News Archive

The research, by Gary Dushnitsky, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School and his co-author Dr Alvarez-Garrido, is featured in the British Venture Capital Association’s report ‘The Missing Piece’ and finds that corporate venture capital is now the driving force behind cutting edge medical innovation.

Dr Dushnitsky, also Academic Director, Deloitte Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, said, “Biotech start-ups are increasingly turning to corporate venture capital arms, which are steadily on the rise, while traditional venture capital funds are partially drying out.  In a recent Nature Biotechnology study, my co-author and I find that the shift in funding patterns is resulting in an increase in scientific publications as well as patenting output.

There is one certainty about the current regulatory process for drug approval in the United States and Europe: No one likes it.

Manufacturers are frustrated by the need for large, complex, and lengthy clinical-development programs that often hinge on meeting a single endpoint in one pivotal clinical trial. As a result, the cost to bring a drug to market has been estimated to be well over $1 billion — and it may be much higher. Patients and providers are disturbed by lack of timely access to medicines that show early promise in addressing significant unmet needs. Even regulators, who are responsible for enforcing the current structure, chafe at what manufacturers typically present to them: successful trial results in patients who are carefully selected to show the drug offers benefits but who are not very representative of the broader population likely to receive it. Payers then have a mess on their hands: pressure to pay for premium-priced medications that, when broadly employed, don’t offer much therapeutic benefit over existing alternatives.

Nutty things are happening in biotech. Irrational exuberance has returned. Generalist investors with lots of money are suddenly buying these stocks first and asking questions later. Companies can fire off meaningless press releases, and be rewarded. I heard a big-time money manager talk the other day about a recent biotech IPO being one of the “best performers” in the market. It had a two-week track record, and had done nothing fundamental to earn its tag as a “best performer.”

If markets are driven by cycles of fear and greed, and I believe they are, we are in the greed cycle.

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield will offer up to $1.5 million in grants to help medical providers develop telemedicine-based behavioral health services, the Baltimore insurer announced this week.

CareFirst wants to seed projects that use video conferencing or other technologies to allow doctors and others to diagnose and treat patients remotely.

Christy Wyskiel is the new senior adviser to the president for enterprise development at Johns Hopkins University. Wyskiel has previously worked as an investor in early stage and startup companies. She has also provided business and management support to startups, such as Hopkins spinout GrayBug.

Wyskiel officially takes on her new role leading Hopkins’ tech transfer office Jan. 1. But she’s already busy getting the lay of the land and helping map out what will come next for Hopkins with regard to technology commercialization.

Investors are pouring venture capital dollars into the Washington region at a pace not seen in more than a decade.

Companies across the Washington region have attracted $1.15 billion in the first three quarters of the year, more money than the first three quarters of any year since 2001.

As an African-American man entering a Caucasian-dominated industry, Solomon Graham wasn’t intimidated when he founded Quality Biological in 1983, investing $10,000 of his own money to start the business.

The Gaithersburg company is one of the longest-operating biotechs in Montgomery County and has grown into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. It provides products and supplies for molecular and cell biology laboratories to use in infectious disease and cancer research.

Investments in electronic health records, tools to help hospitals absorb physician practices anda group working with hospital systems to help them set up their own insurance plans. Those three health IT companies helped drive venture capital investment in the software sector, which hit a 12-year high in the third quarter. Medical device and biotechnology companies collectively marked their lowest investment for a nine month period since 2005, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. It is based on data from Thomson Reuters.

About $3.6 billion was invested in the software sector and there were 42o deals in the quarter.

You can purchase 14 gallons of organic milk or 396 lollipops. You can give her 33 rides on the Ferris wheel at the state fair, or you can get him a couple of violin lessons. You could put the money in a savings account, you could buy her her very own LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer digital learning tablet, or you could buy enough pizzas to feed all of her friends on the block. So many options, so many choices.

I took that money and got my daughter’s genes tested, ordering up an analysis of the composition of her very small self and its odds of living a long and healthy life. And in so doing, I in some small way tied her fate to the success of the company doing the analysis, a genetic-testing startup called 23andMe in Mountain View, California.

The latest of edition of Mtech News published by Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute.