News Archive

A total of 87 applicants from more than 30 cities across Russia sought to land one of just three residency openings in the U.S.-Russia Innovation Corridor (USRIC), a collaborative innovation initiative led by American Councils for International Education. Of the 12 finalists selected for interviews, two startups and one university technology transfer office will take on a renewable three-month residency in USRIC.

Through USRIC, the residents will collaborate with U.S. partners and develop new markets, using the resources of the Maryland International Incubator (MI2) housed at the University of Maryland at College Park (UMD).

DC Innovation Corps (I-Corps), the new, National Science Foundation-backed program aimed at translating the region’s vibrant research community into successful startups and licensed technologies, kicks off its first cohort this week at the George Washington University with 20 teams of inventors and current and aspiring entrepreneurs.

The cohort launches with a diverse mix of teams from the Children’s National Medical Center, Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland, the George Washington University, Virginia Tech, George Mason University, and regional entrepreneurs from the Emerging Technology Center, Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech) and bwtech@UMBC.

Washington, D.C. has become one of the centers for high-tech innovation, spurring some of the biggest investments from venture capital firms in the country. In fact, according to The Atlantic Cities, D.C. ranks among the top 10 cities for venture capital funding.

With the influx of startups and entrepreneuers looking for funding, venture capitalists are beginning to leverage social media to brand their firm, position themselves as thought leaders, and attract the top talent in the city. With the help of Klout, an online-influence scoring site, we checked out which local VC firms are leveraging Twitter the best. Take a look at the factors involving Klout scoring here, and without furhter ado, here the highest ranking VC firms in D.C. 

The HIMSS Innovation Center opens today in Cleveland, a city, known around the world for the Cleveland Clinic and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and one that prides itself on being a city of firsts.

HIMSS leaders who describe their 50,000-plus member organization of health IT professionals as “cause-based,” make no bones about their intent to shake things up in healthcare – more than a little bit.

British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline will seek marketing approval for the world’s first malaria vaccine next year after trial data showed the shot significantly cut cases of the disease in African children.

The vaccine known as RTS,S was found, after 18 months of follow-up, to have almost halved the number of malaria cases in young children in the trial, and to have reduced by around a quarter the number of malaria cases in infants.

“Based on these data, GSK now intends to submit, in 2014, a regulatory application to the European Medicines Agency (EMA),” GSK, which has been developing the vaccine for three decades, said in a statement.

Kids today … are actually doing some amazing stuff. Take 15-year-old Jack Andraka, who recently won the grand prize of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for developing an early detection test for pancreatic cancer.  

Andraka came up with the idea for the test after a close family friend died of pancreatic cancer. Using free online science papers, he formed a basis for the test, which looks for increased levels of a biomarker for pancreatic cancer in blood and urine. He contacted 197 scientists, seeking help with his research, and was rejected by each one, before Dr. Anirban Maitra at Johns Hopkins University agreed to donate lab space and help him develop his research.

(Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Bicoastal venture firm New Enterprise Associates owns 75.2 percent of GlycoMimetics Inc., making NEA by far the biggest beneficiary of the Gaithersburg biotech’s planned initial public offering.

The company revealed NEA’s outsized ownership in its IPO paperwork, filed on Friday. It is not yet clear whether the firm, which has a major office in Chevy Chase, plans to sell some of its 26.7 million shares in the offering.

MacroGenics Inc. is slated to go public this week.

The Rockville drug-maker plans to raise as much as $73.6 million to fund the development of its pipeline, selling 4 million shares at a forecasted range of $14 to $16 per share. Shares of MGNX are expect to start trading Friday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Noble Life Sciences (Gaithersburg, MD), in collaboration with ImQuest BioSciences (Frederick, MD), has successfully developed a neutropenic mouse thigh model of infection and demonstrated its use in a study evaluating vancomycin for the treatment of Staphylococcus aureus infection. The model will serve as a new Noble service for the evaluation of the efficacy of novel anti-microbial compounds in the treatment of microbial infections.

Complicated skin and soft tissue infections are frequently encountered in clinical practice and are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in hospitalized patients. The neutropenic mouse thigh model of infection has been used extensively to test and benchmark antimicrobial drugs leading to a significant impact on our current knowledge of antimicrobial pharmacology. This model allows the quantitative comparison of different agents and different dosing regimes and the determination of the time-course of antimicrobial activity under conditions optimal for efficacy, i.e., neutropenia.

Donald E. Ingber, a professor at Harvard University, has combined advanced electronics and biology to create a “lung on a chip,” a breakthrough device that could safely allow precise tests of risky new medical treatments before they are tried out on humans.

Just as eye-opening as his work, however, may be his source of federal financing.

It’s not the National Institutes of Health, the $30-billion agency that is the largest provider of federal basic-research money to universities. Instead it’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, an agency one-tenth as large as NIH and responsible primarily for meeting the military’s technological needs.