.

Piece by piece, a new, more detailed catalogue of cell types is emerging from labs like that of Aviv Regev at the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which are applying recent advances in single-cell genomics to study individual cells at a speed and scale previously unthinkable.

The 21st Century Cures bill advanced Thursday when The House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee sent the unanimously passed bill onto the full committee, which will address it next week.

The bill could potentially be enacted into law later this year.

Drug costs are astronomical – this we know.

But we don’t have a transparent, informed way of calculating – or understanding – the true costs of drug development, argued Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor of pharmacoeconomics at Harvard University, in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Awful patient experience, poor communication, increasing out-of-pocket costs. Investors assembled for a panel discussion of the future of investing in aging technology at the AARP Innovation@50+ focused more on pain points that could apply to healthcare generally not specifically to senior care.

Jody Holtzman, senior vice president of thought leadership at the AARP, moderated the panel.

What’s the difference between a “good” state for telemedicine and a “bad” one?

The American Telemedicine Association released two reports at its annual conference earlier this month in Los Angeles, a state-by state analysis of coverage and reimbursement policies for telemedicine services and another on physician practice standards and licensure in each state.

The angel investor market in 2014 had a slight correction in investment dollars and in the deal size. Total investments in 2014 were $24.1 billion, a decrease of 2.8% over 2013, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. A total of 73,400 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding in 2014, an increase of 3.8% over 2013 investments. The number of active investors in 2014 was 316,600 individuals, an increase of 5.9% from 2013. The change in both total dollars and the number of investments resulted in a deal size for 2014 that was smaller than in 2013 (a decrease in deal size of 6.4% from 2013). These data indicate that angels were active investors in 2014 but at decreased valuations than in previous years, indicating a slight market correction in valuations. However, the $24.1 billion is a robust amount and is close to the market high of $26.0 billion that occurred in 2007.

Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser has named Matt Bailey the first director of technology innovation for the Office of the Chief Technology Officer.

The appointment is part of an effort to create innovative solutions to address the challenges that Washington, D.C., faces as a city, said Bowser in a release.

There seems to be something special about coworking spaces. As researchers who have, for years, studied how employees thrive, we were surprised to discover that people who belong to them report levels of thriving that approach an average of 6 on a 7-point scale. This is at least a point higher than the average for employees who do their jobs in regular offices, and something so unheard of that we had to look at the data again.

BHI issued a Commercial Relevance Award to three companies as part of the Invest Maryland Challenge, Maryland’s statewide business plan competition. The three companies each offer a differentiated product or service to the biohealth marketplace with an opportunity to provide significant commercial value to the health industry granting the the Commercial Relevance title..

Sickweather is a Batimore-based health information company that scans social networks for indicators of illness, allowing you to check for the chance of sickness as easily as you can check for the chance of rain.

Care Progress is a Bethesda-based company with a software platform to efficiently manage and treat cancer patients at home and maximize reimbursement through outcomes-based care management.

Tissue Analytics is a Johns Hopkins University spin-out that is transforming the common smartphone into a sophisticated medical imaging system.BHI will offer strategic consulting services with selected companies to support the growth of these businesses and doe do using our knowledge, network and process for assisting early-stage biohealth companies. BHI is pleased to continue to partner with the State of Maryland’s Invest Maryland Challenge to support the growth of emerging biohealth businesses.

BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a public-private partnership and innovation intermediary is seeking an energetic and motivated life science professional for the role of an Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) with product development experience and subject matter expertise in the fields of neurology and neuroscience. The EIR will reside within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will also support intramural and extramural initiatives on an as needed basis.

The EIR program was established at BioHealth Innovation to:

• Retain and bring entrepreneurial talent to the Maryland ecosystem
• Connect resources including institutions, technology assets, people and capital within Maryland that include federal institutions, labs, academic institutions, small businesses, disease foundations and the investor community
• Build/support sustainable life science startups that will add value within the healthcare system and also build upon the existing infrastructure

The EIR will work with BHI leadership to ensure that the activities and outcomes are aligned with BHIs strategic focus.

