News Archive

Twenty-four Maryland executives were named Maryland regional finalists for EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year.

The annual award program recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence in innovation, financial performance and commitment to their businesses. Winners will be announced June 25 at a gala at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront.

OrderUp Inc. CEO Chris Jeffery, Medifast CEO Michael MacDonald and Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake Inc. CEO Lisa Rusyniak are among the Baltimore-area business leaders named as finalists.

When George Scangos took the helm at biotech giant Biogen in 2010, he took a look around the company’s headquarters in the Weston, Massachusetts, suburb of Boston and thought, “What are we doing out here?”

Last year, the company celebrated the return of its headquarters to Cambridge’s Kendall Square, one of the capital cities of the biotechnology industry. The neighborhood’s 2.5 square miles are home to 130 life sciences companies, according to industry group Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, the densest concentration on the planet.

MAY 7-8, 2015 • BETHESDA NORTH MARRIOTT HOTEL & CONFERENCE CENTER

Sessions on cancer immunotherapeutics, RSV vaccines, HIV, TB, and malaria vaccines, and models for regional synergy in vaccine development all await you at the Atlantic Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics Summit on May 7-8 at the Bethesda North Marriott. Renowned speakers will be leading sessions highlighting local innovation that is having a global impact. We are excited to announce that Stanley Erck, President and CEO of Novavax, will be leading a session titled, “The Next Billion Dollar Vaccine.” Mr. Erck was named President and Chief Executive Officer of Novavax in April 2011. He became a Novavax Director in June 2009 and beginning in February 2010, served as its Executive Chairman of the Board. From 2000 to 2008, Mr. Erck was President and Chief Executive Officer of Iomai Corporation, leading the company through an initial public offering and a merger with Intercell, an Austrian vaccine company, and through the development of a late-stage infectious disease product candidate. Prior to Iomai, Mr. Erck served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Procept, a publicly traded immunology company; as Vice President, Corporate Development at Integrated Genetics (now Genzyme), and in management positions within Baxter International. Mr. Erck currently sits on the Board of Directors of BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, MaxCyte, Inc., and the MdBio Foundation. 

Call it serendipity. When the management team behind Foundation Medical Partners decided to shift their investment strategy away from medical devices and therapeutics in favor of health IT, the name change to Flare Capital Partners coincided with an exit. IBM Watson snapped up its portfolio company Explorys in a big announcement at HIMSS this month. Explorys, a Cleveland Clinic spinout, is a predictive analytics company that amassed a huge amount of data to develop cognitive insights for clinical decision support.

“The timing was nice” but entirely coincidental, according to Flare Capital General Partner Michael Greeley who spoke to MedCity News in a phone interview Wednesday night.

1776 has made its second acquisition.

Just weeks after the surprise announcement of its Disruption Corp. purchase, the Washington, D.C., accelerator has acquired San Francisco-based Hattery, a co-working space that will give the company a foothold on the West Coast.

Alexandria is in the enviable position of having a commercial real estate portfolio including embedded development opportunities at the crossroads of the innovation economy – in Cambridge, Massachusetts, San Francisco, and other markets experiencing positive demand. This unprecedented demand from life science and tech tenants is giving ARE significant pricing power – as demonstrated by not only strong SS NOI for the quarter at 7.8% (vs 6.7% Q4 14 and 4.3% Q1 14) but also via the leasing spreads on renewal at 30.8% GAAP and 18.5% cash in Q1 15 and guidance for 2015 leasing spreads at 8-10%. Q1 leasing spreads skewed much higher than guidance given one lease at Tech Square in Cambridge that increased 100%. Given limited supply in Cambridge and the timing of deliveries, ARE may be in a position, as mentioned on the call, to push rents on its Kendall Square development buildings higher than original pro forma. In 2015, ARE is allocating capital 47% Cambridge, 25% Mission Bay/SoMa and 10% Torrey Pines/UTC with the balance in Manhattan and Other.

Strand Life Sciences, a global genomic profiling company that uses next generation sequencing technology to empower cancer care, today announced it has opened its U.S. operations center in Aurora, Colorado. This opening is in support of the company’s recent launch of the StrandAdvantage pan-cancer genomic profiling service.

Available now to physicians, StrandAdvantage was designed to accelerate the analysis of therapeutically actionable cancer genes and match them to relevant FDA-approved targeted cancer therapies and open clinical trials without the need for multiple tests.

CRISPR Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company focused on translating CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology into transformative medicines, today announced the closing of a Series A and Series B financing totaling USD 89 million, including USD 35 million of new funding in the Series A and USD 29 million in the Series B. The oversubscribed Series A and Series B financings were led by strategic investors, SR One and Celgene Corporation, respectively, and included new investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Abingworth, alongside the Company’s founding investor, Versant Ventures.

CRISPR Therapeutics has also announced changes to its Board of Directors. Simeon George, SR One, Ali Behbahani, NEA, and Kurt von Emster, Abingworth, will be joining Brad Bolzon, Tom Woiwode, and Chief Executive Officer, Rodger Novak.

Results Published in Clinical Vaccine Immunology Compares AdVAV Favorably Against Only Currently Licensed Alternative

Vaxin Inc., a clinical stage vaccine development company, today announced that a recently published study demonstrated that utilizing a single vaccination with the company’s AdVAVTM intranasal anthrax vaccine performs as well as the currently licensed Anthrax Vaccine Absorbed (AVA; BioThrax®), which requires two vaccinations. AdVAV is administered via an intranasal route rather than the intramuscular route of AVA. Intranasal delivery is generally believed to be a superior vaccination route because the mucosal immune response is important for protection, particularly against respiratory diseases. The study found that protection from aerosolized anthrax after a single dose of AdVAV was no worse than the protection afforded by multiple doses of AVA. Importantly, AdVAV produced protective antibody titers with earlier onset and greater persistence than AVA, suggesting that AdVAV may offer both rapid and long-lasting protection with just a single dose.

AstraZeneca has inked a development and commercialisation deal with Celgene for its haematology programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) candidate, MEDI4736.