Montgomery County’s largest biotechnology company, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this week, actually hatched from a meeting in the Big Apple.
In the late 1980s, Wayne T. Hockmeyer was an executive with Praxis Biologics in Rochester, N.Y., with an inkling to branch out on his own. He had spent two decades in the U.S. Army, including as chairman of the Department of Immunology at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C., from 1980 to 1986.
The state’s two major research institutions, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland, College Park , are partnering to build a research and science center in East Baltimore opening September 2014. The state is spending $27 million and Hopkins is contributing $3 million toward the $30 million public/private venture whose goal is to make Maryland’s universities and private industry more competitive in the sciences.
The High Performance Research Computing Facility will consist of multiple buildings on land leased from Hopkins on its 350-acre Bayview Medical campus, at 4940 Eastern Ave. Expected to break ground in November, the center will be set off from other buildings and have its own separate entrance. The universities will finish site design this month and then bid the project to vendors.
GlaxoSmithKline announced on Thursday that it has signed a four-year contract with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority for the provision of its inhalation anthrax treatment, raxibacumab.
In the new contract, GSK will give the United States government 60,000 doses of raxibacumab over a four year period. The estimated value of these shipments total $196 million.
Sprint (NYSE: S) is upping its mobile health game in a new partnership with Techstars. The mobile service provider and its startup accelerator partner will fund and mentor 10 health technology ventures next spring as they launch the Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator.
Based in Sprint’s hometown of Kansas City, the accelerator will provide selected companies with three months of mentorship, work space, technical support, hosting services and testing labs. Companies will receive $20,000 in exchange for 6 percent equity given to Techstars. They will also have the option of accepting a $100,000 convertible debt note from Sprint, which would take an undisclosed percentage of equity as well.
A Maryland patient with a fever could one day enter a photo booth-like facility and leave with a diagnosis and prescription.
A Severna Park firm is part of an international effort to send less-critical patients to these so-called medical cabins instead of doctors’ offices and hospitals. Link International Group has been working with VideoKall — which has offices in Montgomery County and Ventura, Calif. — to produce the MEDEX Spot Unmanned Micro Clinic. The cabins use satellite equipment and cameras to conduct medical tests on patients and connect them to practitioners working at 24-hour medical centers around the country.
Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline is joining the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, other firms and other individual investors in launching a $94 million global fund that will focus on combating diseases.
The launch of the Global Health Investment Fund was disclosed early Monday.
Noted Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chairman Vaccines and R&D at GSK (Nyse: GSK): “I am convinced the GHIF will be instrumental in helping bring cutting edge innovation and solutions to diseases of the developing world and this is one reason why we are participating. This collaboration demonstrates that with an innovative structure, a fund with a humanitarian focus can appeal to a broader range of investors.”
The following funding opportunity announcements from the NHLBI or other components of the National Institutes of Health, might be of interest:
A health IT accelerator is launching in Baltimore with the aim of pulling more technology out of Baltimore’s biggest research university and drawing more companies into the city. DreamIt Health Baltimore will host a class of 10 startup companies for a four-month accelerator program in Baltimore beginning in January. The accelerator is part of DreamIt Ventures outside Philadelphia.
The University of Maryland has once again made The Princeton Review’s list of the country’s top entrepreneurship programs. In the 2014 list of the “Top 50 Schools For Entrepreneurship Programs,” published in Entrepreneur magazine, UMD ranks No. 15 for its undergraduate program. The university also ranks No. 16 for its graduate program, up eight spots from the 2013 rankings.
Aris Melissaratos is being replaced as Johns Hopkins University’s top technology commercialization adviser, as the university looks to delve deeper into entrepreneurship. Christy Wyskiel, an entrepreneur and investor, has been named senior adviser to the president for enterprise development at Hopkins. Beginning Jan. 1, Wyskiel will oversee Hopkins’ efforts to commercialize technology and research of faculty members.
