A merger of the University System of Maryland and the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center is one step closer after leaders signed an agreement this month for a new building at the California campus.
A merger could open up educational and business opportunities for the region, officials said Friday during a signing agreement at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons.
The increasing digitization of healthcare could shake up the industry in many ways, from allowing doctors to do their jobs more efficiently to reducing demand for specialists, according to a new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
How technological changes will increase access and improve quality of care is still a moving target, however, according to the new study, published today in Health Affairs. Meanwhile, a different set of researchers found that one technological intervention improved access to care for depression, but had no impact on depressive symptoms.
GSK today announced the recruitment of 140 new apprentices over the next two years in the UK – of which a third will be in engineering. This represents a 27% increase in the company’s annual intake of apprentices since 2012/13.
GSK also announced plans to increase the number of engineering graduate trainees by 26 in Britain – an increase of 25% since 2012/13.
DreamIt Health, a new health startup incubator that paired entrepreneurs around Philadelphia with experts from Independence Blue Cross and Penn Medicine to help commercialize new ideas, is now venturing down I-95 to expand into the city of Baltimore. We spoke with Elliot Menschik, MD, PhD, who manages DreamIt Health, about the goals of the new venture and the opportunities it plans to offer to Baltimore’s medtech entrepreneurs.
Another massive acquisition by MedImmune and a new fund to uncover the next ARM lit up a vibrant October when deals in the Cambridge UK technology cluster topped $900 million.
It took the seventh month total in Business Weekly’s Cambridge Cluster Deals Digest to just over $23 billion. While MedImmune splashed the most cash, it was a home-grown innovation that had the Cambridge investment community buzzing.
Attend the last DreamIt Health information sessions on Tuesday, November 5, 2013 from 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm at the Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute and Wednesday, November 6, 2013 from 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm at the Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus.
DreamIt Health is a health tech accelerator that helps startups achieve in four months what might otherwise take years to accomplish. The program has helped launch 130 IT companies to date.
DreamIt Managing Partner Elliot Menschik will present on November 5 and BioHealth Innovation’s Ethan Byler will present on November 6. These free programs will answer questions about Dreamit, and lite fare will be provided.
GrayBug LLC, a startup ophthalmic drug company spun out of Johns Hopkins University’s Wilmer Eye Institute, has hired its first full-time CEO and raised $1.5 million in new venture capital funding.
Michael O’Rourke, a veteran pharmaceutical industry executive and consultant, joined Baltimore-based GrayBug on Oct. 15. He comes to the company as it closed $1.5 million in funding from investors including the Maryland Venture Fund, the Abell Foundation and Brown Advisory, the Baltimore asset management firm.
Johns Hopkins Montgomery County Campus Executive Director Elaine Amir retired Sept. 30. On an interim basis, Leslie Ford Weber is serving as campus executive director.
Leslie knows her way around Johns Hopkins and Montgomery County. She is director of government and community affairs for Montgomery County, representing both the university and the Johns Hopkins health system in their interactions with county elected officials, businesses and other external organizations. Before joining Government and Community Affairs, Leslie held a dual role as executive vice president of the Suburban Hospital Foundation and senior vice president of Government and Community Relations for Suburban Hospital.
Type 2 diabetes is viewed as one of the biggest drivers of healthcare costs partly because of the complications that can arise from the condition. Diabetes costs in 2012, for example, reached $245 billion. One complication — hyperglycemia – can cause diabetic coma if it remains untreated. WellDoc is working on a way to predict hyperglycemia without patients needing to have continuous glucose monitoring. The plan is to add the mhealth tool to its prescription mobile app platform Bluestar, which the company is preparing to roll out.
It presented positive findings from a study of the hyperglycemia prediction tool at the Diabetes Technology meeting in San Francisco this week, according to a company statement.
Vaccine manufacturers are often criticized for investing in shots aimed at high-margin Western markets, while neglecting diseases affecting the developing world. This week, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation set up a project to spur development in neglected areas by cutting the financial risk of early research.
GlaxoSmithKline ($GSK) and Sanofi ($SNY) are the first companies to sign up to the project, called the Vaccine Discovery Partnership (VxDP). Under VxDP, the Gates Foundation will work directly with biopharma companies on projects that further its goals and span from preclinical through to Phase IIa. By providing financial support for the projects, the Gates Foundation hopes to make early-phase vaccine research a less risky proposition for the industry.
