As usual, we bring you the top five entries from our most recent list. This week, it’s the top venture capital recipients in Maryland, based on funding received between the first and third quarters of 2015.
Vtesse, Inc. announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted its drug candidate, VTS-270 for treatment of Niemann-Pick Type C1 Disease (NPC), Breakthrough Therapy designation status. Both the FDA and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) had previously granted Orphan Drug status to VTS-270, which is currently in a pivotal Phase 2b/3 clinical trial.
David Narrow, who graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2013 with a master’s degree in biomedical engineering, has been named one of Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” notable entrepreneurs in the health care industry.
Narrow, 25, is the CEO of Sonavex, a company that works to improve outcomes for surgical patients by providing clinicians cutting-edge visualization through the use of imaging technology. Sonavex is presently based in North Baltimore and is part of FastForward at Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, a business accelerator program that supports startup companies.
Accelerator Corporation, a leading life science investment and management firm, today announced the Series A financing of Petra Pharma Corporation to develop small molecule inhibitors for the treatment of cancer and metabolic diseases in alliance with Weill Cornell Medicine. The investors participating in the $48 million Series A investment in Petra Pharma include Accelerator New York’s investment syndicate partners: AbbVie, Alexandria Venture Investments, ARCH Venture Partners, Eli Lilly and Company, Harris & Harris Group, Inc., Innovate NY Fund, Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Inc., The Partnership Fund for New York City, Pfizer Venture Investments, Watson Fund and WuXi PharmaTech.
Under Armour’s partnership with IBM Watson is the latest in a series of announcements from the consumer health and fitness business that illustrate how the company is thinking about big data applications not only to provide timely, helpful insights on athletic training to a customer base of 180 million but also how to get them to buy more gear.
Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg are young, successful and ambitious. The pair formerly started an ad tech company that Google acquired for $81 million, Invite Media, and for the past two years they’ve been tackling a much bigger problem: cancer.
Turner and Weinberg launched Flatiron Health after seeing family and friends battle the brutal disease. Flatiron Health is taking a data-driven approach to cancer. It analyzes the results of cancer treatments and turns the information and findings it gathers into software solutions the medical community can subscribe to. Now they’ve raised $175 million from pharmaceutical giant Roche, which will also be purchasing some of Flatiron Health’s software, The New York Times’ Katie Benner reports.
A cancer startup just raised millions in a funding round led by a pharmaceutical giant.
That could be the sign of bigger things to come.
Billions of dollars have been made from cancer drugs that inhibit the ubiquitin-proteasome system, otherwise known as the cellular garbage dump. By turning off the cell’s garbage disposal system, these drugs enable proteins to build up to a point where malignant cells commit suicide.
Medigene AG (Frankfurt Stock Exchange: MDG1) announced today that the Supervisory Board has resolved important changes and additions to the senior management team to better align the organisational structure with the strategic goals of the company in immuno-oncology and to expand Medigene’s presence in the United States. The Supervisory Board has appointed Prof Dolores Schendel as the new Chief Executive Officer of the company, with effect from 1 February 2016. Prof Schendel joined Medigene’s Executive Board as Chief Scientific Officer in May 2014. She was co-founder of Trianta Immunotherapy GmbH (now Medigene Immunotherapies GmbH), which was acquired by Medigene at the beginning of 2014 and whose platforms are the basis of Medigene’s scientific strategy.
Germantown startup NextCure Inc. has raised $67 million in Series A financing for a plan to commercialize the work of a scientist credited with discovering a key pathway for how cancer drugs harness the immune system, it was announced Wednesday.