News Archive

Heather Phillips was supposed to be getting ready to join her extended family at its annual pumpkin carving celebration in Clarksburg, but instead she was still at work at Lung Bioengineering in downtown Silver Spring. It was late on a Saturday morning in October, and she’d been working all night. Now she stood inside the loading dock of the two-story building awaiting, for the third time in 12 hours, the delivery of an insulated cardboard box filled with ice and a pair of human lungs.

Image: Specialists Sam Popa (left) and Erin Larrabee prepare a set of lungs in a Lung Bioengineering operating room. Photo by Lisa Helfert

VICTORIA, British Columbia–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

Aurinia Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:AUPH) (TSX:AUP) (“Aurinia” or the “Company”), a late-stage clinical biopharmaceutical company focused on advancing voclosporin in multiple indications, today announced that the Company has established its U.S. commercial center of operations in Rockville, Maryland. The new site will support Aurinia’s plans for growth as it prepares for the potential approval and launch of voclosporin for the treatment of lupus nephritis in 2021.

ROCKVILLE, Md.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Immunomic Therapeutics, Inc., a privately held clinical stage biotechnology company pioneering the study of nucleic acid immunotherapy platforms, announced today that it successfully completed a pre-IND (Investigational New Drug) meeting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding its First-In-Human (FIH) Phase I trial and development plans for ITI-1001. The FDA addressed the Company’s questions and provided feedback on key components of the planned IND application for the candidate, ITI-1001, for the treatment of newly diagnosed Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM).

Joel S. Marcus is the Executive Chairman and Founder of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE:ARE), an urban office REIT and the first and longest-tenured owner, operator and developer uniquely focused on collaborative life science, technology and ag-tech campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations. Mr. Marcus co-founded Alexandria in 1994 as a garage startup with $19 million in Series A capital. As CEO from March 1997 to April 2018, he led its growth into an investment-grade-rated S&P 500 company.

Image: https://www.forbes.com

A Canadian pharmaceutical company is expanding into Rockville about a year after an executive with a long history in Maryland’s bioscience industry took the helm.

Aurinia Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Victoria, British Columbia, announced plans to open a new office in the city of Rockville on Tuesday, bringing about 100 employees to 30,000 square feet. The company could someday expand to employ as many as 500 people and occupy up to 120,000 square feet in Rockville during the next seven years, depending on its success in securing federal approvals for one of its drugs.

Image: Peter Greenleaf, a biotech executive with lots of history locally, is bringing his latest company to Rockville. JOANNE S. LAWTON

INDIANAPOLIS, March 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Roche (SIX: RO, ROG; OTCQX: RHHBY) announced today that it has begun shipping the first allotment of its cobas® SARS-CoV-2 Test for COVID-19 (coronavirus) to a network of hospital and reference laboratories across the U.S. to enable automated, high-volume patient testing. Shipping of the initial 400,000 test kits began Friday, March 13, and will be completed this week. Roche plans to ship an additional 400,000 tests per week to the laboratory testing sites across the nation that are set up to run the test immediately under the guidelines of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

The European Commission put out a call Friday for startups and small businesses which are developing technologies that could help combat the COVID-19 outbreak to apply for fast-track EU funding.

The push is related to a €164M pot of money that’s being made available for R&D via the European Innovation Council (EIC) — a European Union funding vehicle which supports the commercialization of high risk, high impact technologies.

GeneDx, a global leader in genomics and patient testing, is celebrating its remarkable 20th anniversary throughout the month of March.

The Gaithersburg, Maryland company has played an important role in the history of genetic sequencing and the rise of the BioHealth Capital Region as a global biohealth cluster. GeneDx was the very first company to commercially offer NGS (Next Generation Sequencing) testing in a CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments) lab and has been at the leading edge of genetic sequencing and testing for two decades. The company’s whole exome sequencing program and comprehensive testing capabilities are world-renowned.

Image: https://biobuzz.io

Researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Australia have mapped immune responses in a patient in response to COVID-19 infection, demonstrating the body’s ability to fight the virus and recover from the infection. The team tested blood samples taken from one of Australia’s first cases of COVID-19, at four different time points during the infection. “We looked at the whole breadth of the immune response in this patient using the knowledge we have built over many years of looking at immune responses in patients hospitalized with influenza,” said Oanh Nguyen, PhD, co-author of the researchers report, which is published in Nature Medicine.

Image: Outbreak response in action: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) staff support the COVID-19 response in the CDC’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC). (CDC; photo credit James Gathany)

SAN DIEGO (March 17, 2020) – Maravai LifeSciences, a global provider of life science reagents and services to researchers and biotech partners, announced today that it has acquired MockV Solutions. MockV plays an important role in helping biopharma customers develop manufacturing processes that are free of viral contamination, leading to the production of safe biotherapeutics. The MockV acquisition, coupled with Maravai’s previous acquisition of Cygnus Technologies, expands Maravai’s leadership position in bioprocess impurity testing. Impurity testing is a critical step in the development and manufacture of biotherapeutic products.