News Archive

Wrap up a great summer with one last BioBuzz networking event on August 27th from 5:00 – 7:30 p.m. at American Tap Room in Rockville, MD. This location is a short walk from the Metro located in the Rockville Town Center so there are no excuses not to come.

New this month, join us for Table Talks at BioBuzz.

For a new twist to the networking events, starting this month we will be hosting “Table Talks at BioBuzz”. We have enlisted industry experts on various topics who will be joining us to facilitate discussions around their industry related topics of choice. They will be strategically situated at a few tables at our venue so that you will be able to join which ever conversations interest you throughout the evening and participate in some stimulating discussions; while still enjoying the usual, casual atmosphere that BioBuzz offers each month.

This month’s Table Topics and discussion leaders will be announced later this week so keep an eye out.

Dr. Marvin Malek has been yearning and advocating for a publicly financed, single-payer health care system for at least two decades. Now, as Vermont stands on the threshold of being the first state to launch such a plan, he’s confessing to trepidation.

“I am pretty damn nervous,” he confided before bounding off for rounds at the Vermont Central Medical Center, still clutching the bicycle helmet he wore on his ride to work.

At a laboratory in Baltimore, hairless mice kept in racks of plastic crates are labelled with yellow cards, each identifying a person fighting cancer. These mice are cancer “avatars”—the lumpy tumors visible under their skin come from actual patients.

The animals serve as personalized, living test tubes. Each mouse will eventually be treated with a different drug and its tumors measured. Results showing which medicine worked best will be sent back to a doctor trying to treat a difficult cancer case.

Grand Challenges Canada, funded by the Government of Canada, has announced funding of seven projects implemented in ASEAN member countries. This funding, totalling $784,000, will support projects that combine scientific/technical, social and business innovation to solve pressing global health challenges. 

The funding was announced by Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird during a visit to Burma, where he is participating in the ASEAN-Canada Post Ministerial Conference. As one of ASEAN’s longest-standing dialogue partners, Canada has enjoyed positive and fruitful relations with the ASEAN region, cooperating on many issues, including regional integration, economic interests and innovation.

The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche is set to pay $450 million for a Danish biotech company that develops drugs that silence microRNAs (something considered key to tackling certain diseases).

Roche is targeting the Danish biotech firm Santaris Pharma, according to The Wall Street Journal. Santaris Pharma A/S is a biopharmaceutical company founded in 2003 in Copenhagen. Santaris Pharma A/S has become a leading clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that develops RNA-targeted medicines. Santaris works on developing drugs for a wide range of diseases using microRNA and mRNA. Their research focuses on infectious disease and metabolic disorders.

The FDA has given Medtronic approval to introduce its Attain Performa Model 4298 quadripolar lead and the Viva Quad XT and Viva Quad S cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators (CRT-D) in the U.S.

Having four electrodes on a lead allows cardiologists to select from any one of 16 available pacing configurations. Additionally, the short distance between the inner two electrodes provides more ability to finely tune CRT-D therapy.

A few days after their state’s primary elections, Chinese-American community leaders in Maryland woke up to an email in their inboxes.

It was from Lily Qi – director of special projects for the government of Montgomery County, an affluent suburb of Washington – thanking them for their support in the reelection campaign of County Executive Ike Leggett, whose primary victory cleared the way for a third term.

“In a low turnout election like this one, every vote counts and the immigrant community holds great sway in tipping the balance,” Qi said in her note. Throughout the campaign, Qi had tirelessly reached out to the Chinese-American community, which accounts for 5 percent of

Johns Hopkins University is teaming up with Google on a project aimed at speeding up technology commercialization.

Under a new partnership agreement with Google, Hopkins will work on the search engine giant’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, which focuses on developing new technology and moving it quickly to the marketplace.

Wall Street may or may not be going through its long-awaited correction these days, but regardless, it still seems to have a hearty appetite for digital health initial public offerings. That appetite is provoking venture capitalists to fund ever-more startups. Through June of this year, $2.3 billion has been sunk into digital health offerings compared with $2 billion in all of 2013, reports digital healthcare accelerator Rock Health.

“We think there’s going to be four to five IPOs each year for the next five years.” said Steve Kraus, the lead healthcare partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, Cambridge, Mass.

As a small company, you have a number of things going for you because of your size: You’re agile. You can react quickly to market changes. You can still innovate on a whim.

Big businesses know this all too well, which helps explain what’s driving an increase in the number of corporate venture capital arms cropping up in the past few years. If the old chestnut is correct, a rising tide floats all boats. So as the economy recovers and some sectors like technology seem like they’re heading toward irrational exuberance, corporate VC firms are eager to get in on the action.