News Archive

Richmond, VA, Nov. 11, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Center for Innovative Technology announced the appointment of Sean Mallon as Vice President for its Entrepreneurial Ecosystems Division.  The division is one of four recently created at CIT in its role as the operating arm for the Virginia Innovation Partnership Authority (VIPA). The other three divisions are Investment, Commercialization, and Strategic Initiatives.

The Entrepreneurial Ecosystems Division was established to connect and leverage the expertise and infrastructure of Virginia-based partner organizations and will work with stakeholders to develop and strengthen programs that support entrepreneurs in all regions of the Commonwealth. As Division VP, Mallon’s responsibilities will include developing a backbone of statewide resources to assist regional ecosystems and ensure that all programs are inclusive to communities that have been historically under-represented in entrepreneurship and capital formation. Mallon will be based in CIT’s Richmond headquarters office.

The Universities at Shady Grove (USG) marks its 20th anniversary this year and the campus has launched a new chapter in its history with the appointment of Dr. Anne Khademian as USG’s third executive director. Khademian, who joins USG after 17 years with Virginia Tech University, begins her tenure at a challenging time as USG and its partner universities grapple with the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis. But she is making rapid inroads in building strong relationships with colleagues and community leaders, and in laying out some of her initial priorities for advancing USG into the future. They include a continued focus on ensuring student success, and on strengthening the future of USG, which she sees as a unique asset for bolstering economic and workforce development in Montgomery County, the state of Maryland and throughout the D.C. metropolitan region.

The State Technology and Science Index (STSI) provides a benchmark for evaluating the knowledge economies of all 50 US states. The index compares each state’s capacity for achieving prosperity through scientific discovery and technological innovation, by performing a cross-sectional analysis of their rankings on key indicators using the latest available data from US federal government and private-sector sources.

The index is a composite of five sub-indexes, which cover a diverse range of topics: research and development (R&D) inputs, risk capital and entrepreneurial infrastructure, human capital investment, technology and science workforce, and technology concentration and dynamism. By comparing how states rank in these areas, the index assesses their capacities for generating new scientific ideas, as well as for commercializing technologies that contribute to firm expansion, high-skills job creation, and broad-based economic growth.

MENLO PARK, Calif., Nov. 12, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Talis Biomedical Corporation, a company dedicated to developing innovative molecular diagnostic tests for infectious diseases at the point of care, today announced it has strengthened its executive management team with the appointment of Rob Kelley as its first Chief Commercial Officer and Douglas Liu as Senior Vice President, Operations. Additionally, it has closed a new $126 million financing to support expansion of its operations and the commercial scale-up of the Talis One™ System and further expand the test menu. The Talis One System is a sample-to-answer, cloud-enabled, molecular diagnostic platform designed to provide rapid and highly accurate point-of-care tests for the detection of infectious diseases, including COVID-19.

The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) is innovating in terms of how it will invest in projects, creating a new public-private partnership known as BARDA Ventures, based on the 21st Century Cures Act and venture capital methods.

As a result, BARDA seeks proposals from existing nonprofit partners to manage a long term health security fund no later than Dec. 8, 2020. That fund will be used to guarantee support for breakthrough technologies and new means of preparedness and response to health security threats. This, the organization hopes, will help its ability to stimulate innovation and promote disruptive technologies to close gaps in pandemic response and other healthcare preparedness.

Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. government’s crash program to inoculate 300 million Americans against the coronavirus, includes a number of pharmaceutical partners like Emergent BioSolutions in Baltimore. CBS News correspondent David Martin toured one of Emergent’s manufacturing suites where the company is producing two COVID-19 vaccines awaiting FDA approval. 

Novavax Inc. (NASDAQ: NVAX) said Monday it received a crucial status for its Covid-19 vaccine candidate as the pandemic drags on and coronavirus cases once again soar across the country.

The Gaithersburg company has earned fast-track designation from the Food and Drug Administration for NVX-CoV2373, a coronavirus vaccine candidate in late-stage development. It means the biotech can submit parts of its application on a rolling basis for a speedier review by the agency, and gives Novavax more direct and frequent access to the FDA.

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Praduman Jain, known to colleagues as “PJ,” is CEO and Founder of Vibrent Health and the Principal Investigator of the Participant Technology Systems Center of the National Institutes of Health Precision Medicine Initiative, the All of Us Research Program, for which the PTSC received a $75 million grant in 2017 and an additional award in 2020 with initial first-year funding of $39 million to build a national platform for health research and health management insights for 1 million people across the U.S. for at least 10 years.  Jain is also the Chair of the Security Board of the Committee on Access, Privacy & Security for the NIH All of Us Research Program; a member of the Roundtable on Genomics and Precision Health at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; an invited external expert for eMERGE & Beyond, The Future of Electronic Medical Records and Genomics program of the Division of Genomic Medicine, National Human Genome Research Institute; and an external advisory board member for iTHRIVE – a Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Award.

Biopharma and Life Science companies in the BioHealth Capital Region are known for their work with cutting edge technologies such as gene and cell therapies. Those strengths were on display at the 6th annual BioHealth Capital Region Forum.

The Strengths of our Region: Cutting Edge Therapies panel, which was moderated by Mark Cobbold, vice president of Discovery in Early Oncology at AstraZeneca, brought together leaders from three other companies to discuss their disruptive pipelines, the strength of the region and challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Cobbold touted the work performed by the three companies joining him on the panel, Cartesian Therapeutics, Adaptive Phage Therapeutics, and Ziel Bio. Pointing to the work being done by those three companies and AstraZeneca, Cobbold said they are representative of why the BioHealth Capital Region has become one of the most successful BioHubs in the United States.