News Archive

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.

Real estate giant Alexandria Real Estate Equities has unveiled sweeping plans to transform a 56-acre Research Triangle Park site into a campus for life science and agricultural technology companies.

Plans for the campus call for more than 1 million square feet of space.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities’ vision to turn a mostly undeveloped property in Research Triangle Park into its latest life science cluster is moving forward with a first phase intended to boost offerings for early-stage startups.

Pasadena, CA-based Alexandria (NYSE: ARE), which operates science and technology campuses across the country, announced the RTP plans today. Alexandria will start by refurbishing an existing building and laying the groundwork for development expected to reach 1 million square feet of space. Those RTP plans put the property shy of similar Alexandria science campuses in San Francisco; Cambridge, MA, and New York. But Alexandria CEO Joel Marcus says each site reflects its market.

Hot biotech startups are attracting increased venture funding, and venture investors are ensuring a slot in the financing of these types of companies by starting the company themselves, Brian Gormley reports for Dow Jones VentureWire. The latest venture firm to do so is SR One, the venture arm of GlaxoSmithKline PLC.GSK.LN +1.16% The group, which invests in medical technologies, has added an entrepreneur in residence to its Cambridge, Mass., offices and has seeded its first startup through the effort, a company formed to develop drugs for cancer and inflammatory diseases. The firm’s launch of its own company comes after 30 years of funding existing companies.

Tuesday, December 1, 2015 | 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
The Observation Gallery at Baltimore Washington
International Thurgood Marshall Airport

Meet with over 30 companies and learn about their technology and relationship to Maryland.

Keynote address by Mike Gill, Secretary, Maryland Department of Commerce

Economic Development in Maryland…the Next Chapter
New Addition! Immediately after the Showcase join OurCrowd for an update on The Startup Nation: Israel’s Vibrant Economy.

emocha Mobile Health received a Small Business Innovation Research grant to further development of its mobile app that provides video-based healthcare observations in some cases where visits were previously required.

The NIH grant, which is for about $200,000 over two years, will allow the Johns Hopkins-based startup to gather data on its miDOT app from Tuberculosis patients in four health departments around the state, said cofounder Morad Elmi. The system is already in use at Baltimore’s health department.

Most companies make a conscious and deliberate decision to embrace digitization and the information revolution. Yet the role of big data in medicine seems almost to compel organizations to become involved. In this interview, Dr. Eric Schadt, the founding director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, tells McKinsey’s Sastry Chilukuri how data-driven approaches to research can help patients, in what ways technology has the potential to transform medicine and the healthcare system, and how the Icahn Institute is building its talent base. An edited transcript of Schadt’s remarks follows.

This week, Andreessen Horowitz said it’s launching a fund dedicated to investments in bioinformatics and “beyond the pill” technology.  The venture capital firm had already gotten its feet wet with investments in these areas, but a dedicated fund is something new and indicates an interest in ramping up its strategy. With its fund, the firm could make a big impact. Here are some insights on some challenges and opportunities in these areas and some companies the firm should consider.

First of all, it’s worth noting some of the health and life science IT companies that Andreessen Horowitz have invested in so far. It’s only a handful to date: