News Archive

One year after DreamIt Health and the Canadian consulate launched digital health accelerators, the University City Science Center is hosting a state-backed health IT accelerator, according to a statement. The program has spots for six companies in a three-month program in Philadelphia. Aron Starosta, who set up the Canadian Consulate’s accelerator on the Science Center’s campus, also developed the Pennsylvania-backed program.

Geography isn’t a barrier as long as companies are registered in the state. The application deadline is March 15.

The Salk Institute’s Office of Technology Development (OTD) is responsible for managing the intellectual property of the Salk Institute.

At the OTD, our mission is to enable our researchers to realize the commercial potential of their ideas. Our goal is to develop and support relationships with industry partners who can help turn scientific progress in the lab into tangible products for the benefit of patients and society at large, while returning income to the inventor and to the Institute to support further research.

Commentary by Dr. Wallace D. Loh, President, University of Maryland

Maryland’s economic success relies on its staggering concentration of scientific talent, superb education, highly competitive businesses and enlightened government. When they all mesh, the state’s economy outpaces the competition.

This has earned Maryland a designation by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as the No. 1 entrepreneurial state and a No. 2 ranking by the National Science Foundation for the economic impact of its concentrated research activities.

People can argue all day about whether Illumina has, at last, given us the $1,000 genome. The answer does matter, because the cheaper it gets to sequence a whole human genome, the easier it will be to gather lots of them. That will help us understand what makes people different, and shed light on what causes disease. Or so scientists hope.

It’s heady stuff. But that’s the not the biggest story at Illumina right now.

GlaxoSmithKline is set to unveil plans to launch late-stage clinical trials on 10 new drugs over the next two years, the Telegraph reported, without citing sources.

The new drugs, which have not been detailed to investors, will include cancer and respiratory disease medicines, the newspaper said on its website.

The venture arm of GlaxoSmithKline joined investors in ZappRx, a prescription app, in a second instance recently of big pharma putting cash into a mobile health firm.

ZappRx announced it had closed a $1 million round from backers led by current investor Atlas Venture but also including GSK-backed SR One.

The round follows $1 million invested by Atlas Venture in September 2013.

The 2014 SBIR and STTR Omnibus Grant Solicitation of the NIH is now live and the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) budget for the program is increasing. Funding from the NCI Small Business Innovation Research & Small Business Tech Transfer (SBIR & STTR) Programs can help you advance your technology towards commercialization and can also help spark investor interest in your business.

The next application due date is April 5, 2014. We encourage you to start preparing your application and are happy to provide feedback on your project. If you’d like to take advantage of this opportunity, please email the NCI SBIR program director listed in your relevant technology area. Also be sure to check that all of your required registrations are complete. It’s never too early to start the registration process.

Directing a child to set up a diagnostic test is one way to illustrate the ease of using a device. That’s the approach Biomeme took for its pitch on crowdfunding website AngeList. Biomeme co-founder Max Perelman’s cute-as-a-button 7-year-old daughter takes on the role of lab assistant.

The DreamIt Health Philadelphia graduate developed a test kit to identify the DNA or RNA signature of bacteria and viruses through blood, urine or saliva samples. The company raised about $1 million in a mix of debt and options, according to a Form D filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and received $400,000 from the Philadelphia area division of Ben Franklin Technology Partners, the economic investment arm for Pennsylvania.

Getting specialty medications can be a big hassle. Dozens of pages of forms are required. Patients rely on call centers to find out the status of their prescriptions, and can go days wondering exactly when the next refill is coming. What if you could handle it all, instead, with just a few clicks on a smartphone app?

That’s the kind of thing ZappRx, a recently-formed startup out of Cambridge, MA, is trying to do.

The statistics surrounding startup success are pretty daunting — in fact, of the 500,000+ businesses owners that launched companies in 2012, only a handful will ever achieve a fraction of the notoriety of famed CEOs like Zuckerberg, Dorsey or Karp.

When launching a startup, there are countless decisions to consider: number of founders, sources of funding, location and target market, to name a few.

This infographic takes a look at the statistics surrounding startups and examines how many of them actually manage to get off the ground.