News Archive

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.

Home to the National Institutes of Health and operations of nearly every leading biopharmaceutical company, Montgomery County, Maryland, has been on the frontlines of coronavirus vaccine research and other life-saving developments. Its thriving life sciences sector is among the diverse industries that had brought steady population growth to the County. Over the past decade, demand for housing and retail services—as well as land prices—had grown dramatically. In response to growing constituent needs, Montgomery County set out to transform its real estate management.

State-of-the-art biomanufacturing-ready office space is coming to Frederick County.

Matan Companies recently broke ground on the new Progress Labs at Riverside I in Frederick.  Located in Riverside Research Park, the 215,000 square-foot project is adjacent to the National Cancer Institute’s Frederick National Laboratory and just four miles from Fort Detrick.

This project is a significant addition to Maryland’s biohealth cluster, which is home to numerous leading companies and federal agencies and where office and laboratory space for bio companies remains in high demand.

Image: https://open.maryland.gov

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Applicant Assistance Program (AAP) is designed to assist small businesses with an interest in preparing and submitting a Small Business Innovation Research or Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) application to any of the following Institutes and Centers:

• The National Cancer Institute (NCI SBIR) 
• The National Institute on Aging (NIA SBIR) 
• The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI SBIR) 
• The National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke (NINDS SBIR) 
• The National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR SBIR) 
• The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH SBIR) 
• The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS SBIR) 
• The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS SBIR) 
• New this cycle! The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD SBIR) 
• New this cycle! The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA SBIR)

German-based BioNTech has announced that they will soon be joining Montgomery County, Maryland’s growing list of world-renowned international companies in the “Immunology Capital Next to the Nation’s Capital.” BioNTech is acquiring a Gaithersburg manufacturing facility and cell therapy R&D platform from Kite, a unit of Gilead Sciences, to support the development of BioNTech’s expanding pipeline of novel cell therapies.

Since its emergence in December 2019, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has spread worldwide, causing a global pandemic (coronavirus disease-19 or COVID-19) with more than 188 million confirmed infections and more than 4 million fatalities (as of July 19, 2021) (https://covid19.who.int). While the majority of the infections are asymptomatic or manifest in mild to moderate forms, a small percentage of people develop severe respiratory illness with a fatal outcome.

Image: Figure 1 Key mutations in the spike protein of SARS-CoV Variants of Concern (VoC) (B.1.1.7, B.1.351, B.1.1.248, and B.1.617.2) and Variants of Interest (B.1.526, B.1.427, and B.1.429). Mutations occur on all spike protein subunits. Mutations in other areas of the genome have been identified and are currently under investigation.  

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected the University of Maryland to lead one of five multi-institutional hubs that will provide entrepreneurial training to academic researchers in science and engineering in order to foster and maintain U.S. global leadership in innovation.

The $15 million I-Corps Hubs, funded over five years, will extend the foundation’s Innovation Corps, or I-Corps, program that helps researchers commercialize their technologies and translate the impact of their work to the broader public. Each regional hub will include at least eight universities. 

ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND, August 23, 2021 – BioHealth Innovation Inc. (BHI) announces the addition of Diane Ignar, Ph.D., and Dr. Loleta Robinson to the expanding Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIR) team. The Entrepreneur-in-Residence Program at BHI ensures that disruptive technologies receive all the resources required to transform the technology from a discovery into a commercially relevant product and eventually have a measurable impact on human health. The program was created to support scientists, early-stage startups, and licensed technologies to provide them with access to these resources. Diane will work with NIH’s National Institute on Aging, and Loleta will work with their Office of Extramural Research.

Image: https://biobuzz.io

George Mason University boosts the Washington, D.C., metropolitan region economy by supplying an educated, skilled, and multifaceted workforce, by partnering with key employers, and through the Mason-based Virginia Small Business Development Center.

In 2020, the Small Business Development Center network assisted 9,500 businesses, resulting in $86 million in new capital received and 1,167 loans obtained.

Mason incubated and supported or accelerated more than 1,600 Virginia companies in fiscal year 2019.

Investing in our local economy means cultivating Mason’s existing private and public partnerships—and forging new ones—to drive innovation.