News Archive

On August 23, 2021, BARDA’s Division of Research, Innovation, and Ventures (DRIVe) opened a new area of interest (AOI) under the EZ Broad Agency Announcement (EZ-BAA) solicitation to expand the capabilities of existing next-generation sequencing diagnostics to agnostically detect any pathogenic respiratory RNA virus including new, emerging and existing viruses.

Next-generation sequencing diagnostics have been established for oncology and some genetic disorders, and such technology also is needed for infectious diseases due to growing health security challenges and threats. In a viral outbreak or pandemic, having agnostic tests – especially those which can detect any respiratory RNA virus and can be implemented rapidly without the need for additional regulatory approvals – is crucial.

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Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC set the bar high for biotech innovation. Join us for the 7th Annual BioHealth Capital Region Forum that will highlight the accomplishments of today and chart our successes of tomorrow.

Join the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) in collaboration with the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) on Wednesday, August 25th, 2021, for a webinar to learn about the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) programs for researchers and entrepreneurs in translational science.

Daniela Lecca completed her education in Italy, where she received her Ph.D. in Toxicology from the University of Cagliari for her research on the neuroprotective and immunomodulatory actions of a PPAR-γ agonist in MPTP mouse models of Parkinson’s disease. During her Ph.D. program, she spent a short-term period as a visiting Ph.D. student at the Dept of Neuroscience of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. She carried out a project on non-motor symptoms onset in a MPTP chronic model of Parkinson’s disease. After completing her Ph.D., she won a fellowship from her University that allowed her to join as a special volunteer the Synaptic Plasticity section of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore, Maryland; here, she worked on a research project on the role of L-DOPA-mediated neuroinflammation in the non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, by a 6-OHDA mouse model.

Lily Qi, Representative for the 15th legislative district in the Maryland House of Delegates. Joins BioTalk to discuss her career, Biotech in Montgomery County, and being a supporter of the BioHealth Capital Region

Listen now on Google https://bit.ly/3sW3iHE, Apple https://apple.co/3yvdkR4,  Spotify https://spoti.fi/3yxKRdw, TuneIn https://bit.ly/3zz8gww

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. is conducting phase clinical 3 trials of its plasma-derived therapy for outpatient treatment of COVID-19, the company announced this week.

The randomized clinical trial will assign participants to receive infusions of either a placebo or the plasma treatment. Emergent is one of two companies providing hyperimmune globulin products for the trial, which plans to enroll 820 patients across the U.S. and abroad.

Automating adjudication of events in cardiovascular trials Clinical trials for cardiovascular (CV) disease are time consuming and expensive to run, often requiring large patient populations to meet the statistical requirements needed to demonstrate efficacy.1 These trials require robust data packages to achieve market approvals and registrations in order to get essential new medicines to patients.

Image: https://www.astrazeneca.com

The U.S. government’s announcement that it is investing $3 billion into research on antiviral medicines for Covid-19 is a step in the right direction and comes at a critical moment in the pandemic — though earlier, of course, would have been better.

But based on my experience with drug development, in particular with antivirals, in both government and the private sector, I know that the process takes longer and is more expensive than anyone ever anticipates. I believe that $3 billion in federal funds is not nearly enough, and that at least $10 billion in clinical research funding is needed to discover and develop the new antiviral medicines that patients desperately need and that physicians have been asking for since the start of the pandemic.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I had an introverted childhood growing up in an orthodox Hindu family with my caring parents, two brothers, and paternal grandparents. My father was a bank officer all his life and has been my major inspiration. He had his master’s in mathematics and was a child prodigy at it. He could do 6-digit multiplication and division faster than I could crunch the numbers in a calculator.

Image: https://medium.com

Avian H7N9 influenza viruses cause sporadic outbreaks of human infections and threaten to cause a major pandemic. The breadth of B cell responses to natural infection and the dominant antigenic sites recognized during first exposure to H7 HA following infection are incompletely understood. Here, we studied the B cell response to H7 HA of two individuals who had recovered from natural H7N9 virus infection. We used competition-binding, hydrogen-deuterium mass spectrometry, and single-particle negative stain electron microscopy to identify the patterns of molecular recognition of the antibody responses to H7 hemagglutinin.