News Archive

Epidarex Capital, a leading international early-stage life science venture capital fund, has announced a £4 million Series A investment, in Edinburgh Molecular Imaging (EMI). Scottish Enterprise’s investment arm, the Scottish Investment Bank, also participated in the round. EMI, an Edinburgh BioQuarter spin-out company from the University of Edinburgh, is developing a pioneering Optical Molecular Imaging (OMI) technology with the potential to address unmet needs in the diagnosis and monitoring of several major diseases.

EMI’s highly innovative OMI technology revolves around the development of fluorescent imaging reagents that detect harmful processes deep inside the human body, at the bedside, in real time and at molecular resolution. The company’s initial focus is on lung conditions but the technology is applicable to a wide spectrum of disease. The company’s approach has the potential to transform clinicians’ ability to diagnose and manage a number of serious respiratory conditions, including lung cancer, fibrosis, lung infections and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). EMI’s technology will address the pressing need for tests which can rapidly provide diagnostic certainty and reduce healthcare costs. Respiratory diseases kill one in five people in the UK and cost the NHS over £6 billion per year, with lung cancer being the biggest cancer killer.

Ozarks Medical Center in Missouri and Flagstaff Medical Center in Arizona are just two hospitals in 25 states across the country that will receive federal funding for telemedicine projects. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced nearly $16 million in USDA grants would be disbursed for distant learning and telemedicine services.

The USDA’s Distance Learning and Telemedicine Loan and Grant program provides funding to rural hospitals, clinics, schools and libraries for equipment and technical assistance for telemedicine and distance learning. Grant recipients must demonstrate that they serve rural America, prove there is an economic need and provide at least 15 percent in matching funds.

Three of the University of Pennsylvania’s health-related research centers have teamed up to launch an innovative grant program designed to lure academic investigators out of their insular comfort zones into large scale interdisciplinary research projects.

The three—Penn’s Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CCEB), Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) and Center for Public Health Initiatives (CPHI)—are offering a novel funding structure they hope will pull together researchers from a variety of disciplines to focus on “big ideas” related to improving the health of populations.

Frustrated  by unpredictable and often political funding for science research,  a handful of young researchers think they’ve found the answer: crowdfunding.

Jackson Solway Experiment.com Co-founder and CEO Cindy Wu The researchers–who have backgrounds in synthetic biology, rocket science and other disciplines–built much of  their startup, Experiment.com, while at the Y Combinator accelerator in 2013.

Mobile technology is transforming the way patients and doctors interact.

That was the message conveyed by a panel of speakers at a Health IT Forum hosted at Johns Hopkins University’s Montgomery County Campus.

The Health IT Forum series, held four times a year, is a community partnership co-sponsored by the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development, the TechCouncil of Maryland and the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce. The January forum, titled “Patient Tools for Better Health,” attracted approximately 50 health IT experts from the region.

New Enterprise Associates has stepped up to help with a $14 million A round designed to get Austin, TX-based startup Lumos Pharmaceuticals in the clinic with a new therapy for an autism spectrum disorder characterized by severe cognitive impairment. Sante Ventures negotiated the original term sheet for Lumos and NEA joined the financing later.

Lumos has been working with a subsidiary of the NIH on LUM-001, an analogue of creatine that was studied by investigators at the University of Cincinnati. The “repurposed” molecule has been shown in animal studies to cross the blood-brain barrier, offering the potential to restore levels of creatine in the brain, which is eliminated by a defect in the transporter gene found in people who suffer from a range of cognitive disorders, including autism.

It’s no big secret that the vast majority of venture capitalists are men. But that vastness is even a bit larger than I had expected.

Following yesterday’s news that Jennifer Fonstad and Theresia Gouw were stepping down as partners with DFJ and Accel Partners, respectively, in order to launch their own firm, we decided to begin researching exactly how many partner-level female VCs there really were.

On Tuesday, Kaiser Permanente and the Veterans Health Administration announced that they will collaborate to research and develop best practices for various health care fields, EHR Intelligence reports (Freeman, EHR Intelligence, 2/4).

The partnership is part of the VA’s Innovation Partnership Program.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Bethesda Blues and Jazz – 7719 Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda, MD 20814

What’s next for Montgomery County? The potential for livable work, live and play environments on Metro abound. But what about the business community? What is it going to take to build an innovation economy? Is Montgomery County going to become the next tech hub?

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“Our goal is absolutely to democratize knowledge,” says Denny Luan. “Modern science has such a rush for fast results – publish or perish, output over process. We’d like to show the greater public that science does not have to be locked up behind monasterial walls. We’d like to change the way science is shared – in an engaging, deliberately beautiful way. Real-time, open-access and with great design.”

Luan is co-founder of what, until this morning, was known as “Microryza” – the site has been renamed “Experiment” as part of a revamped branding strategy – a potentially revolutionary crowdfunding platform that is looking to do for science what Kickstarter has done for the entertainment industry.