A team of scientists unveiled a new tree of life on Monday, a diagram outlining the evolution of all living things. The researchers found that bacteria make up most of life’s branches. And they found that much of that diversity has been waiting in plain sight to be discovered, dwelling in river mud and meadow soils.
The way drugs are made is dangerously outdated. While many industries have gotten much more efficient at manufacturing, pharmaceutical companies rely on an old-fashioned approach that is slow, inflexible, and prone to breakdowns. A new refrigerator-sized apparatus that can take in a set of ingredients and quickly produce four common pharmaceuticals is the most advanced demonstration yet of a potential new strategy for drug making that is more flexible, efficient, and reliable.
The year 2015 has come and gone, and despite Back to the Future’s predictions, there are still no flying cars. However, University of Maryland researchers have been working to make the world a better place through new innovations focused on health, security, energy efficiency and other areas that address global challenges.
These new inventions will be honored at a special Celebration of Innovation and Partnerships event on May 9 as part of the University of Maryland’s “30 Days of EnTERPreneurship.” Each year, UMD honors exceptional inventions that have the potential to make an important impact on science, society, and the free market. The Invention of the Year award nominees come from three categories: Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, and Information Sciences. One invention from each category is selected to win the Invention of the Year Award.
Two key supporters of Baltimore health startups are putting resources into a new accelerator.
The partnership between Johns Hopkins Tech Ventures and the Abell Foundation that earned support from Village Capital is set to develop a new health-focused startup accelerator in Baltimore.
Startup founders will have another tool for raising early stage capital starting next month. On May 16, the SEC is allowing companies to use crowdfunding to raise money.
The greater Washington region has an accelerator problem and we have to fix it if we want to grow the next generation of technology businesses.
A business accelerator is a term used to describe a broad range of business models that share characteristics: assisting a founder form a new businesses through mentorship, partnership connections, access to related expertise (for example, how to set up a limited liability company or a sales team) and access to investors.
A University of Maryland, College Park startup that makes high-nutrient coffee captured the top prize on Thursday night in Kevin Plank’s annual Cupid’s Cup entrepreneurship contest.
For poor Americans, the place they call home can be a matter of life or death.
The poor in some cities — big ones like New York and Los Angeles, and also quite a few smaller ones like Birmingham, Ala. — live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen rising life expectancy in the 21st century. But in some other parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.
Nearly 40% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, with about 1.7 million of those cases expected in 2016 in the United States (according to the National Cancer Institute). These patients are hoping for better treatments and, hopefully someday, cures. They could also be valuable resources, helping experts develop better therapies, if only staff at research centers like Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston could study their unique cases. Even patients with the same diagnosis, such as breast cancer, have different genetic makeups, both in their healthy cells and in their tumors. These differences provide clues to new genetic factors that may cause the disease, why some patients respond especially well to certain treatments, why some tumors are so resistant to treatment, and how people of different ages or ethnicities are affected.
More and more, pharma companies are making real bets in digital health, and reorganizing their businesses to put some power behind those efforts. The space is, in some ways, quieter than it was this time last year, but there’s reason to believe that quiet is a calm before a storm of activity, driven more by pharma’s tendency to keep early-stage projects close to the chest than by a lack of activity. The executives we spoke to for this report talked about initiatives with real potential for broad commercialization.
