News Archive

A hallmark of Parkinson’s disease is the progressive loss of nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons. We derived human neuroepithelial cells from induced pluripotent stem cells and successfully differentiated them into dopaminergic neurons within phase-guided, three-dimensional microfluidic cell culture bioreactors. After 30 days of differentiation within the microfluidic bioreactors, in situ morphological, immunocytochemical and calcium imaging confirmed the presence of dopaminergic neurons that were spontaneously electrophysiologically active, a characteristic feature of nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons in vivo. Differentiation was as efficient as in macroscopic culture, with up to 19% of differentiated neurons immunoreactive for tyrosine hydroxylase, the penultimate enzyme in the synthesis of dopamine. This new microfluidic cell culture model integrates the latest innovations in developmental biology and microfluidic cell culture to generate a biologically realistic and economically efficient route to personalised drug discovery for Parkinson’s disease.

What if the answer to reducing health costs of the most expensive patients stems from listening to the hunches of home care workers with little — if any — medical training?

That’s the premise tech startup Care at Hand Inc. used to predict and prevent an estimated $6.5 million in Medicare spending by reducing hospitalizations among aging patients in Massachusetts.

The City of New York Early-Stage Life Sciences Funding Initiative represents an unprecedented public-private partnership across world-class academic institutions, industry leaders, top-tier investors, and the philanthropic community.

Established by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) with at least $50 million in matching funds from top-tier venture capital partners including Celgene Corporation, GE Ventures, and Eli Lilly & Company, the funding partnership will deploy a minimum of $150 million and seeks to launch 15 to 20 breakthrough ventures by 2020.

The Qiagen campus in Germantown is large, open and modern looking.

Its 25-acre site on Germantown Road houses a mostly glass office building connected to a newer addition that provides space for manufacturing and packaging the company’s biotech products.

NO one who lived through the 1990s would have suspected that one day people would look back on the period as a golden age of bipartisan cooperation. But in some important ways, it was. Amid the policy fights that followed the Republican victories of 1994, President Bill Clinton and the new majorities in Congress reached one particularly good deal: doubling the budget for the National Institutes of Health.

The decision was bipartisan, because health is both a moral and financial issue. Government spends more on health care than any other area. Taxpayers spend more than $1 trillion a year for Medicare and Medicaid alone, and even more when you add in programs like Veterans Affairs, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Indian Health Service.

The life sciences community presented a vision this week in which the Washington, DC region becomes a top 3 biotech hub by 2023. What role will economic development incentives play in achieving this status?

Industry, academic, nonprofit, investment and government partners participated in the Regional Biotech Forum: Growing Our Ecosystem, a program spearheaded by BioHealth Innovation, AstraZeneca, MedImmune and the Tech Council of Maryland and supported by BioMaryland, Virginia Bio, Montgomery County, MD among others.

From Christy Wyskiel,Senior Advisor to the President, Johns Hopkins University

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that Neil Veloso will join Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures as the executive director of technology transfer, effective May 18, 2015.

Neil has extensive experience in technology transfer and commercialization. He has spent the last nine years of his career in a variety of roles at Cleveland Clinic Innovations (CCI) in Ohio. Currently, he is serving as the senior director of innovation management, a role in which he directs technology commercialization at Cleveland Clinic and at seven of CCI’s Innovation Alliance Partners. In this role, Neil focuses on commercialization strategy across a broad portfolio of both academic and hospital system assets. He manages a team that advises inventors, administers intellectual property, and promotes commercialization through licensing, new venture creation and the development of industry partnerships. Neil’s collaborative leadership style and ability to work with myriad constituents has been cited repeatedly as one of his great strengths by former colleagues and industry partners.   

A few months into 2015, D.C.’s tech industry is continuing to prove itself a major region for venture capital investing interest. Based on an NVCA/PwC report provided to DC Inno, the District is ranked No. 9 among major U.S. regions for investments during Q1. In a quarter that saw vibrant deal flow and exceptional venture raises, the D.C. focused software sector did especially well by raising $220 million in investment dollars.

MaxCyte® Inc., the pioneer in cell therapies using scalable, high-performance cell transfection systems, today announces a strategic research collaboration with Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to develop unique Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies, which harness patients’ own immune systems to combat cancers.

MaxCyte’s unique approach to CAR cell therapy allows targeting of solid tumor cancers by enabling control over the on-target, off-tumor toxicity, which limits other CAR therapies to hematological cancers. MaxCyte achieves this by introducing the CAR construct as a transiently expressing messenger RNA (mRNA), thus allowing control of the duration of expression and toxicity against target antigens in normal tissue. This unique approach also avoids the cell expansion step required for standard approaches, dramatically reducing manufacturing time and expense for CAR therapies from days or weeks to a matter of hours.

The end may be near for Montgomery County’s Department of Economic Development.

County Executive Ike Leggett, speaking in North Bethesda as a panelist during the Washington Business Journal’s inaugural On the Road event, announced Tuesday he intends to replace Montgomery County’s economic development agency with a public-private authority, along the lines of Fairfax County’s Economic Development Authority.