News Archive

At Novartis’s research lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a large incubator-like piece of equipment is helping give birth to a new era of psychiatric drug discovery. Inside it, bathed in soft light, lab plates hold living human stem cells; robotic arms systematically squirt nurturing compounds into the plates. Thanks to a series of techniques perfected over the last few years in labs around the world, such stem cells—capable of developing into specialized cell types—can now be created from skin cells. When stem cells derived from people with, say, autism or schizophrenia are grown inside the incubator, Novartis researchers can nudge them to develop into functioning brain cells by precisely varying the chemicals in the cell cultures.

Governor Martin O’Malley and The Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development announced today that Cellphire, a Rockville biotechnology company, has received a $1 million investment through the State’s InvestMaryland program. Cellphire is developing stabilized cellular products, including freeze-dried platelets that can be stored for years, for use in a range of advanced therapeutic and diagnostic applications.

“Supporting entrepreneurs and innovators like those at Cellphire is a central piece of Maryland’s broad support of the startups and small businesses that move our Innovation Economy forward and keep our State competitive in the 21st Century,” said Governor O’Malley. “Maryland is a center of healing and discovery. The technology being developed by Cellphire has the potential to improve care and save lives around the globe.”

Researchers at WellDoc® today presented updated results of its hypoglycemia prediction technology at this week’s 2014 American Diabetes Association 74th Scientific Sessions. In previous work, using just one week of blood glucose data, WellDoc’s models were shown to predict correctly 90 percent of the time that hypoglycemia would occur the following day. Today, WellDoc announced an enhanced model that incorporates both glucose and medication data has demonstrated the ability to predict hypoglycemia within a specific hour.

“The challenge in predicting hypoglycemia is that most patients with type 2 diabetes measure their blood glucose once or twice per day. This so-called ‘sparse data’ makes mathematical forecasting difficult,” states WellDoc Chief Data Science Officer, Anand Iyer, Ph.D. “We used machine learning algorithms which allow the computer to detect patterns and make predictions after being trained on thousands of data points.”

MedImmune, its parent company AstraZeneca and a handful of other pharma companies and health groups announced a broad lung cancer trial on Monday, looking to use patients’ genomic profiles to match them with therapies.

The Lung Cancer Master Protocol, or Lung-MAP, trial will explore five product candidates as treatments for advanced squamous cell lung cancer. That includes MedImmune’s MEDI4736, according to spokeswoman Tracy Rossin.

America is still the world leader in creating new medical technologies that have the potential to save lives. So why is it so tough for the entrepreneurs and investors behind these new products to make a living here?

One reason, according to venture capitalists, is long, costly delays before getting new treatments to market, in some cases caused by health insurers dragging their feet when it comes to agreeing to reimburse doctors for using new medical products.

A new report from Rock Health looking at the future of the biosensor wearables market shows a market in transition. The next generation of wearables is more targeted towards patient populations, particularly chronic conditions. In a Google hangout about the report, Malay Gandhi, a co-author of the report, talked about some of the qualities that are making these wearables more appealing to consumers and the b2b market and features that will give them staying power.

Athletic trackers aimed at the mass market have lost ground Nike’s exit from the wearables market shows there are far more fitness tracking devices than the market can support. There’s also a certain amount of consumer fatigue because the accuracy of fitness bands can vary. It’s difficult to keep most consumers interested in using them after six months. That prompted The New York Times article comparing these wristbands to “digital snake oil.”

Rockville-based CytImmune received $100,000 from Montgomery County’s equity investment program to help the company advance its industry-leading work in the development of tumor targeted nanomedicines.

The County’s investment was made by the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development, in conjunction with a $200,000 equity investment made by the Maryland Venture Fund, which is administered by the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED). Both the County’s and State’s investments in CytImmune are part of a broader strategy to support the growth and development of innovative companies.

EntreMed (Nasdaq: EMND) has been through plenty of turbulence. In 1998, it was the subject of a breathless front page New York Times story suggesting the biotech was on the verge of curing cancer, based on promising mice studies. Those hopes (and EntreMed’s share price) deflated in the coming years, when the company found itself shedding jobs and executives and struggling to survive.

But through it all, EntreMed remained EntreMed. No longer: the Rockville company’s shareholders have voted to change its name to CASI Pharmaceuticals, as of June 16. The company will now trade under the ticker symbol CASI.

kloudtrack®, a leader in cybersecurity and cloud computing (cyber|cloud) technologies and solution services for sensitive data, process management and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC), will team up with the University of Maryland’sRobert H. Smith School of Business and Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) to establish the first Innovation Sandbox™ exchange catering to the innovation, workforce development and technology roadmapping needs of public and private sector healthcare, and medical and life science (HealthTech) organizations.   

The project was announced as part of today’s Maryland Economic Development Association Summer Conference at UMD, themed “Health Innovations: Impact on Economic and Workforce Development.”

After all the angst generated by the Affordable Care Act, and all the punditry, noise, and debate that accompanied its rollout, you might conclude that there are no practical solutions to our healthcare challenges.  But, of course, there are new answers and solutions and new, creative approaches to solving healthcare problems. You just have to look at innovative, private sector enterprises.  And if you do, you might find one of the more innovative answers to eldercare right there in your old-fashioned television set.  Just ask Kian Saneii, CEO of Independa.

But first, a little background.  One of the more troubling and difficult areas of healthcare is the growing needs of the elderly, including both preventive care and the management  of long-term, chronic illnesses.   This has been a well-understood fact for quite some time.  Saneii and the Independa team he began assembling in 2009 set out to find practical real-world solutions to these challenges.  How they did this is an instructive case study in innovation, pragmatism and common sense.