News Archive

A new 30,000-square-foot business incubator planned for Johns Hopkins University’s East Baltimore campus will more than double the university’s capacity for startup companies and is a major step toward its goal of being a bigger player in technology commercialization.

The new incubator, called FastForward East, will be housed at 1812 Ashland Ave., a 170,000-square-foot building by Forest City Enterprises, Inc. The building will be the next to go up in Hopkins’ Science + Technology Park, which is part of the 88 acre East Baltimore Development, Inc. project, for which Forest City is the master developer. Construction is expected to be complete in 2016.

The six startups that make up the new class of DreamIt Health Baltimore got to work Friday, Jan. 30. Along with offering the first chance for founders to get to know each other through icebreaker games, the orientation marked the first work session at a new coworking space in Power Plant Live.

States with robust innovation economies have assets in common: a corps of research-intensive universities, a highly educated workforce and a government supportive of their science and technology industries. Maryland has all of these things. What the state needs to strengthen is its entrepreneurial culture, so that it becomes a top destination for scientists serious about ushering their ideas out of the lab and into the marketplac

The 3rd annual Ag Biotech Entrepreneurial Showcase is on May 19, 2015 in Research Triangle Park, NC. Ten to twelve entrepreneurs from across the greater eastern U.S. will be selected, and cash prizes for the best presentations will be awarded.

The deadline to submit an Application to present is February 12.

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., and Harold Varmus, M.D.

President Obama has long expressed a strong conviction that science offers great potential for improving health. Now, the President has announced a research initiative that aims to accelerate progress toward a new era of precision medicine (www.whitehouse.gov/precisionmedicine). We believe that the time is right for this visionary initiative, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other partners will work to achieve this vision.

Perceptive Navigation, a medical device start-up company whose chief executive is Johns Hopkins cardiologist Dr. Ted Abraham, won a highly competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 grant. Perceptive Navigation, located at the Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus, works to commercialize the Vu-Cath, an image-guided catheter that can be used in complex surgeries. The device, which is on a needle, is used while doing medical procedures on small areas of the body.

President Obama’s settled the score on this one: It’s precision medicine. Not personalized medicine.

The life sciences community has been throwing around both terms, but there’s actually a keen distinction between the two.

Biotechnology companies in the Washington region attracted less money from investors in 2014 than any other year since 1999, recent data show, even as the sector saw a significant increase in venture capital dollars in other parts of the country.

Local industry observers aren’t sounding alarms just yet. They say one down year, no matter how down it may be, doesn’t necessarily mean the region has fallen out of favor with life sciences investors.

DreamIt Health Baltimore is leasing 4,500 square feet of space at Power Plant Live!, a space Executive Director Jason Hardebeck envisions as a future hub for health care technology startups.

DreamIt’s lease runs through May when the business accelerator wraps up its 16-week program. Hardebeck said he has been in talks with Cordish Cos., the property’s developer, to re-purpose the office as a co-working space for graduate companies once the accelerator program ends. DreamIt would also maintain a presence there.

February 10th at 2pm ET

Every Phase II NIH SBIR/STTR application requires a commercialization plan, which essentially describes how the company plans bring its innovative technology to market.  In this Hangout, we will discuss the key elements of a successful commercialization plan.