News Archive

Sponsored by the Division of Strategic Partnerships and Applied Research, the StarTUp Accelerator supports student and local business ventures in an intensive eight-week, cohort-based fellowship where start-up businesses take residency and work in a collaborative space to accelerate their ventures. The inaugural cohort is a diverse group that includes two student-based ventures, a 100% halal-certified consumer cosmetics brand, a sports betting game from recent TU grads, and ventures from current TU faculty.

Sykesville, MD; March 13, 2020- Noble Life Sciences is excited to announce renewal of full accreditation from Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC) International Council. Noble Life Sciences has held full AAALAC accreditation since October 10, 1989. Accredited contract research organizations (CROs) are re-evaluated every three years through an extensive internal review and on-site inspection conducted by members of AAALAC accreditation council and reviewed by the full council to determine accreditation status.

AstraZeneca will oversee global development, manufacturing, and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine candidate that was created by researchers at University of Oxford, and is now being studied in a human clinical trial launched last week, the partners said today.

AstraZeneca, the University, and its spinout company Vaccitech—which has joint rights to the platform technology behind the vaccine candidate, ChAdOx1 nCoV-19—said they will start work immediately while hammering out final terms of their collaboration agreement. The partnership is designed to enable rapid production and distribution of the vaccine should it prove effective in clinical studies.

Image: AstraZeneca will oversee global development, manufacturing, and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine candidate that was created by researchers at University of Oxford, and is now being studied in a human clinical trial launched last week. (University of Oxford)

Vaccitech Ltd and the University of Oxford today announce an agreement with the UK-based global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca for the further development, large-scale manufacture and potential distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine candidate currently being trialled by the University.

The partnership is to begin immediately with the final terms being agreed in the coming weeks. This will allow for rapid vaccination around the world if the COVID-19 vaccine candidate proves to be effective. The vaccine candidate was developed by the University’s Jenner Institute who began trials in humans last week jointly with the University’s Oxford Vaccine Group.

Innate Pharma SA (Euronext Paris: IPH – ISIN: FR0010331421; Nasdaq: IPHA) (“Innate” or the “Company”) today announced that the first patient was dosed in a randomized, doubleblind Phase II clinical trial, evaluating the safety and efficacy of its anti-C5aR antibody, avdoralimab (IPH5401), in COVID-19 patients with severe pneumonia.

The primary objective of this investigator-sponsored trial, named FORCEa , is to improve the proportion of COVID-19 patients with severe pneumonia who no longer need to be hospitalized, and to reduce the need for and duration of mechanical ventilation in patients with COVID-19 pneumonia complicated by acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).

Since the enactment of the CARES Act, the Small Business Administration and U.S. Department of the Treasury have continually updated the rules governing the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) through formal rulemaking and less formal guidance. In some cases, these rules and guidance have contradicted the plain language of the Act itself.

The PPP, of course, is designed to provide businesses and nonprofits with 500 or fewer employees (subject to certain notable exceptions) access to 2 months of payroll for their employees in light of the economic uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The National Institutes of Health today announced a new initiative aimed at speeding innovation, development and commercialization of COVID-19 testing technologies, a pivotal component needed to return to normal during this unprecedented global pandemic. With a $1.5 billion investment from federal stimulus funding, the newly launched Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative will infuse funding into early innovative technologies to speed development of rapid and widely accessible COVID-19 testing. At the same time, NIH will seek opportunities to move more advanced diagnostic technologies swiftly through the development pipeline toward commercialization and broad availability. NIH will work closely with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to advance these goals.

Image: https://www.nibib.nih.gov

Gilead Sciences’ closely-watched COVID-19 drug candidate remdesivir outperformed placebo in a clinical trial sponsored by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), the agency announced today—the first clinical study launched in the U.S. of a therapeutic for the virus.

NIAID released preliminary data showing that the study met its primary outcome of statistically significant improvement in time to recovery by Day 29. Patients who were treated with remdesivir showed a median time to recovery of 11 days compared with 15 days for those who received placebo—a 31% faster time to recovery.

Gilson and QIAGEN have entered into a strategic partnership that will provide researchers the ability to limit operator-dependent variation in their manual nucleic acid extraction results and improve the traceability of their workflows.

This agreement brings together two influential leaders in the life science industries: Gilson, a global manufacturer of sample preparation technology, and QIAGEN, a leading global provider of molecular diagnostics and sample preparation technologies.

This collaboration will integrate Gilson’s TRACKMAN® Connected digital bench tools and QIAGEN’s manual nucleic acid extraction kits to create consistency between collaborators, increase confidence in their execution of extraction protocols, and improve traceability at the bench.

Personal Genome Diagnostics, the venture-backed developer of a novel diagnostic kit for genomic profiling of different cancers in lab settings, has received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its PGDx elio tissue complete test.

The test’s approval is another step forward for precision therapies that rely on an understanding of the unique genomic profile of an individual patient’s tumor, according to the company.

Image: Image Credits: Ed Uthman / Flickr (opens in a new window)under a CC BY 2.0 license.