Congratulations to all the winners in the third InvestMaryland Challenge. All four will receive a $100,000 top prize from the Department of Business and Economic Development. Check out the rest of the prize winners in the list below, and an explanation of all the different prizes provided by sponsors and partners here.

Montgomery College offers Summer 2015 classes designed to meetyour entrepreneurial needs in support of your business ideas.

For Aspiring Entrepreneurs:

The Intentional Entrepreneur:

This one day class helps you identify your entrepreneurial skills and abilities, and addresses any concerns you may have about business ownership. This class is a must for anyone considering starting a business!

Monday, May 18, 2015 6–10 p.m.Saturday, July 11, 2015 9 a.m. – 1 p.m.

For Early Stage Entrepreneurs:

New Venture:

Designed specifically for the entrepreneurs in the early stages of business development.

Wednesdays, June 3–August 5, 2015 6–9 p.m.

For more information, please contact Karen Ambrose, Program Director at 240-567-2592 or e-mail: karen.ambrose@montgomerycollege.edu

Don’t forget to register NOW for Wednesday’s T2 Speakers Series “Commercializing Innovations at Georgetown University” with Georgetown University Office of Technology Commercialization Director Ruchika Nijhara, Ph.D.

Tech Transfer Speakers Series is a free monthly program offered through the Gateway to Innovation: Montgomery Welcome Center for Federal and Academic Tech Transfer. For more information and additional calendar items, please visit TechTransferConnection.com. Engage with others in the tech transfer field by joining the Gateway to Innovation LinkedIn Group. Brought to you by: Montgomery County Department of Economic Development and the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer.

JOIN THE GATEWAY TO INNOVATION LinkedIn Group and start networking with other researchers, federal lab professionals, university technologists, investors, and many others in our area. Move your technology forward by reaching out and connecting!!

University of Maryland (UM) Ventures and Biomecite Diagnostics, LLC announced today the signing of an exclusive option by Biomecite Diagnostics for the rights from University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) to develop diagnostics to detect inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), such as ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD). Drs. Florian Fricke and James White developed the licensed technology while both were with the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS). The technology explores distinctive genomic variances in the populations of bacteria or microbiome found in the human gut to diagnose the closely related but differing gastrointestinal diseases, UC and CD.

Emergent BioSolutions of Gaithersburg has won approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its hemophilia drug Ixinity.

The treatment, administered intravenously, helps control and prevent bleeding episodes and also is approved for use during surgery in adults and children 12 and older with hemophilia B, according to a company news release. Hemophilia B is a bleeding disorder caused by a mutation on the factor IX gene resulting in a deficiency of clotting factor IX in the blood, which controls bleeding.

The Montgomery County Business Hall of Fame will add four new members later this year, including a former space issues attorney turned health company CEO, a bank chairman, a barbecue expert and the chief executive of a hospital.

The following people have been named to the business hall of fame and are scheduled to be honored at an Oct. 27 event:

Photo Credit: Fortune Live Media – Flickr

Drug testing on humans and animals will be a thing of the past within two decades, United Therapeutics CEO Martine Rothblatt said Monday.

Soon, companies will test pharmaceuticals on silicon versions of the human body, entering drugs as code, she said.

Photo Credit: Fortune Live Media – Flickr

Gaithersburg-based molecular diagnostics company OpGen Inc. went public Tuesday, and saw its shares drop more than 20 percent during the day before closing at $4.85, down nearly 19 percent.

CEO Evan Jones said he’s not concerned. In the world of biotech, making money can take time.

QIAGEN N.V. (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) announced today that it has expanded its relationship with BGI, the world’s largest genomics organization, to provide QIAGEN’s Ingenuity® Variant Analysis™ in integrated bioinformatics for all customers of BGI’s sequencing services.

