News Archive

Internet2 has announced the establishment of a new award, honoring the lifelong contributions of the chancellor of the University System of Maryland (USM). The Internet2 William “Brit” Kirwan Mentorship Award will be presented annually, beginning in 2016, to a member of the Internet2 community who embodies the spirit of Kirwan’s role as a mentor to countless professionals in the research and education (R&E) community. He is well known for his ability to connect people in higher education and inspire others, and for giving his time to serve the community. Kirwan, a long-time Internet2 supporter and member of its Board of Trustees, will step down from his USM chancellorship next month.

Funding: Biotechnology Investor Incentive Tax Credit (BIITC)

Maryland’s Biotechnology Investment Incentive Tax Credit (BIITC), created to assist the state’s early stage life sciences companies raise funding, is one of the most generous programs of its kind in the country. The program provides refundable income tax credits equal to 50% of an eligible investment to investors in qualified Maryland biotechnology companies (QMBCs). Although recipient companies must be based in Maryland, investors from outside the State (including outside the U.S) are encouraged.

Investments from $25,000 to $500,000 per individual investor are eligible, with a company limit of 15% of the annual budgeted credit amount ($1,800,000 of credit per company in FY2016 [July 1, 2015 – June 30, 2016]). To date, 75 companies have taken advantage of the program, receiving $69M in credits and later $450M+ in follow on investment.

Billion-dollar backstop

Name: David Mott Title:

General Partner at New Enterprise Associates

Billions at his disposal paired with a broad, deep swath of biotech experience make David Mott a key industry figure. Mott has been with NEA since September 2008 and heads up its biopharma investment. Healthcare typically claims $750 million to $1 billion, or 30% to 40%, of each NEA fund; the firm also invests in information technology.

AstraZeneca, a global, innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business,  to invest approximately $285 million in a new high-tech facility for manufacturing of biological medicines in Södertälje, Sweden.

The new plant will be focused on filling and packaging of protein therapeutics. It is anticipated that the new facility will supply medicines for clinical trial programmes of AstraZeneca and MedImmune, the company’s global biologics research and development arm, from the end of 2018, and will deliver finished products for commercial use once fully operational by 2019.

Continuing on its current investment spree, Chinese internet giant Tencent has now led a $750K seed funding round for Tissue Analytics, a tele-medicine app that guides you to take care of chronic wounds.

Existing investor DreamIt Health — the Philadelphia-based accelerator program which Tissue Analytics is an Alumni of (the startup got a pre-seed fund from the accelerator program), also participated in the round along with numerous other angel investors from Philadelphia.

Europe’s sluggish economic growth of recent years has been reflected in some surveys about entrepreneurship. The percentages of adults engaged in early-staged entrepreneurial activity, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Model, ranged (as of 2010) from 4.2% in Germany to 5.8% in France—compared with 7.6% of Americans, 14% of Chinese, and 17% of Brazilians. A year later, an EY report found European entrepreneurs less confident about their countries as places for startups compared with adults surveyed in the U.S., Brazil, or Canada.

How many types of cells are there in the human body? Textbooks say a couple of hundred. But the true number is undoubtedly far larger.

Piece by piece, a new, more detailed catalogue of cell types is emerging from labs like that of Aviv Regev at the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which are applying recent advances in single-cell genomics to study individual cells at a speed and scale previously unthinkable.

A lot of people make news in the biopharma business. Few of them are influential.

Influence, simply put, is the ability to make your mark in such a way as to get other prominent people in this business to rethink the way they do business. Last year, that definition caused us to put GlaxoSmithKline’s ($GSK) Deirdre Connelly on the list for her plan to do away with sales quotas in the U.S. The influential idea then was that ethics had to come before numbers–a big issue at a company that has been challenged time and again by an unethical approach to business that spurred a series of sordid messes and a second take at a painful reorganization.

A U.K. government-appointed review team into the issue of antibiotic resistance, headed by economist Jim O’Neill, has urged the global pharmaceutical industry to fund a $2 billion innovation fund to kick-start research into new antibiotics. O’Neill argues that without the fund, the incentive for major pharmaceuticals to develop new antibiotics is not there. This is due to the low return-on-investment and too great a focus on short-term profit-and-loss. The issue of “who pays for new antibiotics?” was recently posed by Magnus Steigedal, director of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Strategic Research Area on Health, who came to a similar conclusion that the world cannot wait around for big pharma alone.

Like almost everyone else, doctors and nurses now use smartphones on a regular basis. So what’s the best way for the healthcare industry to take advantage of that?

That was the theme of many of the projects being developed in this year’s DreamIt Health Baltimore program, an intensive four-month bootcamp for health-tech startups that began in January. For the second year in a row, Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine co-sponsored the accelerator program in Baltimore, with the six startups setting up shop at an Inner Harbor work space.