News Archive

Today CosmosID announced participation in Vice President Biden’s National Cancer Moonshot, which aims to accelerate progress in preventing, diagnosing, and treating cancer. CosmosID will provide access to its automated bioinformatics platform, MetaGenID, for five cancer microbiome research studies (valued at $150,000) to understand how the microbiome (i.e. oral, gut, and skin) contributes to development of specific cancers.

As part of the White House’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative, today, SHARE For Cures (www.SHAREForCures.org) launched a technology platform and study aimed to gather a better understanding of the real-world use of novel cancer immunotherapy drugs.   

SHARE For Cures’ new SHARE platform will easily and securely gather clinical, wellness, lifestyle, and patient-reported data about cancer immunotherapy use, side effects and benefits.  Once gathered, the data will enable researchers to better understand how these new therapies are being used outside of clinical trials, as well as the health impact of specific drugs on real-world patients. 

Vertex says it has updated an R&D collaboration with Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Therapeutics (CFFT) stretching back more than a decade.

Under the updated Research, Development and Commercialization Agreement, disclosed in a regulatory filing yesterday, CFFT—the Foundation’s nonprofit drug discovery and development affiliate—agreed to pay Vertex $75 million upfront, as well as up to $6 million annually toward development funding.

Facing federal and state pressure to raise retention and graduation rates, dozens of colleges and universities are developing analytics tools to help students make better decisions about everything from courses to social activities.

Purdue University has notified its 7,300 incoming freshman about a new web application that could help them better acclimate to life on campus. Administrators at the West Lafayette, Ind., school view the software as a critical tool for an institution whose graduation rate hovers at around 50 percent.

PricewaterhouseCoopers published its quarterly MoneyTree Report Friday showing that startups of all stripes garnered a total of $10.6 billion through 891 deals nationwide. However, the deal value and the number of deals fell 36 percent and 25 percent respectively from the same quarter last year.

Venture capitalists invested $19.6 million in Maryland companies in the third quarter, the lowest total in any quarter since 1997.

The total investment represents a 76 percent decrease from the second quarter and is down 86 percent from the third quarter last year, according to a MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data provided by Thomson Reuters.

MD Start, a European medical technology accelerator, announced Thursday that it has raised $11.5 million to create and fund four new French companies that can fulfill unmet needs in the medical device market.

The round was led by French Tech Acceleration Fund managed by Bpifrance, a French public investment bank. Other returning investors were French venture capital firm Sofinnova Partners, Dublin-based Medtronic, and LivaNova, a London-based medical device company.

An affiliate of Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. (NYSE: ARE), an urban office REIT based in Pasadena, Calif., has purchased Torrey Ridge Science Center in San Diego’s Torrey Pines submarket. Walton Street Capital and SteelWave sold the campus to Alexandria for $182.5 million.

Torrey Ridge Science Center is a Class A life science campus leased to companies such as Regulus Therapeutics, Pacira Pharmaceuticals, Nitto BioPharma, Interpreta and BP Technology Ventures. The three-building, 291,799-square-foot campus was 87 percent leased at the time of sale.

The Johns Hopkins University earned $58 million in licensing revenue in its 2016 fiscal year, three times more than in the prior year.

Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, the university’s commercialization office, attributed the spike in part to a major sublicensing deal between one of its portfolio companies, Immunomic Therapeutics, and Japanese pharmaceutical company Astellas Pharma.

The Washington DC/Baltimore Chapter of Women In Bio is presenting a program to learn about board service in the public and private sectors. If you are a budding entrepreneur looking to develop a board, this is the event for you. If you were recently named to a board and want to know more about your responsibilities, this is the event for you. If you want to start a business/nonprofit and need to know how to set up a board, this is the event for you.