In the Boston-versus-New York rivalry, the Red Sox and the Yankees were also-rans this baseball season. Now, Massachusetts and New York are in another battle for the No. 2 spot: U.S. venture capital investment.
New York is leading Massachusetts in total venture capital invested so far this year, which if it held up would be the first time the Empire State edged out its East Coast rival and took second place behind industry leader California since at least 1992.
Applications are now open for DreamIt Health’s second Baltimore cohort.
DreamIt Ventures will accept applications through Dec. 5, according to a DreamIt blog post. The first cohort last year included startups like Protenus, Aegle and Quantified Care.
A $5 million Innovation Challenge Fund (ICF), to encourage and support academic groups and small companies in collaborative efforts in the development of bioelectronic medicines, has been announced by GSK. This funding programme is in addition to the company’s prior commitment of a $1 million award (December 2013), for the team that first solves the GSK Bioelectronics Challenge.
Bioelectronic medicine is focused on producing miniaturised, implantable devices that could be programmed to read and correct electrical signals passing along the nerves of the body, to treat disorders as diverse as inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis, asthma, hypertension and diabetes. The ICF funded work and the Innovation Challenge’s winning entry will be made freely available to the global research community.
A jaw-dropping report released by the World Health Organization on October 14, 2014 reveals that 1 in 20 Ebola infections has an incubation period longer than the 21 days which has been repeatedly claimed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
This may be the single most important — and blatantly honest — research report released by any official body since the beginning of the Ebola outbreak. The WHO’s “Ebola situation assessment” report, found here, explains that only 95% of Ebola infections experience incubation within the widely-reported 21-day period.
ASTRAZENECA has announced a four-way collaboration which will strengthen the pharmaceutical giant’s link with Cambridge University.
The firm, together with its biologics research and development arm MedImmune, has agreed the new collaboration as it prepares to move its global headquarters to the city. It builds on an existing strategic partnership between the organisations.
I joined J&J Consumer Companies about four years ago to start its Digital Center of Excellence. Our role initially was to build capabilities and develop strategy that served multiple brands in multiple regions, so I did a landscape overview to help develop the approach. What I saw was that we had hundreds of different websites and digital platforms that we were operating upon globally. If you want to get a message across globally on your owned assets, you need to do that in the same way across the world.
Bicycle’s founding venture capitalist (VC), Atlas Ventures joined forces this month with SV Life Sciences and three corporate VCs – Novartis (NVS) Venture Fund, GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) SR One and Astellas Venture Management to invest $32m (€25m) in the Cambridge-based biotech company.
Bicycle Therapeutics was established in 2009 as a spin-off of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge), based on the work of the scientific founders Sir Gregory Winter and Professor Christian Heinis from Trinity College, Cambridge. Winter, a renowned scientist in the biotech industry, also founded Domantis and Cambridge Antibody Technology. Founded in the 80s, Cambridge Antibody Technology was a pioneer in British biotechnology, and was listed on the UK stock exchange in 1997, raising £43m. In 2006, AstraZeneca bought the company.
Bioinformatics giant Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) is getting into the accelerator game, along with other players in the life sciences and other fields. On Wednesday it announced the first three startups chosen to start the program this fall at its San Francisco lab space.
San Diego-based Illumina, which makes genomic analysis systems, unveiled the program in February, joining the growing list of academic institutions, venture-backed groups, and life science corporations building start-up space in the Bay Area and beyond. Not least among the benefits of the Illumina accelerator program is access to the company’s high-end gene sequencing systems, which are installed in the lab space Illumina has leased near the Mission Bay campus of the University of California, San Francisco.
The Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) announced this week the release of the Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund (CRCF) annual report for FY2014, showing growth in new patents, products and innovative companies.
Karen Jackson, Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, said, “CRCF plays an important role in the acceleration of innovation in the Commonwealth by funding essential research and commercialization projects. The investments we make in research commercialization plant the seeds that are growing the New Virginia Economy.”
The Tech Council of Maryland (TCM), Maryland’s largest technology trade association for life science and technology, has been awarded a three-year, $225,000 federal grant designed to help job seekers gain skills in the growing fields of cyber technology and cyber security.
The grant is part of a $15 million federal investment in the Cyber-Technology Pathways Across Maryland (C-PAM) Consortium, spearheaded by Montgomery College. The consortium, which is comprised of 14 community colleges and trade associations, aims to prepare women and other underrepresented populations for jobs in the rapidly growing cyber industry.