Under the reseller agreement, BGI customers will receive sequencing data generated from their samples through Ingenuity Variant Analysis’ secure, cloud-based environment and gain access to its leading comprehensive gene variant data and genomic interpretation applications. BGI will provide Ingenuity Variant Analysis to customers in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, with plans to expand to other regions throughout the year. BGI collaborates with more than 10,000 organizations and 30,000 partners worldwide, providing sequencing services for thousands of research projects, including large-scale genome initiatives.

Sucampo Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a global pharmaceutical company, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Fast Track Designation for cobiprostone, a locally acting chloride channel activator, for the prevention of oral mucositis. The FDA has also accepted the company’s Investigational New Drug (IND) application to initiate a phase 2 clinical trial of cobiprostone for the prevention of oral mucositis in patients suffering with head and neck cancer receiving concurrent radiation and chemotherapy.

I’ve known Edmund Pendleton from the University of Maryland as the Director of the D.C. National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps Node (a collaboration among the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, George Washington, and Johns Hopkins). But it wasn’t until seeing him lead the first I-Corps class at the National Institutes of Health that I realized Edmund could teach my class better than I can. After seeing the results of 500+ teams through the I-Corps, the NSF now offers all teams who’ve received government funding to start a company an introduction to building a Lean Startup.

UNC and pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline are joining forces to try developing a cure for HIV/AIDS, with the British company pledging a five-year, $20 million contribution to the effort.

GSK is also chipping in a 10-person research team, to work with faculty members, post-doctoral fellows and graduate students attached to four different labs in UNC’s medical and pharmacy schools.

Kelly Chu stands at the front of the room and explains a complex spreadsheet displayed on a projector.

With precision she describes the discounted free cash-flow model she built of a food-services and construction company, and walks through its revenue-growth assumptions before making a recommendation on whether or not to invest.

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.

There is nothing like the sight of children to inspire hope, so it was only fitting that University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) President Jay A. Perman, MD, began his second annual State of the University Address on May 7 with a performance by the sixth-grade dancers from Southwest Baltimore Charter School.

But there was deeper meaning as well to their presence at his optimistic address “Renew the State. Repair the World” before an overflow crowd at the School of Nursing.

Welcome to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Strategic Visioning Forum. The Institute is gathering ideas for the most compelling scientific priorities in the four NHLBI Strategic Goals to address over the next decade.

Your opportunity to submit initial ideas to help the NHLBI Strategic Visioning process will close on May 15. Click on Submit a New Question or Challenge and don’t miss your chance to share your voice!

Since it seems that 1776 can’t go a week without making news, they just announced an Innovation Opportunity Program that they are launching with General Assembly. DC’s Mayor Muriel Bowser along with representatives from TDF Foundation, THEARC, Capital One, MedStar Health, and Microsoft were also on hand for the announcement.

On Tuesday, the Senate Health committee held a hearing on the promise of precision medicine. Last week, the House released draft legislation to support biomedical innovation. And following President Obama’s State of the Union in January, the White House unveiled the Precision Medicine Initiative, meant to provide funding to accelerate biomedical research.

What none of these things do directly is to curb the price of speciality drugs—including precision drugs—which cost Americans more than $80 billion in 2013, according to the Campaign for Sustainable Rx Pricing.

The advent of connected devices and M2M is offering a tremendous opportunity for healthcare professionals. Near-ubiquitous mobile networks are allowing carers to diagnose, monitor, and communicate with patients with unprecedented speed and efficacy.

NextGen Angels recently announced plans to bring its brand of under-40, entrepreneur-friendly angel investors to 12 more U.S. cities, with plans for international expansion down the line.

I caught up with CEO Dan Mindus, who founded the group in 2012, about both the expansion and the venture market in the Greater Washington area. Based on our conversation, there are two important things about the local funding market that every entrepreneur should probably know:

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong has some big ideas in healthcare, like a vision of a fully connected ecosystem that truly empowers patients to make informed choices about their own care, aided by supercomputers to crunch all the data, including highly complex genomic information. And he’s not afraid to toot his own horn every once in a while.

