News Archive

The Tech Council of Maryland (TCM), Maryland’s largest technology trade association with more than 400 life science and technology members employing over 200,000 in the region, today announced that individuals from Hewlett-Packard Co., Johns Hopkins University, MedImmune, RCM&D and SoBran Inc. were named to the association’s board of directors.

“We are excited to have this impressive group of individuals on the TCM board,” said Phil Schiff, TCM’s CEO. “Their individual and collective expertise will be invaluable as the association evolves to address the changing needs of our membership.”

One of IBM’s first app ecosystem partners for Watson, the health optimization company Welltok Inc., became the first firm to benefit from a $100 million venture fund IBM established to promote the use of its cognitive computing technology.

Welltok has raised $22.1 million in Series C funding led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with new participation from IBM and Qualcomm Ventures. This brings Welltok’s funding in the last nine months to more than $40 million.

QIAGEN N.V. QGEN +0.76% (frankfurt prime standard:QIA) today announced the launch plans of several novel products designed to significantly reduce the challenges of the most significant bottlenecks in next-generation sequencing (NGS): sample preparation and bioinformatics. The solutions will enable NGS users to generate more valuable insights from any sample. The new products add to QIAGEN’s rapidly expanding portfolio of ‘universal’ solutions designed to run with any NGS platform, including QIAGEN’s GeneReader™ platform, which is being prepared for launch in 2014. Several of QIAGEN’s new NGS products will be introduced to genomics researchers this week at the 15th annual Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting in Marco Island, Florida.

Illumina, Inc. today announced the launch of the Illumina Accelerator Program, the world’s first business accelerator focused solely on creating an innovation ecosystem for the genomics industry. Its goal is to speed the time to market and lower the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs, start-ups and early stage companies working on scientifically and commercially promising next-generation sequencing (NGS) applications.

Through the accelerator’s six-month program, Illumina will provide invited participants with technology and business guidance and $100,000 in support, including access to sequencing systems and reagents, as well as fully operational lab space in close proximity to the company’s planned R&D facilities in San Francisco’s Mission Bay. Initial partners include prominent technology investor Yuri Milner, who will offer each participating company $100,000 in exchange for convertible notes, and Silicon Valley Bank, which intends to provide banking services and credit to each participating company.

The DC regional Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program is now accepting university research teams from the DC, MD, and VA area for the 5-week Lean LaunchPad, technology commercialization and customer development workshop beginning March 24th. UMD is the lead institution running the NSF-funded program, and as such, teams from UMD will be given priority in this program. Interested teams can learn more and apply at http://www.dcicorps.org/. Feel free to contact info@dcicorps.org or (240) 319-9594 if you have any questions.

The pharmaceutical industry’s dependence on universities and small biotechs as the source of innovation is laid bare in an analysis of the origin of all the novel drugs approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in the three years from 2010 – 2012.

The analysis shows that 49 per cent of the products granted marketing authorisation during this time were originally discovered by the in-house efforts of pharma companies, with the remaining 51 per cent originating elsewhere. However, of the 94 products that received approval, 87 per cent were owned by pharma companies at the point the license was granted.

Out of 260 applicants, 41 start-ups have advanced in the second annual InvestMaryland Challenge, the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED) announced today.

The early-stage business competition—with awards provided by DBED’s Maryland Venture Fund, the BioMaryland Center and other sponsors—seeks to grow entrepreneurship and innovation in the State.

MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, announced it has entered into a three-year collaboration with the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The collaboration will focus on CTSI’s Catalyst Awards program, which solicits applications from University scientists who wish to move their translational research beyond the bench and into product development.  

This marks the first industrial partnership for CTSI’s Catalyst Awards program’s therapeutic track, which focuses specifically on discovery and development of patient treatment options. The collaboration will benefit both MedImmune’s biologics and AstraZeneca’s small molecule portfolios and will call for proposals in therapeutic areas of interest to MedImmune and AstraZeneca, including cardiovascular and metabolic disease; oncology; respiratory, inflammation and autoimmunity; neuroscience and infectious disease.

Looking beyond the small-molecule drugs and biologic treatments that have dominated therapeutic development over the past generation, GlaxoSmithKline’s ($GSK) all-encompassing R&D department is trying to get a jump on the future of medicine, and research chief Moncef Slaoui is betting that there’s a great deal of promise in drug-mimicking electronics.