News Archive

Johns Hopkins University will give $15 million to promising researchers over the next three years.

Two new grants, totaling $15 million over three years, are intended for early-career researchers, who are increasingly being passed up for federal research grants. The grants will also support researchers who collaborate with others outside their school. Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels is concerned about a potential dearth in new researchers entering the field, and in early January told the Baltimore Business Journal he planned to earmark more university funds to support their work.

Silicon Valley Bank’s annual healthcare M&A report, Trends in Healthcare Investments and Exits, examines the merger and acquisition and IPO activity of private, venture-backed biopharma and medical device companies.

Twenty-five U.S. institutions have been selected by the NSF-funded National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter) to join the Pathways to Innovation Program.

The Pathways to Innovation Program is designed to help institutions fully incorporate innovation and entrepreneurship into undergraduate engineering education. The program is run by Epicenter, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and directed by Stanford University and VentureWell (formerly NCIIA).

DATE: February 11, 2015 3:30 – 5:00 PM

LOCATION: Montgomery County Department of Economic Development, 111 Rockville Pike, Suite 800, Rockville, MD 20850  

We’re kicking off 2015 with a new (permanent) location and a wide variety of new programs for innovators and entrepreneurs in Montgomery County.  Have you heard of the Thingstitute?  Do you know about the Venture Mentoring Program?  Guess what – there’s also a new life sciences accelerator!  All of this (and much more!) including Montgomery County’s new emphasis on identifying funding sources for your business.  You won’t want to miss this program.

In what it’s calling a ‘historic’ announcement, the Department of Health and Human Services has set new goals to speed the U.S. healthcare system toward value-based care.

HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell announced Monday that the agency wants to tie 30 percent of fee-for-service Medicare payments to quality or value through alternative payment models, such as accountable care organizations or bundled payments, by the end of 2016. It also aims to have 50 percent of payments affiliated with these models by the end of 2018.

DreamIt Health Baltimore announced its second cohort on Monday.

The startups that make up the accelerator’s class of 2015 include a telehealth platfrom, an app to improve patient handoffs and a photo-sharing service for healthcare professionals. Five of the six companies are from outside Baltimore, with one hailing from Spain. Officials also noted that two of the companies are female-founded.

Improving patient handoffs, autotransfusion, Epic alumni and a couple of women-led startups figure into DreamIt Health Baltimore‘s second class of early stage healthcare companies. They will also be the first to occupy its permanent office at a new shared working space.

In a phone interview with DreamIt Ventures Managing Director Jason Hardebeck, he noted that the accelerator has added new partners — University of Maryland in Baltimore, including its medical school, and The Abell Foundation.

In early January Brenton “Brent” Saunders, the chief executive of upstart pharmaceutical giant Actavis , reclined in a medical chair on a stage in an Orlando hotel ballroom as a plastic surgeon pierced his face 30 times, delivering needles full of Botox to the crooks of his eyes and nose and injecting Juvederm Voluma, a dermal filler, into his cheeks. A cameraman documented every prick and projected it on a huge screen behind him. These are bestselling products for Allergan AGN -0.51%, which Actavis is buying for $67 billion, the biggest health care deal in six years. The audience, 1,000 Allergan sales reps, went wild.

CEOCFO: Mr. Fannon, what is the basic concept at BioIT Solutions?

Mr. Fannon: BioIT Solutions was formed to address needs for advanced computational, workflow and data management systems for biological research, drug development and diagnostics. Biology has become an information science. As scientists decoded the genome and discovered genes that encode proteins, results were stored in databases that form the basis for new approaches to biological discovery. There is a lot of emphasis on digital biology these days — work that used to require painstaking lab experiments can now be done, very efficiently, using databases and computational tools. The significant and rapid convergence of biology and information science is creating excellent opportunities for effective solutions for research, diagnostics, and personalized medicine.

Tuesday, Feb 10, 2015 From 4:00-6:00 PM

Please join us for a Business Roundtable Discussion moderated by Bernanrd T. Ferrari, MD, JD, Prfoessor and Dean – Carey School of Business, at our new FastForward East Innovation Hub!