“We’ve created the Google of genome mapping,” Soon-Shiong, the multibillionaire entrepreneur behind the still-somewhat-mysterious NantHealth and parent company NantWorks, said Monday at the American Telemedicine Association annual meeting in Los Angeles.

Metro areas with strong startup ecosystems depend on success stories and market conditions that converge over time. In the best of circumstances, a regional community can become stronger than the sum of its parts, moving the needle for industries nationally – or even worldwide.

On Wednesday, big names from D.C.’s tech and business circles will come together at DC Inno’s State of Innovation event at Artisphere to discuss the area’s future for young startups. One of the hot topics for the evening will be exactly how an innovation ecosystem comes together. Tackling the question will be local leaders from Eastern Foundry, Video Blocks, Arlington Economic Development and Springboard Enterprises.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced an agreement to feature Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funded early-stage biomedical companies in an expanded Innovation Zone at the 2015 BIO International Convention®. The Innovation Zone companies, focused on drug discovery, diagnostics and other therapeutic platform technologies, will have dedicated exhibit space and participate in BIO One-on-One Partnering™. Select companies will make 15-minute company presentations in the BIO Business Forum. The Innovation Zone will also feature six universities funded under the prestigious NSF Accelerating Innovation Research Program (AIR). This select group will demonstrate advanced biomedical prototypes that are very close to commercialization stage.

Physicians are not only becoming more proficient with EHRs, they are using their systems for more than just reference. That’s the conclusion of a new Accenture survey of more than 2,600 doctors in Australia, Brazil, England, Norway, Singapore and the U.S.

Interoperability is growing as well, albeit slowly. In 2015, for the first time, a majority of U.S. physicians surveyed by Accenture (51 percent) said they “routinely” access patient data from outside their organizations, up just slightly from 45 percent in 2012.

Of all the rumors ever to swirl around the world’s most valuable company, this may be the first that could involve spitting in a plastic cup.

Apple is collaborating with U.S. researchers to help launch apps that would offer some iPhone owners the chance to get their DNA tested, many of them for the first time, according to people familiar with the plans.

When it comes to the Puget Sound region’s biotech industry, is it more important to have big anchor companies or an ever-churning ecosystem of small innovators?

That was one of the questions posed to a panel of three biotech executives last week at an industry forum hosted by news website Xconomy at Fred Hutch.

Symbiomix Therapeutics today announced multiple milestones, including the closing of the third and final tranche of a $41 million Series A financing and positive results from a multi-center, randomized Phase 2 trial testing a single oral dose of SYM-1219 for the treatment of bacterial vaginosis (BV). Based on discussions with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) at an End-of-Phase 2 meeting, the Company now is planning to submit the Phase 2 trial as one of two pivotal studies for a New Drug Application (NDA) filing in 2016. Simultaneously, the Company announced that the FDA recently designated SYM-1219 as a Qualified Infectious Disease Product (QIDP). SYM-1219 is a novel drug candidate that contains secnidazole, an antibiotic with favorable pharmacokinetics that facilitate administration as a single-dose oral therapy.

Each time 81-year-old Bill Dworsky or his 80-year-old wife Dorothy opens the refrigerator, closes the bathroom door or lifts the lid on a pill container, tiny sensors in their San Francisco home make notes on a digital logbook.

The couple’s 53-year-old son, Phil, checks it daily on his smartphone. If there’s no activity during a designated time, the younger Dworsky gets an automated email, so he can decide whether to call or stop by. “This is peace of mind, really,” he says of the system he installed last year.

BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a public-private partnership and innovation intermediary is seeking an energetic and motivated life science professional for the role of an Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) with product development experience and subject matter expertise in the fields of neurology and neuroscience. The EIR will reside within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will also support intramural and extramural initiatives on an as needed basis.

