News Archive

The United States has over 5,700 hospitals, and most of them are central to their communities for an obvious reason: They help people get healthier. When I look at these hospitals, I see an untapped resource, a way they could provide greater value to their communities and the country.

Intellectual assets — the ideas and know-how in the heads of clinicians — are vital, intangible resources for most hospitals. They’re equivalent to the research assets at universities. In addition to knowledge and know-how, clinicians working in hospitals are creating ideas for new health care technologies (apps, processes, devices, therapies, drugs) and cost-effective care models, often as part of their response to the value-based care principles of health care reform.

QIAGEN N.V. (Nasdaq: QGEN) today announced it has entered into a master collaboration agreement with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis AG (NYSE: NVS) to enable the development and commercialization of companion diagnostics to be paired with existing Novartis pharmaceutical products as well as compounds in its development pipeline.

The non-exclusive agreement with Novartis creates a framework for collaborations that would include developing QIAGEN companion diagnostics to guide treatment decisions for Novartis pharmaceutical products. The scope of the collaboration can cover all QIAGEN platforms, indications or biomarkers. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

A Johns Hopkins astrophysicist will share in a $3 million prize for his discovery that the universe is expanding rapidly, contrary to earlier belief.

Adam Riess, who previously won a Nobel Prize for his work, has been awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Riess shares the award with research partner Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University and University of California, Berkeley astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter.

The MdBio Foundation, Inc. (MdBio), a nonprofit organization, today announced that it has received a grant of $50,000 from AstraZeneca and its Gaithersburg, Md.-based global biologics research and development arm, MedImmune. The grant will enable the foundation to expand its focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and prepare today’s students to become the workforce of tomorrow.

“Our goal is to show students the many possibilities their future can hold with a strong foundation in STEM,” said Brian Gaines, CEO of MdBio. “AstraZeneca’s and MedImmune’s generosity will enable us to expand our programs to ensure that we reach students who can benefit from enhanced educational opportunities. Our state is well-known for its strength in the bioscience market, and we hope to foster the next generation of employees for the companies that call Maryland home.”

Let’s face it: pre-Election Night, this year’s race for Maryland governor was pretty underwhelming, the kind where your mother might reveal she’s thinking of voting for Republican businessman Larry Hogan because she remembered his dad to be a nice guy back when he was Prince George’s County executive in the 1970s.

(Hi, Mom! For the record, I don’t know who she ended up voting for.)

iHealth is one of the leading developers of connected health devices, with devices on the market ranging from the BP5 connected blood pressure cuff to the Align wireless glucometer. As we recently highlighted, they have also been at the forefront of integrating the data captured by these devices with the electronic health records used by clinicians.

We had the opportunity to talk with Jim Taschetta, Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Retail Sales at iHealth, about their current work at Duke & Stanford exploring EHR integration, views on integration of Android devices, and more.

The University of Maryland earned a gold medal in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM) held in Boston from Oct. 30 to Nov. 3, 2014.

The competition engages student-led teams from universities across the globe to present novel synthetic biology projects that address real-world problems.

University of Maryland University College recently swept two divisions of the Maryland Cyber Challenge for the second consecutive year, capturing first place in the College and Professional divisions of the premier Maryland cyber competition held at the annual Cyber Maryland conference in Baltimore.

“This is a tough competition and to beat many great teams just to get to the finals in the college and professional divisions is an amazing accomplishment. We fielded four teams for this competition (two in each division) and all four made it to the final round. That speaks to the quality of our teams, ” said Jeff Tjiputra, chairman of UMUC’s undergraduate cybersecurity program and academic advisor to the cyber competition teams. 

The Pentagon’s technology arm is prepared to invest up to $700,000 in a promising idea in the field of biological sciences and technology. The goal is to turn theoretical concepts into actual products, such as better sensors for prosthetic limbs and techniques to cope with infectious disease outbreaks.

Under a new initiative by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, inventors will be able to send in proposals without having to trudge through miles of red tape as they would have to in traditional government contracts.

Photo Credit: DARPA