News Archive

Incoming University of Maryland President Darryll Pines may describe himself as a bit of a joker — but he is serious about building out the school’s tech and startup ecosystems.

“The university is an incredible innovation ecosystem, but we were not leveraging every aspect of it. Now you will start to see a lot more startups coming out of the University of Maryland,” Pines told the Washington Business Journal in an interview after a Friday press conference punctuated by accolades, off-script jokes by Pines and plenty of Terrapin pride.

Image: Darryll Pines has been named the next president of the University of Maryland, College Park. JOHN CONSOLI, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

It’s highly appropriate that the 40th anniversary of the Bayh-Dole Act occurs in a year as politically contentious as that in which it passed. In 1980, many predicted that our best years were behind us and that the United States would soon lose its place as the world’s economic superpower. Experts proclaimed the best remedy was to adopt the “Japan, Inc.” model,  where the government  bureaucracy orchestrated a coalition of dominant companies boldly plotting the future (that idea was particularly popular with many in Washington, D.C.). The patent system was under constant attack for being unfair, the U.S. suffered from double digit unemployment and inflation (dubbed “the misery index”) and energy costs skyrocketed. Congress discovered that despite billions of dollars invested annually in federally funded R&D, few inventions were being brought to the marketplace where they could benefit the American people. It felt like the bottom had fallen out from under the feet of our nation.

Image: https://www.ipwatchdog.com

Doylestown-based Pennsylvania Biotech Center (PABC) this week announced a sponsorship program intended to support early-stage biotech companies via supplier services, education and collaboration.

This comes seven months after PABC announced a $50 million dollar investment fund and accelerator providing seed and Series A and B funding to its incubator companies.

The program was created by Hatch Biofund Management, LLC, the operators of the life science venture fund. Sponsors in the program will specifically work with early-stage companies in PABC’s incubator and the Unite IQ incubator PABC runs at The Discovery Labs in King of Prussia.

Image: Pennsylvania Biotech Center’s future expanded campus.

U.S. healthcare providers in 2019 experienced almost triple the number of breaches to their records than they did in 2018.

That’s the assertion of healthcare compliance analytics platform Protenus in its Protenus Breach Barometer report, which reported that 41 million patient records were breached in 2019. The increase in breaches was a 48.6% difference from 15 million in 2018, while the trend of at least one health data breach per day — a trend first reported in 2016 — remains.

BALTIMORE, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — The W. P. Carey Foundation, whose generosity launched Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, has made a $25 million commitment to the school to recruit renowned faculty, enhance academic programs, and help launch student careers. The gift will be matched with commitments from Johns Hopkins University and contributions from other donors for a total of $50 million.

The W. P. Carey Foundation’s new gift provides Carey Business School with support to ensure its path of growth and advancement in shaping business leaders of the future.

Image: Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–LumaCyte, an advanced bioanalytical instrumentation company specializing in vaccine and cell and gene therapy bioprocess, production, and R&D analytical capabilities, announces its expansion into Europe with the establishment of LumaCyte, B.V. in The Netherlands. LumaCyte has experienced a rapid increase in global demand for Radiance®, it’s label-free single cell analysis instrument, with a large portion of that demand coming from Europe. In the fall of 2019, LumaCyte reported that it was strengthening its infrastructure to support a growing customer base, with strong efforts being placed on servicing the expansive European market. The company has expanded its US headquarters, significantly increasing manufacturing and laboratory footprints, as well as completed the rigorous EU specific regulatory CE mark certification, indicating Radiance® conformity with EEA health and safety standards, which is a prerequisite for its instrument sale and use.

Orgenesis Inc (NASDAQ:ORGS) announced a collaboration with Johns Hopkins University to utilize its point-of-care platform to develop and supply gene therapies and technologies. 

The company’s POCare cell therapy platform is designed to advance the development of Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products — medicines based on genes, tissues or cells — through collaborations and in-licensing with other companies. 

CEO Vered Caplan is confident in the pedigree and resources of the Baltimore research university. 

BALTIMORE, February 18, 2020 (Newswire.com) – Over 40 million patient records were breached in 2019, according to new data released today in the Protenus Breach Barometer®. Published by Protenus, a healthcare compliance analytics platform that protects patient data for the nation’s leading health systems, the Breach Barometer is the industry’s definitive source for health data breach reporting.  

Two commercial real estate firms with a significant presence in the marketing of life sciences properties have issued reports over the past 12 months that illustrate the growth in industry employment in recent years.

One life sciences segment, “Research and Development in Biotechnology” (NAICS code 541714), has largely driven that growth, with its number of jobs more than doubling over the past decade, to 204,800 as of 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data cited by Cushman & Wakefield in “Life Sciences 2020: The Future Is Here,” a report released February 6. Between 2010 and 2019, biotech R&D employment grew 5.1%, compared with 1.6% for total employment. Most of the increase, more than 70,000 jobs, occurred between 2013 and 2019.

Pete Briskman, an Executive Managing Director with JLL, leads the Tenant Advisory and brokerage business for JLL in Maryland, sits down with BioTalk Host Rich Bendis to talk his role with JLL, his focus on Life Sciences, and vision of the BioHealth Capital Region

Pete Briskman works with many of the regions’ most exciting and fastest growing Life Science Companies assisting them with their real estate and site selection strategies for Headquarter transactions, relocations, build-to-suits, renewals, expansions, and consolidations. Pete and his team bring proprietary tools to help organizations make informed decisions around the size and scale of their operation, assessment of labor, modeling and programming of occupancy, approach to optimizing business and economic incentives, and very unique real estate market intelligence that can be communicated via our proprietary geo-spatial market intelligence platform.  He is the recipient of GWCAR’s Commercial Leasing Broker of the Year and has been recognized with GWCAR Office Leasing Transactions of the Year for multiple clients.