News Archive

Aura Biosciences, a biotech company developing highly tumor-targeted breakthrough therapies for rare cancers, has secured a $21M Series B round of funding. The financing was led by Advent Life Sciences, with participation from new investors, Chiesi Ventures, Ysios Capital, and Alexandria Venture Investments. Existing investors, including LI-COR Biosciences and Henri Termeer, former Chief Executive Officer of Genzyme, also participated in the financing. The financing will be used to advance Aura’s unique and novel therapies into clinical trials for the treatment of rare cancers of the eye, and to further develop for additional cancer indications its first-in-class technology that was discovered and developed in partnership with Dr. John Schiller at the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

Italian drugmakers Alfa Wasserman and Sigma-Tau said on Thursday they had agreed to merge pharmaceutical activities to create a domestic champion with sales of more than 900 million euros ($992 million).

In October sources told Reuters the two companies were in advanced talks to combine their Italian operations.

For the second year, The Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine are co-sponsoring an opportunity that prepares health information technology startups to present their innovative ideas to the world. DreamIt Health Baltimore is a four-month intensive boot camp program for entrepreneurs, designed to accelerate new product development for health IT startup companies. The program provides six new startups with access to top-tier legal and accounting services, along with opportunities to meet and pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists. Each startup also receives additional seed capital of up to $50,000.

Google has been making major waves in healthcare lately, with a significant change in how it displays health search results in a collaboration with the Mayo Clinic that may include a change to its algorithms.

And efforts to make Google Glass more applicable to healthcare seem to be increasing. But that’s far from the only area it intends on disrupting. The folks at HIT Consultant put together this handy infographic that details the potential dominance, or at least influence, ranging from genomics to diagnosis to wearables.

Maryland’s road to a stronger high-tech economy lies at the intersection of its I-95 and I-270 corridors.  Better integration of education, research and development in the state’s two biggest innovation centers—the Washington suburbs and Baltimore—will spur success.  This is underway.

In less than three years, a strategic collaboration between the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, called “MPowering the State,” has dramatically energized technology development along these corridors.

Mach37, the CIT-backed accelerator for cybersecurity startups, has announced its spring cohort of investments. The companies include services ranging from risk tracking to system immunization and firewalling — your usual cybersecurity shenanigans.

The Herndon-based accelerator invests $50,000 in each of its startups and provides network access and guidance toward each company’s development. The portfolio includes 22 companies as of this announcement.

Johns Hopkins University today unveiled specific steps it plans to take to cultivate and support a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship and respond to the strategic challenges detailed in last year’s committee report on the topic.

The implementation plan, the release of which was announced today to the university community in a message from JHU President Ronald J. Daniels, addresses the 22 specific recommendations to bolster the university’s innovation initiatives that were included in the May 2014 innovation report.

Where will the first $1 trillion company come from? Some think it is already in the making, but not visible yet. The future is all around us and innovators can see it more than the rest of us.

As suggested, a convergence of technologies, including the Internet of Things, AI, robotics and synthetic biology, might just make a health company the first to be the Trillion Dollar Unicorn.

Symbiomix Therapeutics, a late-stage, privately held biopharmaceutical company developing innovative medicines for serious women’s health infections, today announced results from its Phase 1 clinical program demonstrating that its lead product candidate, SYM-1219, was safe and well tolerated and had predictable pharmacokinetics (PK), and that contraceptive efficacy for birth control pills would not be altered by SYM-1219 administration.

These results will be presented on March 6th at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (ASCPT), which takes place in New Orleans from today through March 7th. Following are the details for the two posters presenting the study results:

AstraZeneca has completed the acquisition of Actavis’ branded respiratory business in the US and Canada for an initial consideration of $600m.

The deal strengthens AstraZeneca’s aclidinium respiratory franchise and builds on the acquisition of Almirall’s respiratory portfolio in 2014 by extending the company’s development and commercialization rights into the US for both Tudorza Pressair and Duaklir Genuair.