News Archive

University of Maryland is well-known across the nation and internationally as a forward-thinking research institution, which is why it wasn’t too surprising to hear that UMD is now home to one of the nation’s fastest university-owned supercomputers.

Put simply, the supercomputer going by the name of Deepthought2 (appropriate, eh?) will help to support advanced, high-performance computing and research with the ability to do things like simulate fire and combustion. The contraption has a processing speed of about 300 teraflops, which is crazy fast. How fast? Absurdly speedy.

Research labs closed by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer dot the country: Illinois. Michigan. New Jersey. New York. North Carolina.

Maryland officials don’t want this state to join that list.

After Pfizer declared its desire to buy AstraZeneca — which employs 3,100 in the state — Gov. Martin O’Malley and six members of Maryland’s congressional delegation fired off concerned letters, even though the purchase is by no means a done deal. So far, London-based AstraZeneca has rebuffed its New York suitor.

Johns Hopkins announced on May 6 its plans to build a new cancer treatment building in Baltimore. The facility will be constructed with the help of a $65 million gift. It will be named after the late Albert P. “Skip” Viragh, Jr., a philanthropist and a former cancer patient treated at Johns Hopkins, who died in 2003, at the age of 62.

The Skip Viragh Outpatient Cancer Building is scheduled for completion in 2017. It will be constructed on the southeast corner of Fayette Street and North Broadway, in East Baltimore, and will feature about 50 exam rooms, advanced cancer imaging, a specially designed cancer diagnostic and treatment planning center, and many other facilities and services.

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June 3rd, 2014, from 6 to 8:30 pm  

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AstraZeneca’s boss said on Wednesday he would engage with Pfizer if the price was right and the risks posed from forcing the British drugmaker’s operations into the U.S. company’s new three-unit model were addressed.

Chief Executive Pascal Soriot stressed his company had a bright future as a stand-alone firm but acknowledged that shareholders would expect AstraZeneca’s board to negotiate if terms were sufficiently attractive in a sweetened offer.

The Tech Council of Maryland (TCM), Maryland’s largest technology trade association for life science and technology, today announced the winners of its 26th Annual Industry Awards. More than 700 technology and business leaders from around the state attended the celebration last night, which took place at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center.

“The individuals and companies we honored at last night’s industry awards celebration represent the tremendous talent, innovation and dedication we have in Maryland’s thriving technology community,” said Phil Schiff, TCM’s CEO. “The nominees for this year’s awards were truly outstanding, and exemplify how Maryland’s technology community is playing a vital role in ensuring our state’s long-term prosperity.”

Electronics giant Samsung recently announced a foray into big pharma. The South Korean company is set to invest over $2 billion into biopharmaceuticals—drugs developed from biological sources (e.g. vaccines or gene therapies) as opposed to traditional chemical cocktails—with a focus on creating cheaper versions of existing therapies.

But cheapness won’t be Samsung’s only advantage. The company better known for its smartphones could also take advantage of the fact that the pharma industry has been slow to explore mobile health technology.

It’s too early to say what Pfizer’s bid for AstraZeneca means for MedImmune. But it’s starting to become clearer what MedImmune means for Pfizer’s bid for AstraZeneca.

As Pfizer courts MedImmune’s U.K.-based parent, one promising immunotherapy product — MEDI4736, now in late-stage clinical trials for non-small cell lung cancer — has seen a flood of attention alongside another closely watched lung cancer drug, AZD9291. Data on both drugs are slated to be presented at the end of May at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual conference in Chicago. AstraZeneca is looking to wield positive results to showcase its immuno-oncology pipeline, undergirding the argument that it’s worth more than the $106 billion that Pfizer originally bid for it.

Cybersecurity will be a major growth engine in the region for many years to come. The 2014 CyberMontgomery Forum is YOUR chance to join with cyber leaders from the private sector, government and academia.  Hear from The Honorable Thomas J. Ridge, the first Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and former Governor of Pennsylvania.

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A 300-teraflop supercomputer named Deepthought2 will now power research at the University of Maryland. Housed in the institution’s new 9,000-square-foot Cyberinfrastructure Center, Deepthought2 was developed with high-performance computing solutions from Dell and will support advanced research activities ranging from studying the formation of the first galaxies to simulating fire and combustion for fire protection advancements.

Deepthought2 replaces its namesake Deepthought, installed in 2006. According to a university statement, “the new supercomputer is 10 times faster than its predecessor, able to complete between 250 trillion and 300 trillion operations per second. It has a petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of storage and is connected by an InfiniBand network, a very high-speed internal network. Put another way, Deepthought2 is the equivalent of 10,000 laptops working together, it has 2,000 times the storage of an average laptop, and its internal network is 50 times faster than broadband.”