News Archive

Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. is opening a Gaithersburg wet lab space in a project that may help fill a gap left when Montgomery County’s biotech incubator shuttered last year.

Called Alexandria LaunchLabs, the new space will create five lab and office spaces to accelerate early-stage life science companies. Each will have about 1,200 square feet and have access to supporting infrastructure and amenities such as an on-site gym. BioHealth Innovation, a public-private partnership created in 2011 to foster health and life sciences commercialization in Maryland, will provide startup and entrepreneur-in-residence programs to guide the early-stage life science companies.

Roche aims to have an immunotherapy cancer drug in 11 late-stage trials by the end of the year, the Swiss drugmaker’s head of medical affairs for oncology, Nico Andre, said at a conference on Monday.

The Basel-based company’s MPDL3280A, which is being tested in melanoma, as well as lung, bladder, kidney, bowel and blood cancers but has not yet been approved to treat any type of cancer, is the furthest developed of this class of drug. Some analysts have said such drugs could generate more than $30 billion in annual sales for the industry as a whole by 2025.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. made its first modest investment in Kendall Square about 14 years ago, developing a blocky five-story building it named The Science Hotel.

The building, on Memorial Drive, was designed to be an incubator for biotechnology startups as the industry was just emerging in East Cambridge. In the following years, biotech grew explosively in the Kendall Square area, and Alexandria grew, too.

New Enterprise Associates has closed more than $3.1 billion in new capital for its 15th fund and a joint “opportunity fund,” the Chevy Chase venture capital giant said Wednesday.

The raise marks the fourth consecutive $2.5 billion-plus fund and brings the total capital under the firm’s umbrella since its 1977 inception to nearly $17 billion.

National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Karen B. DeSalvo, M.D., M.P.H., M.Sc., announced today the availability of $1 million in grant funds to support community projects for the Community Interoperability Health Information Exchange (HIE) Program. The funding will help support and enable the flow of health information at the community level, leading to better care and better health.

The Community Interoperability and HIE program will provide funds to up to ten community organizations, state or local government agencies, or other community groups. The awards will help unlock health information and better integrate community resources advancing better care and healthier communities.

In an effort to tap patient communities for insights on drug development, AstraZeneca has inked a five-year deal with PatientsLikeMe, according to a company statement.

Ed Godber, executive vice president of Life Sciences Ventures at PatientsLikeMe, said unlike most of its pharma collaborations, which have been with U.S. affiliates of drug companies, “this one integrates us into the engine of R&D globally. AstraZeneca is putting the patient voice and PatientsLikeMe into the DNA of their innovation process.”

Lung disease lands thousands of patients in the hospital every year. And that’s where many of them stay, unable to breathe without a cumbersome respirator to help circulate air through their lungs.

Breethe Inc., a startup out of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, wants to change that experience. The company is developing a portable, artificial lung that will allow patients to continue treatment outside the hospital. Breethe on Monday announced it had finalized an agreement with UM Ventures, the university’s commercialization office, to license the technology behind its invention.

University of Maryland (UM) Ventures and Breethe, Inc. announced today that Breethe, an early-stage, Baltimore-based medical device company, has obtained exclusive rights to University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) intellectual property (IP) for the development of a wearable, portable blood pump oxygenator that will function as an artificial lung system for patients suffering from respiratory failure and cardiopulmonary collapse. Faculty at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM) developed the core licensed technology, with Breethe also obtaining important supporting technology co-owned by UMB and University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) as part of the license agreement.  The Breethe team plans to leverage the technology to bring the first wearable ‘out-of-hospital’ artificial lung system to market. UMB has made a $100,000 investment in Breethe through UM Ventures.

All it takes is one hit. And Christy Wyskiel likes her chances.

Johns Hopkins University, where Wyskiel heads up technology commercialization, is among the institutions scrambling to transform more faculty research into startup companies, patents and licenses. Hopkins in 2014 reported $16.5 million in licensing revenue, but is still far behind universities that have been leaders in commercialization. Columbia University, for example, earned $150 million in licensing revenue last year.