News Archive

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, emocha Mobile Health has implemented a remote monitoring service powered by human engagement to support health systems including Johns Hopkins Medicine and LifeBridge Health-affiliated hospitals. emocha uses short, asynchronous video check-ins to identify, track, and manage symptoms of healthcare professionals who have been exposed to COVID-19.

Healthcare workers are on the front lines of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, and ensuring their safety and availability is critical. The virus is spreading rapidly across the globe with more than 35,350 confirmed cases in the United States as of March 23. As a result, this highly infectious and novel disease requires strategies to protect the public’s health and to slow the rate of transmission.

BALTIMORE, MD March 24, 2020 – PathSensors Inc, a Baltimore biotechnology company, announced today that they are developing a CANARY ™ biosensor to detect the Novel SARS Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), the causal agent for the coronavirus disease COVID–19. The biosensor will be available for research purposes in May 2020 and validation data on the new SARS-CoV-2 product will be available June 2020.

CANARY ™ technology provides a unique opportunity to reduce the impending public health impact of COVID-19 with rapid results and high specificity. The initial application for this PathSensors product will be for testing of environmental swabs and air monitoring in sensitive spaces such as hospitals, offices, food services, etc. PathSensors will continue to advance the assay’s capabilities as the novel virus is further characterized. As the SARS-CoV-2 biosensor is commercialized, PathSensors expects new uses to emerge, such as rapid specimen screening.

As an entrepreneur mentor and startup investor, I see with sadness the 50 to 90 percent that fail. If you ask them for a reason, most will insist that they couldn’t get funding, or they ran out of money too early. But I’m not convinced that it’s as simple as that. Many are just not facing the reality that their passion had a critical business flaw.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Everybody thinks they’re a leader, but most are far from it. Successful startups, at all levels, depend on leadership and the ability of a few to organize both day-to-day and long-term goals. On the face of it, this sounds simple, but the reality is that not everyone is cut out to lead and to run a successful startup. It requires a certain mindset and armory of skills. These eight tips can help you lead your team. 

Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Shiller warns a pandemic of fear could tip the economy into an undeserved depression.

Shiller, an expert in how our emotions drive financial decisions, finds the sheer volume of chatter surrounding depression risks due to the coronavirus could severely hurt the economy.

Image: https://www.cnbc.com

Gary Rieschel, founding managing partner at Qiming Venture Partners, one of China’s most prominent venture capital firms, discusses the opportunities he sees in the market. Qiming has closed a new $1.1 billion fund, even as uncertainties around Covid-19 depress startup funding. Rieschel speaks with Selina Wang and Rishaad Salamat on “Bloomberg Markets: China Open.” (Source: Bloomberg)

Image: https://www.bloomberg.com

The idea of “crisis management” requires no explanation right now. Something unexpected and significant happens, and our first instincts are to defend against — and later to understand and manage — the disturbance to the status quo. The crisis is an unpredictable enemy to be tamed for the purpose of restoring normality.

But we may not be able to return to our familiar pre-crisis reality. Pandemics, wars, and other social crises often create new attitudes, needs, and behaviors, which need to be managed. We believe imagination — the capacity to create, evolve, and exploit mental models of things or situations that don’t yet exist — is the crucial factor in seizing and creating new opportunities, and finding new paths to growth.

Image: Illustration by Kirsten Ulve

About a year ago, I made a career transition into professional and academic development support for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. I have found the work immensely fulfilling, and as with any other new position, I spent quite a bit of time in my first several months trying to catch myself up to speed on the lingo of the profession.

As streets have emptied of traffic during the coronavirus crisis and airlines have cut flights, the changes have temporarily helped another public health crisis—air pollution. In the Northeastern U.S., nitrogen dioxide pollution (the air pollution caused  by internal combustion engines burning fossil fuels) fell 30% in March as lockdowns began. Los Angeles’s usual smog has nearly disappeared. The same pattern happened earlier in China and Italy as mobility slowed, factories shut down, and hazy skies cleared.

Image: These maps show the air pollution levels in late March 2019 and the late March 2020. Map: courtesy Descartes Labs

It’s hard to imagine now—as most of us are reading this in quarantine, with our feet propped on Costco boxes of spaghetti noodles—but we will one day have to go back to our offices. COVID-19 won’t be eradicated, and not everyone will be immune. But we’ll still be expected to sit at a desk and work. So how will work…work?

Image: courtesy Cushman & Wakefield