No one wants to be the flavor of the month – except during that month.
That’s the danger for today’s healthcare startups and their leadership as they look to find the right investors and partners. Our prediction: Alternative investing paths such as venture philanthropy and corporate venture capital will become even more prominent than they are today (and that’s pretty big, considering the results of the survey Lake Whillans commissioned from MedCity News).
Thursday, December 10, 2015 | 6:30pm-8:30pm, Johns Hopkins East, 1101 East 33rd Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 | 3rd Floor Conference
Learn how to secure National Institutes of Health SBIR/STTRs for your high-tech bio-innovation.
Dr. Doswell lead JUICE Money wins for high-tech minority companies and HBCUs such as:
Virginia Beach has long been an expert at luring visitors with its sun and sand.
But now, there’s a serious effort under way to attract men and women who will spend the majority of their days indoors.
Earlier this month, the Virginia Beach Department of Economic Development launched VABeachBio (vabeachbio.com), an initiative to attract biomedical and life science businesses to the city.
A collaboration between the University of Cambridge and MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, has led researchers to identify a potentially significant new application for a well-known human enzyme, which may have implications for treating respiratory diseases such as asthma.
Enzymes are biological catalysts – molecules that speed up chemical reactions within living materials. Many enzymes are already well characterized and their functions fairly well understood. For example, the enzyme known as MMP8 is present in the connective tissue of most mammals, where it breaks the chemical bonds found in collagen.
When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz founded their namesake venture firm in 2009, they laid out a clear-but-narrow vision for investing in a new wave of Web-based innovation.
Andreessen, in particular, espoused a net-centric view that was absolute. “No clean tech, no rocket ships, no electric cars. No China or India,” he told Fortune magazine at the time. Biotech likewise was out of the question. In the six years since then, Andreessen Horowitz has grown into a $4 billion VC, and established itself as a leading tech investor. Andreessen’s observation that “software is eating the world” has become an industry axiom, as Web-based services have invaded and taken over financial services, education, and a host of other sectors.
How would you engineer a baby? I mean really, actually do it.
Last April, Chinese researchers reported that they had tried genetically editing human embryos for the first time to correct a disease gene. Out of more than 80 embryos, however, only a handful came out correctly. In the rest, the gene didn’t get fixed properly, or they ended up with unintended alterations to their DNA (see “Chinese Team Reports Gene-Editing Human Embryos”).
Construction is complete on a new 700-spot parking garage at Universities at Shady Grove, clearing the way to begin moving dirt on a planned $162 million biomedical sciences building on its Rockville campus.
Work will start on that facility in June, said Stewart Edelstein, associate vice chancellor of the University System of Maryland, the state’s public university network that includes USG. The full project, which included the $20 million garage and a new entrance onto campus, will be completed by fall 2018, said Edelstein, who is also USG’s executive director.
With the cost to sequence a human genome dropping by the day and medical records finally going digital, public health experts are excited for a new era of personalized, or “precision,” medicine—a big data future in which there is no “average” patient, only individual patients with unique genes, environments, and lifestyles. As a measure of this excitement, this year, President Obama launched a $215 million initiative that will create a health database from 1 million volunteers that is unprecedented in detail. Breakthroughs in prevention, understanding, and treatment of disease are hoped.
Following the Maryland Venture Fund’s transition under TEDCO’s purview last month, there’s now a new director of the quasi-public, early-stage funding resource.
Andy Jones is now the Managing Director of the Venture Fund, tasked with “defining MVF’s strategy and leading team members,” according to a news release. TEDCO chief Rob Rosenbaum made the announcement at last week’s Entrepreneur Expo event, and the organization made the formal announcement Tuesday.
The Food and Drug Administration late Monday broadened the use of an already available anthrax drug from Emergent Biosolutions Inc. EBS, -0.57% to a larger treatment population. The agency approved Emergent’s BioThrax for use in people 18 to 65 years old who have had suspected or confirmed exposure to anthrax. Previously, the indication for the drug was for people who were at a high risk of exposure to the bacteria. Emergent Biosolutions shares rose 1% to $38.10 after hours.
