News Archive

Here’s the most important thing you need to know about being an entrepreneur, according to Under Armour Inc. CEO Kevin Plank:

“Everything matters. The way you carry yourself, the way your business card looks, the way you dress during the day.”

The 2016 Maryland Incubator Company of the Year Awards publicly recognizes achievements by current clients and graduates of Maryland incubators and provides a forum for the nominees to increase their visibility in the business, technology and investment communities.

Business incubators support new and early-stage businesses in Maryland. In 1986, the first public incubator was established at the University of Maryland in College Park. Recognizing the economic challenges facing new companies, business incubators are facilities that provide reasonable market rents, shared services and technical assistance to start-ups and early-stage companies, including manufacturing, biotech, service and technology firms.

Biotech and the overall equity markets have been under siege the past few months from macro forces, like oil and the economy, as well as sector-specific concerns like drug pricing.

After watching the carnage in 2016 wreck havoc with small and large cap stocks alike, I figured it was time to revisit the post-market performance of the recent biotech IPO cohort.  It’s grim, as you might expect.  A rising tide lifts all the boats, and a falling one leaves a lot of small ones exposed on the shoreline.  Here are a few metrics on the VC-backed IPO cohort since 2013, as of February 11, 2016:

Despite long-term declines in business creation and slow growth, there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future of entrepreneurship in the United States. This message, delivered by Kauffman President and CEO Wendy Guillies in the State of Entrepreneurship Address, summarizes key findings in a publication released yesterday called The New Entrepreneurial Growth Agenda.

A study just completed by the Sage Policy Group on behalf of the Maryland Business Incubation Association (MBIA) has concluded that Maryland’s 30 small business incubators are having a significant and far-reaching impact on the state’s economy.

It’s hard for most people to find time to work out to stay fit, but when fitness has been part of your life since high school and you’ve served in the military, it’s a problem that can be especially vexing. That is what happened to Gregory Coleman, Chief Operating Officer of Nexercise, a Business Innovation Network member. A three-season high school athlete who graduated from the Air Force Academy, served as an Air Force and Air National Guard pilot, was enrolled in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, plus was married and had a family, Greg felt like he was too busy to make it to the gym. Fellow Wharton student Ben Young, Chief Executive Officer of Nexercise, felt similar pain, and thought they could solve that problem in 2010 by taking advantage of the technology of Apple’s new iPhone.

Three years after Michael Davidson and his colleagues sold the omega-3 drug Epanova to AstraZeneca ($AZN) in the $443 million Omthera buyout, the biotech exec has rounded up some fresh support from a seasoned ally in the venture world to begin building a new biotech focused on cardiovascular disease.

CC Biotech LLC, Rockville MD, developing advanced separations technologies for large molecules, is awarded an SBIR phase I grant from the National Science Foundation for the project ‘Spiral Countercurrent Chromatography for the Separation of Carbon Nanotubes’. The new technique has been applied for the first time to successfully purify single wall carbon nanotube species which are semi-conductors. The application will enable the processing of potent semi-conductors to be added to sensor circuits. The implications of this R&D have wide application to not only bio-sensor devices, but also in the preparation of nanotech molecules as therapeutic nanoparticles and conjugates for drug delivery.

PapGene, Inc., a privately-held company commercializing advanced molecular tests, announced that it was recently awarded a highly competitive Fast-Track Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health to commercialize a test to detect ovarian and endometrial cancers.

The funds for this Fast-Track grant will be released in two phases, which together have the potential to provide a total of nearly $2.3 million in resources to PapGene’s test commercialization efforts. Phase I will provide $297,000 to the company to demonstrate the accuracy of the test and its clinical validity. Upon successful completion of Phase I, Phase II will provide approximately $2 million to demonstrate the clinical utility of the test and to launch its regulatory approval process.

Roche ($RHHBY) and AstraZeneca ($AZN) picked up FDA breakthrough therapy designations for their top pipeline assets, moving forward in multiple sclerosis and cancer with treatments tabbed as potential blockbusters.