News Archive

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.

Many articles these days talk about reasons why companies should consider innovation as a core discipline.    A quick Google search on “why innovate” produces 23,600,000 results.  There is a plethora of opinions regarding innovation and why it is important.  Competition is usually one of the reasons but not the only one, especially when looking how the world will be in the near future.  Innovation becomes a critical survival skill when looking at predictions for how we will live, work, and communicate as early as 2020.

At the end of every year, Edge reaches out to the smartest people on the planet and asks them a single question in an attempt to find the ideas and concepts that are changing the world of science. This year’s two-part question was: “What do you consider the most interesting recent [scientific] news? What makes it important?”

Baltimore, by a curious mixture of geographic positioning, educated talent, proximity to pork, and determined capital, is poised to become a crucial part of the East Coast technology cluster.

“BioIT Solutions of Silver Spring, Maryland has been selected as one of the 50 Most Valuable Tech Companies by Insights Success magazine in their December issue. We are the only company in the list focused on the biotechnology industry.”

Do you work in Greater Washington and love your employer? Then you probably work at a federal agency. We asked Glassdoor, a job-recruiting site that allows employees to anonymously grade their company and their CEO, to crunch the numbers to find out who the most-liked employers are in Greater Washington. We recently compiled a list of most-liked CEOs, too.