A Johns Hopkins spinout created to develop an ultrasound that works from inside the body closed a $500,000 seed round.
Perceptive Navigation, which is based at Johns Hopkins’ FastForward East incubator, received investment from the state-backed Maryland Venture Fund and the Abell Foundation.
Is the U.S. market for consumer wearable devices headed toward the trough of disillusionment on the Gartner Hype Cycle? A new report suggests that explosive growth in demand for fitness bands, smartwatches, smart glasses (think Google Glass) and the like peaked in January and has been headed downward ever since.
QB3@953, a San Francisco, USA-based incubator created by QB3, a University of California research institute and biotech accelerator, has announced an agreement with UK pharma company GlaxoSmithKline (LSE: GSK).
Together the companies will identify and facilitate collaborations to translate early drug target concepts into medicines that benefit patients. It formalizes an existing relationship between QB3@953 and GSK’s Discovery Partnerships with Academia team.
On the surface of a living cell at any given time, hundreds of tiny bubbles are popping into existence, surrounding and incorporating proteins, hormones, fats, and the occasional bacteria or virus. But until now the details of this activity were inferred – you couldn’t actually see it. The problem wasn’t just that the structures taking part in this bustling activity are too small, but that our bodies work on an invisibly fast time scale—important changes are taking place over fractions of a second.
Symbiomix today announced the completion of patient enrollment in a Phase 3 clinical study, the second pivotal trial of SYM-1219, which is a single-dose, oral product candidate for the treatment of bacterial vaginosis (BV). Earlier this year Symbiomix announced positive results from the first pivotal trial for SYM-1219. Symbiomix expects to finish this second pivotal trial by the end of 2015, which would enable a New Drug Application (NDA) filing with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in mid-2016.
Symbiomix also announced that the FDA has granted Fast Track designation to SYM-1219. The FDA’s Fast Track program is designed to facilitate the development and expedite the review of drugs that are intended to treat serious conditions. Earlier this year Symbiomix announced that the FDA had designated SYM-1219 as a Qualified Infectious Disease Product (QIDP) for the treatment of BV. QIDP designation makes SYM-1219 eligible for certain benefits, including priority review. Further, if ultimately approved by the FDA, SYM-1219 would be eligible for a five-year extension of exclusivity in addition to new chemical entity (NCE) market exclusivity.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have been working on a new solution for sepsis, a complication of infection that affects more than a million people in the U.S. each year and kills between 20 and 40% of them.
But this tool for treating sepsis isn’t strictly a medical intervention — it’s a computer code.
Heading up the Johns Hopkins Medicine Technology Innovation Center, Gorkem Sevinc, MSE, CIIP, focuses the bulk of his attention on partnering with clinical and research personnel within Hopkins Medicine to collaboratively build innovative Health IT tools. Software development, IT infrastructure, workflow and collaboration tools are all part of his purview.
Sevinc started the informatics research laboratory in the Department of Radiology at Johns Hopkins Medicine along with his director and chair-elect of SIIM, Paul Nagy, PhD. They grew it to serve all of Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Health IT needs, but the department of radiology continues to be the lab’s anchor.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has hired Jason Hardebeck to work on internet access issues for the city.
Hardebeck will serve as “Broadband Coordinator” for the city. He recently left his role as director of DreamIt Health Baltimore. The mayor made the announcement at a weekly media availability at City Hall.
When Japanese doctors Ryuji Ueno and Sachiko Kuno came to Bethesda two decades ago, they already had a drug company back home. They founded what would become Sucampo entirely with their own capital in 1996 to see if they could sell treatments to a much larger American market.
Two decades later Sucampo is under new leadership, and is buying out its Japanese predecessor R-Tech Ueno for $278 million in cash and stock.
A blood test that could quickly detect a brain injury and measure the damage it has done could help doctors provide better care for the millions of people suffering from such injuries, potentially improving their chances of avoiding long-term disabilities.
The trick is identifying proteins that appear in the blood in elevated amounts only after a brain injury and then developing tests that can both detect those markers and determine medically relevant information from them. Two companies, Quanterix and Banyan Biomarkers, have identified promising biomarkers and are devising and evaluating diagnostic tests.