The EIR program was established at BioHealth Innovation to:

• Retain and bring entrepreneurial talent to the Maryland ecosystem
• Connect resources including institutions, technology assets, people and capital within Maryland that include federal institutions, labs, academic institutions, small businesses, disease foundations and the investor community
• Build/support sustainable life science startups that will add value within the healthcare system and also build upon the existing infrastructure

The EIR will work with BHI leadership to ensure that the activities and outcomes are aligned with BHIs strategic focus.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. (EBS) today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved IXINITY(R) [coagulation factor IX (recombinant)], an intravenous recombinant human coagulation factor IX therapeutic for the control and prevention of bleeding episodes and for perioperative management in adults and children, >=12 years of age, with Hemophilia B. Hemophilia B is a bleeding disorder caused by a mutation on the factor IX gene resulting in a deficiency of clotting factor IX in the blood, which controls bleeding.

Gaithersburg company to use funds to add staff and upgrade equipment to meet demand

Angela Graham, President and CEO, accepts check from DED’s Valerie Fremont and Gene Smith Quality Biological, Inc., an industry leader in manufactured ready-to-use biological research tools, has been awarded an EDF Grant by the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development (DED) to support the expansion of their fulfillment operations. The award, funded from the Montgomery County Economic Development Fund (EDF), will be used to upgrade and modernize equipment needed to meet requirements from local and regional customers. The company, headquartered in Gaithersburg, plans to add 10 new jobs as part of the expansion.

Strand Life Sciences, a global genomic profiling company that uses next generation sequencing technology to empower cancer care, today announced it has opened its U.S. operations center in Aurora, Colorado. This opening is in support of the company’s recent launch of the StrandAdvantage pan-cancer genomic profiling service.

Available now to physicians, StrandAdvantage was designed to accelerate the analysis of therapeutically actionable cancer genes and match them to relevant FDA-approved targeted cancer therapies and open clinical trials without the need for multiple tests.

Results Published in Clinical Vaccine Immunology Compares AdVAV Favorably Against Only Currently Licensed Alternative

Vaxin Inc., a clinical stage vaccine development company, today announced that a recently published study demonstrated that utilizing a single vaccination with the company’s AdVAVTM intranasal anthrax vaccine performs as well as the currently licensed Anthrax Vaccine Absorbed (AVA; BioThrax®), which requires two vaccinations. AdVAV is administered via an intranasal route rather than the intramuscular route of AVA. Intranasal delivery is generally believed to be a superior vaccination route because the mucosal immune response is important for protection, particularly against respiratory diseases. The study found that protection from aerosolized anthrax after a single dose of AdVAV was no worse than the protection afforded by multiple doses of AVA. Importantly, AdVAV produced protective antibody titers with earlier onset and greater persistence than AVA, suggesting that AdVAV may offer both rapid and long-lasting protection with just a single dose.

The Company: Noble Life Sciences (Gaithersburg, MD) is a rapidly growing contract research organization (CRO) that provides a continuum of preclinical drug, vaccine and medical device development services, from discovery to GLP-compliant studies for regulatory submissions. The company offers in vitro and in vivo services, including cellular and animal disease model development and experimental design, non-GLP and GLP animal efficacy, toxicity, biodistribution and product release studies in both small and large animals, and vivarium services. The company also offers custom antibody production services and research animal and tissue products.

The Company operates out of two Maryland-based facilities – in Gaithersburg and Woodbine where it operates as Spring Valley Laboratories, a unit of Noble Life Sciences, offering a range of GLP and non- GLP studies with a primary focus on GLP and large animal testing. Noble is AAALACi accredited, USDA licensed, OLAW compliant, FDA inspected and successfully audited by numerous clients.

The Position: The Director Account Development is a key position within the organization with significant prospects for career growth as the company continues to increase the breadth and scope of its business. This position reports directly to the President and is a member of the management team.

Twenty-four Maryland executives were named Maryland regional finalists for EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year.

The annual award program recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence in innovation, financial performance and commitment to their businesses. Winners will be announced June 25 at a gala at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront.

OrderUp Inc. CEO Chris Jeffery, Medifast CEO Michael MacDonald and Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake Inc. CEO Lisa Rusyniak are among the Baltimore-area business leaders named as finalists.

AstraZeneca has inked a development and commercialisation deal with Celgene for its haematology programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) candidate, MEDI4736.

Governor Larry Hogan today announced that he will sign into law 10 bills directly related to encouraging economic development and job growth in the state of Maryland. He will sign the bills into law at the next bill signing ceremony, to be held tomorrow, April 28, from 9 to 11 a.m.

“The following bills all address ways to improve the state’s business climate and make it easier for the hardworking men and women of our state to thrive and succeed,” said Governor Hogan. “The primary focus of my administration is to get Maryland open for business once again and create greater economic opportunity for our citizens, and I am proud to sign these bills into law.”

Given the complexity and difficulty of the challenges that government leaders face, encouraging innovation among their workers can pay dividends. Government-wide employee survey data, however, suggest that much more needs to be done to foster this type of culture at many federal organizations.

As bacterial infections are becoming more difficult to manage, new ways of targeting the pathogens have to be developed. Creating new antibiotics is one approach, but often the real issues is being able to identify which antibiotic will work. Today that takes days and involves guess work that often prevents a powerful early attack against the bacteria. Researchers at Johns Hopkins are now working on a new technology that will allow clinicians to identify the bacteria that is causing the infection and the antibiotic that will treat it.

Gaithersburg molecular diagnostics company OpGen Inc. intends to raise about $18.7 million in its initial public offering expected sometime this week.

That’s less than the $37.5 million the company indicated it would raise when it initially filed to go public last month. In their latest regulatory filing, officials said the company is offering 2.5 million units, each consisting of one share of common stock and one warrant to purchase one additional share of common stock within the next five years. OpGen anticipates an IPO share price of between $5.50 and $6.50.

U.S approval of GlaxoSmithKline’s newest respiratory inhaler continues the global drugmaker’s shift from the blockbuster drug Advair to a suite of drugs that will be assembled at the British company’s Zebulon manufacturing site.

GSK said Thursday the company and business partner Theravance won approval from the Food and Drug Administration to market Breo Ellipta for asthma. The drug had been approved in 2013 for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, but it failed to win approval for sale to minors as GSK officials had hoped.

Montgomery College offers Summer 2015 classes designed to meet your entrepreneurial needs in support of your business ideas. For Aspiring Entrepreneurs: The Intentional Entrepreneur This one day class helps you identify your entrepreneurial skills and abilities, and addresses any concerns you may have about business ownership. This class is a must for anyone considering starting a business! For Early Stage Entrepreneurs: New Venture Designed specifically for the entrepreneurs in the early stages of business development. Please contact Karen Ambrose, Program Director at 240-567-2592 or e-mail: karen.ambrose@montgomerycollege.edu

CRISPR Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company focused on translating CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology into transformative medicines, today announced the closing of a Series A and Series B financing totaling USD 89 million, including USD 35 million of new funding in the Series A and USD 29 million in the Series B. The oversubscribed Series A and Series B financings were led by strategic investors, SR One and Celgene Corporation, respectively, and included new investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Abingworth, alongside the Company’s founding investor, Versant Ventures.

CRISPR Therapeutics has also announced changes to its Board of Directors. Simeon George, SR One, Ali Behbahani, NEA, and Kurt von Emster, Abingworth, will be joining Brad Bolzon, Tom Woiwode, and Chief Executive Officer, Rodger Novak.

When George Scangos took the helm at biotech giant Biogen in 2010, he took a look around the company’s headquarters in the Weston, Massachusetts, suburb of Boston and thought, “What are we doing out here?”

Last year, the company celebrated the return of its headquarters to Cambridge’s Kendall Square, one of the capital cities of the biotechnology industry. The neighborhood’s 2.5 square miles are home to 130 life sciences companies, according to industry group Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, the densest concentration on the planet.

