News Archive

All of us know that you have to be a little crazy to be an entrepreneur. Launching, let alone sustaining, a new enterprise can be challenging along almost every dimension − mentally, emotionally, and often financially. Historically, this reality has been even more sobering in the health care sector, where the typical hardships experienced by any start-up have been amplified by numerous industry-specific challenges: Extensive regulation, entrenched players with a strong grip on the status quo, confusing paths to entry, and an even more opaque path to payment have made health care a particularly treacherous territory for entrepreneurs.

Numerous studies have shown that Americans of European origin have a more independent, and Asians have a more interdependent, social orientation, as measured by questionnaires asking about agreement with such statements as “I feel it is important for me to act as an independent person.” But this social-orientation difference is about 6 times greater among people from both backgrounds who are carriers of two particular alleles of a dopamine-receptor gene known as DRD4, according to a team led by Shinobu Kitayama of the University of Michigan. The alleles appear to predispose people to acquire behaviors that are considered socially desirable, the researchers say.

Its no secret: the University of Colorado receives hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds that sponsor our research. My lab alone racks up expenditures of $800,000 a year to pay for post-doc and graduate student salary, tuition, materials and travel. Isn’t it preposterous to now ask the public for some more of their hard-earned cash as we, and many other universities now, do on CU Boulder’s new initiative?

It helps to first think about why the government actually does make these payments in the first place: to educate the next generation of engineers and scientists by working on research problems with important societal benefits. With this money becoming more competitive, the pool of ideas actually being supported becomes smaller with little to no feedback from the general public. Crowdfunding research allows the public to turn this around by enabling scientists to find support for projects currently not (or never) on the radar of conventional funding agencies, yet enjoying sufficient public interest.  This category of research is probably the most obviously deserving of crowdfunding and has already enabled a host of documentaries, research excursions, and books, often by providing exclusively ideological or intellectual reward.

Take a guess as to which industry suffered the most cybersecurity breaches in 2013.

According to one health IT startup, that’s healthcare. Protenus pointed that out at DreamIt Health Baltimore Demo Day in April.

As cofounder Robert Lord explained at Demo Day, electronic medical records, shockingly enough, “weren’t built with security in mind.”

QIAGEN N.V. (frankfurt prime standard:QIA) today announced that its therascreen® KRAS RGQ PCR Kit (therascreen KRAS test) has received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to guide the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer patients with Amgen’s Vectibix® (panitumumab). This marks the third FDA approval of a companion diagnostic from QIAGEN that has been paired with a novel medicine.

QIAGEN’s growing menu of clinically validated companion diagnostics is driving global dissemination of personalized healthcare, which uses genomic information to guide treatment decisions in individual patients.

The DoD SBIR 2014.2 solicitation is now available for the submission of proposals.

Participating Department of Defense (DoD) agencies:

• Army
• Navy
• DARPA
• DLA
• DMEA
• Missile Defense Agency (MDA)

IMPORTANT DATES and DEADLINES

May 23, 2014
Solicitation opens and DoD begins accepting proposals
June 11, 2014
SITIS closes to new questions
June 25, 2014 6:00 am EST
Solicitation closes to receipt of proposals at 6:00 AM EST-plan ahead and submit early.

Montgomery County, taking a page from the state’s playbook, has lured cybersecurity startup Mobile System 7 across state lines from McLean, Va. to Bethesda, Md. with $100,000 of investment and services according to The Washington Post. Expansion of the cybersecurity business sector has become a very high priority throughout Maryland and this is just the latest of a series of investments by the state and local governments to encourage successful cybersecurity companies to open or move businesses to Maryland.

The move is reminiscent of the way Luminal, a cybersecurity startup born in West Virginia, was enticed into moving to Frederick thanks to generous investment offers via the state government. That was state investment however, while the Mobile System 7 move comes after Montgomery County’s Department of Economic Development convinced the company that it would do better in Maryland than in Virginia.

Biotech is certainly a growing industry in Greater Baltimore, and here’s more proof. These 10 companies all said they are growing their staff in the coming months, when we asked in our annual industry survey. Here are all the jobs they’re already looking to fill:

City innovation economy classifications and rankings, 2014.

World’s largest city classification and global ranking with 445 benchmark cities classified, and all cities analyst ranked this year. Measuring each cities potential as an innovation economy at the current time, since 2007.

Based on 2thinknow analyst interpretation of 162 city indicators from 2thinknow City Benchmarking Data set.

QIAGEN N.V. (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) today announced the expansion of its industry-leading portfolio of bioinformatics solutions with additional content from BIOBASE, a provider of expertly curated biological databases, software and services. With access to HGMD, an especially in clinical markets widely used biomedical data resource as well as to other unique content, QIAGEN expand its world’s most comprehensive, high-quality and up-to-date literature source for clinical research and diagnosis – further strengthening its market-leading position in the analysis and interpretation of sequencing data. QIAGEN’s growing bioinformatics and next-generation sequencing (NGS) franchises is positioned to benefit from the integration of BIOBASE, its assets and employees and will benefit the expansion of relationships with thousands of clinical labs and NGS users in life sciences.

“The ability of next-generation sequencing to rapidly deliver genomic insights is opening up new frontiers for clinical research and medicine, and QIAGEN is strategically addressing customers’ needs to interpret the massive amounts of data generated by NGS. With HGMD and other content from BIOBASE, a respected organization with a dedicated team and robust line of unique databases and software, QIAGEN is further extending its competitive advantage as the overall market leader for clinical interpretation of human sequencing data,” said Peer M. Schatz, Chief Executive Officer of QIAGEN. “Already today, more than 15,000 users worldwide rely on QIAGEN’s bioinformatics products for interpretation – and have processed over a quarter of a million genome sequences. HGMD is a unique fit with our offering and will integrate well. We expect to drive additional adoption of this leading literature-based knowledge base used by clinical reference labs for annotating hereditary variants, as well as BIOBASE’ other solutions by having integrated them into interpretation solutions shared with our Ingenuity Knowledge Base – adding value for QIAGEN and BIOBASE customers and accelerating our growth drivers in NGS and bioinformatics.”