News Archive

University of Maryland (UM) Ventures announced today agreements between University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) and five different life sciences companies across the Baltimore/Washington metropolitan region. The companies include Montgomery County-based Rexahn Pharmaceuticals, Baltimore County-based Plasmonix, Prince Georges County-based IGI Technologies, Howard County-based A&G Pharmaceuticals, and Frederick County-based BioAssay Works. These deals are part of UM Ventures’ continual efforts to accelerate technology commercialization, advance industry collaboration, and support projects with commercial value at both the Baltimore and College Park campuses of the university.

“UMB is very excited to collaborate with these companies, each an innovator in its own right,” said Phil Robilotto, Assistant Vice President, Office of Technology Transfer, UMB. “These types of collaborations are at the core of our mission to channel the expertise of our industry partners and highlight our efforts to support the Maryland biotechnology community.”

MedCity News writes about all kinds of startups whether their pitch is more at home on CNN or MIT’s Technology Review. We are always so focused on what’s coming next that we forget to reflect on all the companies we have recently discovered. To solve this, we’ve created a monthly report to make sure none of our readers missed any of these posts.

Our new Monthly Startups Index is a free (e-mail registration required) compendium of the early-stage activity across healthcare. It is a piece of business intelligence that includes MedCity’s deeper looks at select early-stage companies, chronicles the investment activity and other news, and even highlights which startups got the most attention from MedCity readers every month.

Digital health accelerator Healthbox and anchor partner Florida Blue had their priorities straight when they chose the seven companies for their inaugural Florida accelerator program: Address the high populations of seniors and youths in the state.

Companies that do that will have more opportunity to scale and build momentum, they reasoned.

Patients like it and so do health organizations, but electronic communications in clinical care will likely not be widely adopted by primary care physicians unless patient workloads are reduced or they are paid for the time they spend phoning and emailing patients, both during and after office hours.

Those are some key conclusions of an in-depth examination by investigators at Weill Cornell Medical College of six diverse medical practices that routinely use electronic communication for clinical purposes. The detailed report, the most comprehensive of its kind, appears in the August issue of the journal Health Affairs.

A person who has suffered from a stroke or spinal-cord injury might need to use crutches or a wheelchair as they gradually regain lost motion through physical therapy.

But these patients could see drastically different effects strapping on a robotic bodysuit or a bionic limb and walking around like Iron Man as they heal. And such digital hardware has the potential to make them recover faster, as well.

Governor Martin O’Malley called attention to state investments in technology during a visit on July 31 to the University of Maryland BioPark, where he spent time in corporate laboratories with chief executive officers and their employees.

Jay A. Perman, MD, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), joined O’Malley on the tour and at a news conference, where the governor spoke about the importance of supporting the life sciences. O’Malley noted that the state has a plan to invest $1.3 billion in life sciences by 2020 and has increased tax incentives to encourage biotechnology and research and development.

The University of Maryland University College announced Wednesday it will be the first in the state’s university system to create a path for students to earn academic credit for learning through “massive open online courses.”

The university is one of the nation’s largest public providers of online higher education with an enrollment of about 93,000 students.

The founders of District startup hub 1776 have shopped around the idea of raising a $25 million seed fund — modeled partially off of 500 Startups — that would place initial bets as high as $150,000 on early-stage tech companies, according to an investor presentation obtained by the Washington Business Journal.

1776 co-founder Evan Burfield cautioned that the document is a draft, and that 1776 is not actively raising capital yet for the planned seed fund and accelerator. He stressed that officials there haven’t arrived on a target for the size of the fund and that $25 million — and other figures in the document — are just one of several ideas they’ve contemplated.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. (NYSE: EBS) announced today that it has closed on its acquisition of Bracco Diagnostics Inc.’s Healthcare Protective Products Division. This acquisition, which includes the RSDL® (decontamination lotion) product that is cleared for marketing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for removal or neutralization of chemical warfare agents from the skin, diversifies and broadens Emergent’s biodefense franchise into the chemical countermeasure market.

“As a result of this transaction closing, Emergent is focused on the uninterrupted supply of RSDL product to customers and on the seamless integration of the new Healthcare Protective Products Group (HPPG) into our biodefense division,” said Adam Havey, EVP and president of Emergent’s biodefense division. “This news, which comes on the heels of other positive developments in our biodefense division, including receiving BioThrax® (Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed) market authorization in Germany as well as reporting positive data from our pivotal study supporting licensure of a post-exposure prophylaxis indication for BioThrax, reinforces Emergent’s leadership position in the biodefense arena.”