News Archive

It’s rare for me to hear a panel discussion on digital health and not hear the same conversation repeated and reiterated over and over again. In a discussion between health IT company CEOs at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference, some of the most interesting points raised were the ones the healthcare industry is struggling with the most. Of course, there were a lot of sound bites too. Here are five of the most interesting digital health insights.

If you control the capital, you control the data and if you control the data, you control the product. This is a sound bite, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Providers’ relationship with their digital health companies revolves around this balance. Digital health companies are using their technology to help providers deliver better patient care. But investors have an impact in shaping business model. With the shift to outcomes-based care, data generated by digital health tools will become even more critical to care delivery.

Gov. Martin O’Malley on Wednesday unwrapped his eighth and final budget, a $39 billion plan that increases spending on tax credits for cyber security, biotechnology and research and development while holding the line on taxes.

For fiscal 2015, O’Malley has proposed hiking the biotech and life sciences tax credit by 20 percent, to $12 million. He wants to increase the cyber tax credit by 33 percent, to $4 million and raise the credit for research and development by 12.5 percent, to $9 million.

What would your business do with $100,000?

For more than a dozen Maryland technology startups, dreams of expansion and development are becoming a reality with the help of awards from the state-sponsored Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO).

TEDCO announced on Tuesday that 13 startups received total funding of $1.3 million, $100,000 each, between July 2013 and January 2014, through the organization’s Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF). The companies range from i-Lighting, an InvestMaryland Challenge winner and lighting system innovator, to Graftworx, a high-tech medical device developer.

From wearable technologies that track back posture, blood pressure and brain waves to connected cars and homes, the 152,000 attendees at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show were treated to some of the most innovative wireless technologies global innovation has to offer. So dazzling and ubiquitous were the wireless innovations not just on display –but in use– that the event easily could have been rebranded as the Consumer Mobile Show.

While many gadgets offer great fun, many more actually save lives. I was honored to lead a conversation on the coming wave of mobile innovation in digital health through next generation wireless sensors which we are implanting inside our bodies called “The Internet of You.” Panelists Dr. Fran Kauffman, the Chief Medical Officer of Medtronic Diabetes and Dr. Christian Holz, a Research Scientist in the mobile innovation group at Yahoo! Labs brilliantly described the progress being made in this next powerful frontier of mobile innovation.

American innovation, badly damaged last year by federal budget tightening and the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration, appears to be getting partial relief with the bipartisan budget deals struck last month and Monday night. The progress is praiseworthy, but it will not counteract the decades-long decline in federal funding for research and development that is so essential to our economic future and critical to accelerating treatments for today’s major health care challenges, including Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

First there was a blizzard of new drug deals. Now comes the forecast for sunnier financial weather ahead.

AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot arrived at JPMorgan with a message: The pharma giant ($AZN) has beefed up its late-stage pipeline and is now ready to prove it can start to grow again in the near future as it pushes through one of the industry’s most radical R&D reorganizations. As of today, AstraZeneca counts 11 drugs in late stages of development–just about double what Soriot inherited when he was named CEO a year ago–with another 27 coming up behind it. And it’s mapped out a combo strategy for immunotherapies designed to get the company in the race to gain approvals and start growing oncology revenue.

The approaching March deadline for individuals to enroll in a health insurance plan is a useful reminder that provisions of Obamacare will continue to roll out this year. The Affordable Care Act and related legislation are putting a huge demand on the health system, from accelerating the shift to electronic medical records to creating a need for more efficient communication tools between physician offices, patients and insurers. A handful of industry insiders offers a glimpse of the kind of targets that will shift into focus in 2014 and the groups that will be looking to buy them.

A Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) and I-Corps presentation, “Linking Innovative Technology with University System of Maryland Resources,” with Mr. Joe Naft, Director, MIPS will take place on Thursday, February 6, 11:15 am – 12:30 pm in Wyle Building 1 North conference room, 22309 Exploration Dr., Lexington Park, MD 20653. This program, sponsored by The Patuxent Partnership, is free and open to the public. Check-in begins at 11:00 am; attendees are welcome to bring their lunch.

Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute’s (Mtech) MIPS program accelerates the commercialization of technology in Maryland by jointly funding collaborative R&D projects between companies and the faculty of Maryland’s public universities. With more than 500 Maryland companies participating in project awards since 1987, MIPS-supported products have generated over $25.2 billion in sales, added jobs to the region, and infused state-of-the-art technology into the global marketplace. To be sponsored by MIPS, projects must show strong potential for commercialization and economic impact. These projects cover the gamut of state-of-the-art technologies in fields such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, clean energy, robotics, information technology and all types of engineering.

After a successful launch of the Academy in September, we are excited to be offering another run of our career-oriented courses. We saw that our web development courses were incredibly popular so we have decided to focus on these two courses for our Winter semester.

A handful of students that took our Academy last year have been placed in either full-time positions or paid internships. Some came to learn the skills needed to build their own websites, while others were sent for professional development. Whatever your reason is for wanting to learn more, the Academy is the most intense digital education program in the region.

ATCC is featuring specific cell-based solutions for screening at SLAS2014, the 3rd Annual Conference and Exhibition of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening. Meeting attendees visiting ATCC at booth #1348 will find helpful information on hTERT immortalized cell lines, human stem cells, cancer cell panels, and reagents that are particularly suited for screening and drug discovery research. ATCC, the premier global biological materials resource and standards organization, maintains the largest collection of cells lines characterized and authenticated for use by the research community.

Cell-based screening programs, especially when automated, require a stable supply of cells for extended studies. To aid in this endeavor, ATCC currently maintains over 20 human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) immortalized cell lines of different types, including epithelial cells derived from various human tissues. These cell lines represent a breakthrough in cell biology research that combines the in vivo characteristics of primary cells with the ability to survive continuously in vitro.