News Archive

The head of Maryland’s university system on Wednesday said higher education needs to embrace disruptive technologies such as massive online courses in an effort to serve more students and contain costs.

“If at the end of the day this means there aren’t as many universities or some people don’t have jobs, you know, this is not a welfare business,” William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council annual meeting. “We have the interests of the nation at stake.”

With the cost of drug development hitting the $5 billion mark and 94 percent of drugs failing at some point in clinical development, pharmaceutical companies have been turning to new tools to help clinical trial design: computers and robots.

A couple of Wall Street Journal articles highlight this trend.

One notes that in June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency endorsed a simulator from the Critical Path Institute to help develop Alzheimer’s disease treatments. Additional simulators are in the works for tuberculosis, Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

The equity culture among young technology companies is almost universal. When implemented properly, broad employee ownership within a company can:

• Align the risk and reward of employees betting on an unproven company.
• Reward long-term value creation and thinking by employees.
• Encourage employees to think about the company’s holistic success.

The Symposium is the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund premier event that delivers comprehensive scientific talks, poster presentations, Ethics discussions and networking time, enabling cell therapy basic research and technologies from the lab to pre-clinical and to commercialization.

With a powerful line-up of speakers and many opportunities for you to present your work in concurrent or poster presentations, the Symposium will follow the format and style of previous meetings with an additional networking time and an intimate environment.

Keynote Address: The John L. Kellermann, III Memorial Lecture

Keynote Speaker:

Rita Perlingeiro, Ph.D.
Associate Professor & Lillehei Endowed Scholar
Lillehei Heart Institute University of Minnesota

The pharmaceutical industry needs better scientific models for testing drugs before they get to the proving ground of human clinical trials. Current lab dish models and animal testing models are time-consuming, expensive and chronically unable to predict which drugs are going to work in clinical trials. The industry is crying out for new modes of early testing that can shorten the timelines, reduce the cost and increase the odds of success in clinical trials.

Both lab dish models and animal models have run into serious limitations. Cell culture (“in vitro”) assays offer some real advantages. Many can provide true, “human” answers to fairly simple questions. But they lack complexity.

Millennial Media, WeddingWire and RainKing Solutions led the list of Maryland companies making the 2013 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, a prestigious technology awards program in United States and Canada. Among Maryland’s eight repeat companies, United Therapeutics Corporation is on the list for the 13th straight year and Zenoss is on the list for the third straight year.

Overall, there were 15 Maryland companies on the list, up from 12 in 2012. Maryland’s 15 companies were the eighth most among states/provinces. California far outpaced other states with 166 companies, with Massachusetts, Ontario, New York, Washington and Pennsylvania following. Virginia had 16 companies on the list for the seventh most among states/provinces.

QIAGEN (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt, Prime Standard: QIA) today announced an agreement with Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) to develop and commercialize a molecular companion diagnostic paired with a novel Lilly oncology compound. This is the third co-development project by QIAGEN and Lilly to create companion diagnostics, which are tests that analyze genomic information in patient samples to enable personalized decisions on treatments. The latest collaboration, involving an undisclosed Lilly compound and an undisclosed molecular diagnostic target, builds on a master collaboration agreement for development of tailored therapies in cancer and other therapeutic areas signed earlier this year.

QIAGEN and Lilly are long-standing partners in personalized healthcare. QIAGEN’s therascreen(R) KRAS RGQ PCR Kit has been widely adopted by laboratories since its July 2012 approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a companion diagnostic. The therascreen KRAS Test detects gene mutations in metastatic colorectal cancer patients, indicating which ones will benefit from Erbitux. In September 2011, QIAGEN and Lilly partnered to develop a companion diagnostic that evaluates the Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) gene, which plays a role in some blood cancers. The test is paired with a Lilly compound to guide use of the proposed drug, currently in clinical trials.

For budding startups, accumulating funding is necessary — but difficult. Crowdfunding can be a viable alternative for entrepreneurs.

That was one key takeaway for the few hundred part-time and aspiring entrepreneurs gathered at the Entrepreneurs Inspiring Entrepreneurs Expo at the BWI Marriott Monday who caught the “Sourcing the Crowd” panel discussion.

Paul Silber had some unexpected advice from a venture capitalist for the entrepreneurs who crowded a conference room at the BWI Airport Marriott Monday hoping to find out how to land some VC cash.

Silber’s suggestion: tap all other sources first, like friends and family and angel investors, before looking to a venture capital firm for funding.

We’ve all done it. You throw your clothes in a bag and head to the airport. Sixteen hours later, you’re in a country where the customs, dress, language and food are very different from home.  As you leave the airport, you stop at an ATM, and within seconds have enough local currency for a taxi and a few meals. All you needed was an ATM card and some money in the bank. 

In fact, your trip is going really well until you slip on some ice and fall down a flight of stairs. As you tumble to the bottom and see your femur bone break through the skin, you wonder whether you will be awake to tell the hospital about your allergy to local anesthetics and your heart disease, which has left you with an abnormal heart rhythm.