EY unveiled on Thursday evening its 2014 Entrepreneur of the Year Maryland winners in eight categories.
The honorees were announced in front of a packed crowd at a black-tie event at the Hilton Baltimore. The awards program recognizes high-growth entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence and success in such areas as innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities.
Maryland has retained top rankings in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s annual Enterprising States study released Wednesday.
For the third consecutive year, the State ranked No. 1 in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. For the second year in a row, Maryland ranked third in the nation for its Talent Pipeline.
Maryland is missing out on as many as 7,000 jobs and millions of dollars of investment as companies build data centers in neighboring Virginia, according to a report from Baltimore accounting firm Glass Jacobson.
Data centers provide cloud storage and are crucial to supporting the kinds of technology firms that have been opening in and relocating to Baltimore.
London-based Index Ventures has just announced a new $542 million fund for seed-stage companies that have raised under $20 million.
The firm says it will invest in European startups mainly, but may make a few bets on companies from Israel and the U.S.
I read an interesting Wall Street Journal article recently that discussed the war between tech companies to control future consumer distribution platforms. The article explains that the cash-flush giants “…each want to own the digital platform where people communicate, shop and seek entertainment.” This got me thinking about platforms in healthcare.
Right now, it’s fair to say that there are three major healthcare platforms. Insurance companies such as Aetna, WellPoint, United Healthcare and Humana have substantial members. However, mentioned in the article is the continual need for innovation. Tech behemoths are“…aware of all the big companies that died because they rested on their laurels.”
Novavax Inc. (Nasdaq: NVAX) said Wednesday it has raised $115 million in gross proceeds by selling 28.75 million shares of its common stock, which the Gaithersburg biotech plans to pour into its pipeline.
Some of the net proceeds will go toward advancing Novavax’s Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) nanoparticle vaccine into a Phase 2 trial in elderly subjects this year. The biotech is also studying its RSV vaccine for pediatric and maternal populations.
The University of Maryland, along with the George Washington University and Virginia Tech, have added the Johns Hopkins University to the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps ™) regional collaboration called DC I-Corps. JHU becomes the newest member university of the National Science Foundation’s National Innovation Network.
The NSF has approved a request from the three original universities to officially include Johns Hopkins in the I-Corps program’s “node” in the Mid-Atlantic called DC I-Corps, which was formed last year with $3.75 million in NSF funding. It is one of five regional nodes established nationwide by the NSF, and the first to expand its membership. Together, these five nodes currently form the basis of the National Innovation Network, which links together select universities with established entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to train faculty and student researchers from throughout the U.S. to transform ideas into products and get them on the market.
This brief analyzes entrepreneurship and job creation in the U.S. life sciences sector—defined as the group of industries engaged in the application of biological science and related knowledge for commercial purposes, primarily for human health care. This definition contains three major subgroups: drugs and pharmaceuticals; medical devices and equipment; and research, testing, and medical laboratories.
Building on previous research that highlights the importance of entrepreneurship and business dynamism to innovation, productivity, and net job creation, this brief analyzes how those trends apply to the life sciences sector. Overall, the life sciences sector plays an outsized role in new job creation and makes important contributions to entrepreneurship—not to mention the perhaps immeasurable benefits these firms play in enhancing and extending human life.
Tiny biotech startups will have a new place to germinate in the San Francisco Bay Area. Healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Labs division is opening a new 30,000 square foot incubator in the biotech-rich suburb of South San Francisco.
The flexible space, complete with common rooms, wet labs, and offices, could hold as many as 50 companies, according to Melinda Richter, a Bay Area incubator veteran tapped last year to head Janssen Labs nationwide. That would roughly double the group’s nationwide capacity, part of the international company’s aggressive reach beyond its walls to find, and fund, new science and technology. “We’re taking a big footprint,” Richter said, with half devoted to shared research equipment and services and half to space that can be customized to individual tenants.
The heightened private equity and venture capital (PEVC) deal activity in the global healthcare industry during the recession years, 2008-2010, witnessed a decline post-2010. However, the fall in deals was not uniform among the constituent sectors, with the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and healthcare equipment sectors experiencing a much sharper decline in investor interest than the healthcare technology and provider segments. Investors started to bet on providers based with the conviction they can provide quicker and safer returns than the pharmaceutical and biotechnology space, which is ridden with regulatory challenges and patent expiries.
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan’s Private Equity and Venture Capital Investment in the Global Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Industry reveals the total number of PEVC deals in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry decreased from 1063 in 2010 to 480 in 2013. Though the returns from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry have been dwindling, they are better compared to the performance of other industries.