Alexandria is in the enviable position of having a commercial real estate portfolio including embedded development opportunities at the crossroads of the innovation economy – in Cambridge, Massachusetts, San Francisco, and other markets experiencing positive demand. This unprecedented demand from life science and tech tenants is giving ARE significant pricing power – as demonstrated by not only strong SS NOI for the quarter at 7.8% (vs 6.7% Q4 14 and 4.3% Q1 14) but also via the leasing spreads on renewal at 30.8% GAAP and 18.5% cash in Q1 15 and guidance for 2015 leasing spreads at 8-10%. Q1 leasing spreads skewed much higher than guidance given one lease at Tech Square in Cambridge that increased 100%. Given limited supply in Cambridge and the timing of deliveries, ARE may be in a position, as mentioned on the call, to push rents on its Kendall Square development buildings higher than original pro forma. In 2015, ARE is allocating capital 47% Cambridge, 25% Mission Bay/SoMa and 10% Torrey Pines/UTC with the balance in Manhattan and Other.

District investor group NextGen Angels has raised $1 million from 24 of its members to finance expanding to two more cities.

The local angel group, which currently boasts 85 members, has a similar presence in New York City and very recently set up a Boston location. CEO Dan Mindus told me Austin and Chicago are the next two cities on the list, with 10 more cities slated in the next 12 to 18 months. Those include Atlanta, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland and San Diego.

U.S. legislators recently released a discussion draft of the medical innovation bill known as the 21st Century Cures Initiative. The legislation aims to hasten the discovery, development, and delivery of new medical devices and drugs, particularly for the treatment of thousands of diseases for which there are no cures.

The proposals in the draft include ways to revamp how agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) foster and regulate medical innovation in the U.S.

Having secured a funding boost for the National Institutes of Health in the 21st Century Cures legislation, House Democrats now say the Food and Drug Administration would be ill-equipped to handle the new burdens under the bill without more resources.

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, raised the matter during a hearing Wednesday on the latest iteration of the legislative package, which is intended to accelerate the pace of innovation in medical drug and device development.

Fresh from unveiling a $3.1B fund, New Enterprise Associates is the sole investor in a $3 million Series A round by MORE Health. The health IT startup wants to connect Chinese doctors and their patients with U.S. specialists across areas such as oncology, neurology, cardiology and pediatrics.

As part of its investment, Xiaodong Jiang, managing director for NEA China, will take a seat on the company’s board of directors. NEA has been in the China market for 12 years and has invested about $400 million in 20 companies there.

The Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) is pleased to offer you a sneak peak at its new and improved branding. While the official unveiling of the new branding will take place at the 2015 national meeting, the FLC is eager to share exclusive insights into the new logo design and refreshed brand message with its members.

As the FLC looks forward to its 30th year after being chartered, the organization wanted to portray a more modern look and feel that reflects the progressive achievements and innovations of its member laboratories and research centers.

How well do you understand science?

Jon D. Miller, director of the International Center for the Advancement of Scientific Literacy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has been asking people in the United States and abroad that question since 1988.

The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) today released an update to two critical state policy reports which identified gaps in coverage and reimbursement, and physician practice standards and licensure.

“After ATA issued the State Telemedicine Gaps Reports last September, many state regulating bodies responded by looking at how their laws and regulations impact healthcare delivery in their state,” said Jonathan Linkous, CEO of ATA. “As a result of state actions across the nation, ATA reevaluated the indicators for each state and issued new reports. As before, we anticipate that these reports will serve as an incentive to increase the utilization of telemedicine to improve the accessibility, affordability and quality of healthcare.”

At DC Inno we are constantly on the look out for the next innovative local company. Over the past several months, one of the most interesting industries we have had the opportunity to cover is the virtual reality (VR) sector. Virtual reality is immensely cool and as a medium, it offers a host of exciting applications and uses. In the past, the technology was so expensive that it offered little to many consumers, but that is now changing. With the proliferation of new, consumer-targeted devices—like the Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear and Google Cardboard—more people are finally getting the opportunity to experience VR.

