US-based Emergent BioSolutions has completed proof-of concept manufacturing of a modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) Ebola Zaire vaccine candidate (MVA EBOZ).
The MVA Ebola Zaire vaccine candidate is expected to be used in a Phase I clinical trial being supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department for International Development.
Peter Thiel is the co-founder of PayPal, the investor who discovered Facebook, and the author of Zero to One, a short account of the counterintuitive thinking that’s made him a godfather figure in Silicon Valley (see “The Contrarian’s Guide to Changing the World.”)+
But what’s less well known about Thiel is his affinity for biotechnology. By now he has invested in more than 25 startups, one of which has already turned into a $1 billion success story.+
Welcome to the fourth annual Inside Higher Ed academic bracket for the National Collegiate Athletic Association women’s basketball tournament. With this bracket, how teams perform in the classroom is what determines the victor.
Here’s how it works: to determine the winners, we first look to the Academic Progress Rate, the N.C.A.A.’s multiyear measure of a team’s classroom performance. When two teams tie, we turn to the N.C.A.A.’s Graduation Success Rate, which measures the proportion of athletes on track to graduate within six years. In the event of a G.S.R. tie, we then turn to the Federal Graduation Rate, a slightly different formula that the government uses to track graduation rates.
Emergent BioSolutions Inc. has manufactured a possible Ebola vaccine that could serve as the booster for GlaxoSmithKline’s frontrunner candidate in the international race to create an effective treatment for the deadly virus.
Gaithersburg-based Emergent (NYSE: EBS) produced a vaccine batch that will be used by Oxford University researchers in a Phase 1 clinical trial with GlaxoSmithKline’s Ebola candidate. GSK’s candidate uses a type of chimpanzee virus to deliver safe genetic material from the Zaire strain of Ebola, the strain responsible for the epidemic in West Africa. That drug candidate began clinical trials in Africa in January, Reuters reported.
Commercially available unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, have gotten pretty amazing and quite cheap over the last few years, thanks to new brushless motors, lithium polymer batteries, and sensors already found in today’s smartphones. They’re already being used by farmers to survey fields, real estate agents to survey properties, and by rescue teams to look for people in difficult to reach places. Lately there have been attempts to use drones for medical applications, such as ferrying automatic external defibrillators and emergency medicines faster than ambulances. In the latest Air Medical Journal, three researchers from Mayo Clinic’s Department of Surgery investigate the potential for drones to be used to deliver things such as drugs and blood derivatives to clinics, disaster areas, and to remote places that are expensive to reach such as ships and offshore oil platforms.
Funding and Research Opportunities
The following funding opportunity announcements from the NHLBI or other components of the National Institutes of Health, might be of interest:
Notices:
Requests for Applications:
Please note that most links to RFAs, PAs, and Guide Notices will take you to the NIH Web site. RFPs will take you to FedBizOpps. Links to RFPs will not work past their proposal receipt date. Archived versions of RFPs posted on FedBizOpps can be found on the FedBizOpps site using the FedBizOpps search function. Under “Document to Search,” select Archived Documents.
It’s time once again to fill out those March Madness brackets, and what better way to predict the winner of this year’s National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s basketball tournament than to compare how the teams succeed in the classroom?
Here’s how Inside Higher Ed’s bracket works: to determine the winners, we first look to the Academic Progress Rate, the N.C.A.A.’s multiyear measure of a team’s classroom performance. When two teams tie, we turn to the N.C.A.A.’s Graduation Success Rate, which measures the proportion of athletes on track to graduate within six years. In the event of a G.S.R. tie, we then turn to the Federal Graduation Rate, a slightly different formula that the government uses to track graduation rates.
MacroGenics, Inc. (NASDAQ: MGNX), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing innovative monoclonal antibody-based therapeutics for the treatment of cancer, as well as autoimmune disorders and infectious diseases, today announced the initiation of a Phase 1 study with MGD010, its first Dual-Affinity Re-Targeting (DART®) molecule being developed for patients with autoimmune disorders. MGD010 is a bi-specific molecule that simultaneously targets CD32B and CD79B, two B-cell surface proteins, for the treatment of autoimmune disorders. MGD010 is designed to inhibit B-cell activation by exploiting the inhibitory function of CD32B, a checkpoint molecule expressed by B cells. As a result of the study initiation, MacroGenics will receive a $3 million milestone payment from its partner, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited.
Johns Hopkins University is making its move.
The institution has been promising — threatening — to be a bigger player in technology commercialization, the process of turning millions of dollars of federal research funding into startup companies, patents and licenses.
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2014-2015 list was released Friday, effectively depicting the best universities from across the globe. The D.C. area made a good showing this year with Johns Hopkins University once again landing the No. 15 spot, but most local schools named to Times Higher Education’s ranking in the past ended up losing some ground this time around.
A total of five colleges and universities from across the region were included in the 2014-2015 ranking. Four of the five ended up with lower rankings than they received on the 2013-2014 list, falling down more than a few notches.
