News Archive

Johns Hopkins University and MedImmune, one of the largest biotechnology companies in the region, have teamed up for an innovative, $6.5 million research collaboration, and eight students in the Master’s in Biotechnology Enterprise and Entrepreneurship practicum are directly involved. They will be doing their practicum projects with MedImmune.

“The partnership between JHU and MedImmune is a wonderful opportunity for MBEE students to gain real-world experience,” said Lynn Johnson Langer, director, Enterprise & Regulatory Science Programs for the university’s Center for Biotechnology Education. “Their work will be highly valuable to the company, and a great learning experience for the students. Truly a win-win.”

Phlebotomy. Even the word sounds archaic—and that’s nothing compared to the slow, expensive, and inefficient reality of drawing blood and having it tested. As a college sophomore, Elizabeth Holmes envisioned a way to reinvent old-fashioned phlebotomy and, in the process, usher in an era of comprehensive superfast diagnosis and preventive medicine.

That was a decade ago. Holmes, now 30, dropped out of Stanford and founded a company called Theranos with her tuition money. Last fall it finally introduced its radical blood-testing service in a Walgreens pharmacy near company head­quarters in Palo Alto, California. (The plan is to roll out testing centers nation­wide.) Instead of vials of blood—one for every test needed—Theranos requires only a pinprick and a drop of blood. With that they can perform hundreds of tests, from standard cholesterol checks to sophisticated genetic analyses. The results are faster, more accurate, and far cheaper than conventional methods.

March 13th, 2014 8:00am-10:00am at the Shady Grove Innovation Center, 9700 Great Seneca Highway, Rockville, MD 20850

The Maryland/Israel Development Center and The Tech Council of Maryland invite you to join us on March 13, 2014 at 8:00 am, for an informational session to discuss business growth opportunities for U.S. companies nterested in potential partnerships with companies in Israel.

A representative of the Israel Bi-national Industrial R&D Foundation (B.I.R.D Foundation) will be presenting information on the foundation’s technology collaboration grants of up to $1 million. If you are working with a company in Israel or could be looking to partner with one, you could be eligible. Join us to learn about the application process and timelines.
You will also have an opportunity to hear about an upcoming Israel trade mission. This is a great way to explore partnership opportunities with Israeli companies. Learn about a trade mission to Israel’s premier Innovation Conference — featuring Israel’s renowned Biomed Conference side-by-side with a groundbreaking High Tech Conference.

The recent federal mandates for healthcare information technology have increased demand on the field, boosting the need for educated and knowledgeable staff for health IT projects. But with the emergence and recent popularity of graduate education in healthcare informatics, we are seeing an influx of students entering these programs who do not have clinical or information technology backgrounds.

These individuals have a great desire to work in informatics and recognize the enormous impact the field can have on healthcare, but they lack the hands-on experience that many employers seek. Some of these students have even reported challenges getting hired after obtaining their master’s degree, for lack of ‘experience.’

Dennis Truong and Jody Crane have reinvented the traditional house call.

The Kaiser Permanente doctors are responsible for the creation and implementation of a new program called HouseCalls, in which patients can schedule 20-minute appointments with physicians via video. The foray into mobile health saves the patients a visit to urgent care centers and saves those centers money, the doctors said. It’s just one new initiative underway at the national health provider aimed at improving care while lowering costs.

Long ignored in favor of enterprise software, social networking and other sexy Internet technologies, biotech has roared back in the past year.

With drug companies desperate to replace expiring drug patents, and President Barack Obama’s new health care law demanding cuts in medical costs, Wall Street has shown a seemingly insatiable appetite for initial public offerings of stock. Last year’s 35 IPOs, including seven in the Bay Area, represented the most in the sector in nearly a decade. In the first two months of this year, 17 others have launched — shattering records.

If the rounds that Health Catalyst and Zephyr Health have put together are any indication of how the rest of the year might go for fledgling healthcare data analytics startups, we can expect to see bigger, mid-stage deals this year, and not in the places you might expect.

New analysis from research firm CB Insights found that venture funding for companies developing predictive and prescriptive data analytics for healthcare more than doubled from 2012 to 2013, while deal volume rose 40 percent. These are companies that are working with providers or payers to convert all of the data they’re collecting into insights that will hopefully guide more effective and less costly care.

D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s administration plans to establish a new fund to aid tech startups and designate a stretch of Northwest D.C. as a “technology corridor” under its Digital DC initiative, according to an email obtained by the Washington Business Journal.

Digital DC — known until this week as Digital District — is the latest in a series of efforts by Gray to elevate the city’s status as a startup hub. It appears to mirror fairly closely some of the recommendations on Gray’s five-year economic development roadmap.

PricewaterhouseCoopers recently released the breakdown of its MoneyTree report by region. While we’ve know for about a month now what fourth-quarter venture capital in D.C. looked like, we weren’t completely sure what the total region looked like broken down by specific tech verticals and how much each received.

In total, the D.C./Metroplex region slipped a bit from the third quarter when it was ranked fifth in amount of funding. In Q4, however, we fell back to the ninth spot behind Texas and the Southeast. Yikes. That may have to do with an absence of huge deals that we saw earlier in 2013, such as Clarabridge’s $80 million raise and Evolent Health’s $100 million raise.

The excitement reached a new peak with the first successful mapping of a human genome at the turn of the millennium.

What if doctors could predict, based on your genetic makeup, which diseases you had a predisposition to so you could prevent them before you ever developed a single symptom? If you did get sick, what if they could tailor a specific drug that your DNA would best respond to?