Bungalow Insurance won the $30,000 Perlman Grand Prize of the 2015 Wharton Business Plan Competition. The prize was awarded at the Wharton School’s annual Venture Finals on April 30, 2015, where student finalists received more than $128,000 in combined cash prizes and in-kind legal/accounting services.

Call it serendipity. When the management team behind Foundation Medical Partners decided to shift their investment strategy away from medical devices and therapeutics in favor of health IT, the name change to Flare Capital Partners coincided with an exit. IBM Watson snapped up its portfolio company Explorys in a big announcement at HIMSS this month. Explorys, a Cleveland Clinic spinout, is a predictive analytics company that amassed a huge amount of data to develop cognitive insights for clinical decision support.

“The timing was nice” but entirely coincidental, according to Flare Capital General Partner Michael Greeley who spoke to MedCity News in a phone interview Wednesday night.

1776 has made its second acquisition.

Just weeks after the surprise announcement of its Disruption Corp. purchase, the Washington, D.C., accelerator has acquired San Francisco-based Hattery, a co-working space that will give the company a foothold on the West Coast.

Women in tech in D.C. aren’t going anywhere. We’ve spent some time on these pages covering some amazing founders over the past two and a half years—Donna Harris, Carla Valdes, Glennette Clark, Shavanna Miller, Sara Capra and Veronica Eklund, Denise Tayloe, Elizabeth Bennett, and many, many others.

Here are three more Superwomen in Tech—a social marketer for one of D.C’s hottest startups, the president of DC Web Women, and the assistant director for open innovation in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—that “get it.” They know that they are working in male-dominated industries. They go to work every day and do their jobs. They network. But they take the time to connect with other people—particularly other women, sometimes in a volunteer capacity—to ensure that the people they meet get what they need. And the tech scene is better because of them.

BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a public-private partnership and innovation intermediary is seeking an energetic and motivated life science professional for the role of an Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) with product development experience and subject matter expertise in the fields of neurology and neuroscience. The EIR will reside within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will also support intramural and extramural initiatives on an as needed basis.

The EIR program was established at BioHealth Innovation to:

• Retain and bring entrepreneurial talent to the Maryland ecosystem
• Connect resources including institutions, technology assets, people and capital within Maryland that include federal institutions, labs, academic institutions, small businesses, disease foundations and the investor community
• Build/support sustainable life science startups that will add value within the healthcare system and also build upon the existing infrastructure

The EIR will work with BHI leadership to ensure that the activities and outcomes are aligned with BHIs strategic focus.

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

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

Dear Colleagues,

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

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

Thursday, May 07, 2015 to Friday, May 08, 2015

The Atlantic Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics Summit is a first-of-its-kind event to showcase Maryland’s global leadership as an epicenter of vaccine innovation, development and commercialization. The Tech Council of Maryland is presenting this conference to bring together the industry’s foremost researchers and business leaders for the purpose of educating, sharing, and collaborating on important issues affecting the new generation of vaccines.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 02:00pm – 03:00pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AstraZeneca and its global biologics research and development arm, MedImmune, announced that they have entered into an exclusive collaboration agreement with Celgene Corporation, a global leader in haematological cancers, for the development and commercialisation of MEDI4736 across a range of blood cancers including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, myelodysplastic syndromes and multiple myeloma.

MEDI4736 is an investigational immune checkpoint inhibitor, directed against programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1). Signals from PD-L1 help tumours avoid detection by the immune system. MEDI4736 blocks these signals, countering the tumour’s immune-evading tactics. Within the collaboration, MEDI4736 will be assessed both as monotherapy and in combination with other AstraZeneca and Celgene potential and existing cancer medicines. Over time, the collaboration could expand to include other assets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently, quite a bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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