It’s strictly social at Science in the City…no speakers, no agenda! It’s the place to nosh and network with other bio-minded folks.
Join us Thursday, May 29, 2014 at 5 pm on the patio, weather permitting.
Don’t waste time by standing in line, RSVP today
Thousands of school-age children who visited the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Biotechnology Education booth at the USA Science & Engineering Festival Expo got to try their hands at extracting DNA from strawberries, treating yellow fever and comparing DNA sequences to determine which animals are related to one another.
The Center for Biotechnology Education participated in the third biennial USA Science and Engineering Festival Expo, held this year in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The three-day event, considered the largest science festival in the country, featured more than 3,000 hands-on activities presented by hundreds of universities and public and private organizations.
The future of health technology is in the palm of your hand. Mobile communication, wearable devices, data sharing, analytics and even gaming concepts will soon seamlessly meld with medical treatment.
DreamIt Health Baltimore explored these possibilities in a four-month accelerator program that fostered nine early-stage companies. Company representatives demonstrated their products, presented plans for growth and pitched to investors during the program’s culminating Demo Day on Wednesday.
What started as a Johns Hopkins Hospital program to train healthcare workers to treat HIV in Uganda has evolved into a multimedia platform for adherence, clinical trials and chronic diseases rolled into a healthcare startup, Emocha, In a presentation at DreamIt Health Baltimore’s demo day, CEO Sebastian Seiguer talked about the company’s origins at Johns Hopkins University Hospital and its relevance for both developing and industrialized countries.
Circulomics Inc has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop its new Nanobind DNA/RNA extraction technology.
Nanobind is an inexpensive thermoplastic nanomaterial developed for high integrity DNA and RNA extraction. Its hierarchical structure of microscale folds topped by nanoscale wrinkles creates a high binding area silica surface capable of capturing large amounts of high molecular weight (MW) DNA and RNA.
Merck & Co Inc (MRK.N) is considering selling a big portfolio of mature drugs that could fetch more than $15 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, as the U.S. drugmaker continues to streamline businesses to focus on high-growth areas.
Merck, which is also in the process of selling its $14 billion consumer healthcare unit, is working with an investment bank on the potential sale of the off-patent drugs, which could draw interest from generic drugmakers, the people said.
With the decline of great industrial laboratories, such as Bell Labs—home of such major technological advances as the transistor and research that won seven Nobel Prizes, all in physics—many universities are putting increased focus on technological innovation, translational research, and commercialization. Work leading to successful innovations, however, “does not necessarily result in outcomes that are traditionally counted [by universities] in career advancement, such as publication,” write Paul Sanberg, senior vice president for research and innovation at the University of South Florida in Tampa, and his co-authors in an article published 28 April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, it “often requires faculty members with a different working mindset and modus operandi than those conducting purely basic research.”
A team of physicists, psychologists and developers have produced a mobile health platform to make virtual reality and augmented reality more accessible as a self-help tool for treating phobias. Phobius, part of DreamIt Health Baltimore’s inaugural class, has developed a smartphone-enabled tool and is planning a September launch for its consumer product, which includes goggles and an iPhone or Android app.
Phobius comes to Baltimore by way of Barcelona. In addition to the consumer-facing tool, a clinician-facing track is under development. The consumer-facing platform will concentrate on phobias from insects and public speaking to needles. The company plans to market it without any guarantees of its effectiveness in curing these phobias. But it also plans to seek FDA clearance and a CE Mark from European regulators to use the device for treating post traumatic stress disorder and anxiety disorders.
The angel investor market in 2013 continued the upward trend started in 2010 in investment dollars and in the number of investments. Total investments in 2013 were $24.8 billion, an increase of 8.3% over 2012, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. A total of 70,730 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding in 2013, an increase of 5.5% over 2012 investments. The number of active investors in 2013 was 298,800 individuals, an increase of 11.4% from 2012. The increase in both total dollars and the number of investments resulted in a deal size for 2013 that was slightly higher than in 2012 (an increase in deal size of 2.6% from 2012). These data indicate that angels were active investors in 2013 but those that did invest decreased their individual investments from $85,435 in 2012 to $83,050 in 2013, a decrease of 2.8%. The $24.8 billion in total investments is close to the market high of $26.0 billion that occurred in 2007.
In the face of rising drug research and development costs and continued pressures against increasing prices for medicines and health care services, the biopharmaceutical industry must find ways to increase innovation and efficiencies. The Association of University Research Parks (AURP) today announced that leaders from industry and academia will come together at the Janssen Research & Development West Coast Research Center in San Diego on June 23, 2014, for AURP’s BioParks 2014 Meeting . Participants will address recent shifts in pharmaceutical R&D models and the role bioparks play in this evolution.
“Research parks play a vital role in fostering collaboration between universities and the private sector. While this is important across all research-based industries, the need for such collaboration is absolutely critical in the biopharmaceutical space,” said Kevin T. Byrne, MBA, AURP President, and President, The University Financing Foundation.
