News Archive

Today, the University announces the receipt of its largest gift ever by a single donor. It will catapult our top-15 computer science program to even greater national and international pre-eminence.  It will spark innovation and entrepreneurship across the campus and catalyze new economic development in the state.  

The gift began after a tragedy and will end in a living memorial.  It demonstrates the impact of friendship, teamwork, and family—qualities that ultimately benefit our students and faculty.

When we go grocery shopping, most of us don’t buy a pallet of one product and survive on that for the rest of our lives. We get our food more regularly, so it’s fresher and more in tune with our tastes of the moment. So why wouldn’t education in the fast-changing STEM fields, look like that too?

That was how Andrew Coy, the executive director of the Digital Harbor Foundation, put it during an informal tech leaders roundtable discussion at City Hall Thursday morning.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM (EDT)

Rockville, Maryland

In February 2013, The Sunshine Act was included as the Transparency Reports and Reporting of Physician Ownership or Investment Interests section of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Sunshine Act requires manufacturers of drugs, medical devices, and biologicals that participate in U.S. federal healthcare programs to report certain payments and items of value (typically $10 or more and totaling $100 annually or greater) given to physicians and teaching hospitals. Failure to stay in compliance may result in fines ranging from $10,000 to $1,000,000 annually. Whether you are a practicing physician or your startup has a medical device, drug, or related product, you are impacted by the ACA’s Physician Payments Sunshine Act. In July, CMS proposed removing the reporting exemption for any payments or transfers of value made to physicians who participate in accredited CME programs. We’ll talk with experts in compliance and policy who will share their experiences in implementing these new policies and how you can understand the implications of the law, dispute inaccuracies, and stay in compliance!

The CEO and co-founder of Oculus VR is giving the University of Maryland $31 million – the largest gift in university history – to construct a computer science building.

University officials said late Thursday that alumnus Brendan Iribe’s gift will help build the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Innovation. Most of the gift will go toward the building, which will be designed for work in virtual reality, augmented reality, computer vision and robotics, and $1 million will establish the Brendan Iribe Scholarship in Computer Science.

Over the course of three days at the Mayo Clinic‘s annual Transform conference, featuring scores of healthcare’s top names, several themes stood out. Here’s what I gather were the main points.

1. Economic factors and barriers are just as important in determining health outcomes for the population as a whole. It stands to reason – people with fewer financial resources are often forced to choose between paying for a costly lab test or doctor visit or putting food on the table, among countless other instances and examples.

My last post, How Successful People Stay Calm, really struck a nerve (it’s already approaching 1.5 million reads here on LinkedIn). The trick is that managing your emotions is as much about what you won’t do as it is about what you will do.

TalentSmart has tested more than a million people and found that the upper echelons of top performance are filled with people who are high in emotional intelligence (90% of top performers, to be exact). So, I went back to the data to uncover the kinds of things that emotionally intelligent people are careful to avoid in order to keep themselves calm, content, and in control. They consciously avoid these behaviors because they are tempting and easy to fall into if one isn’t careful.

Friday, Sept. 19, 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Under Armour – 1020 Hull Street, Tide Point, Baltimore, MD 21230

Baltimore Innovation Week starts NEXT WEEK and includes more than 45 events from Sept. 12-20. The fall is just beginning—kickoff the season with a big networking event for tech and entrepreneurship in Baltimore. Come to the Innovation celebration, which will be even bigger than last year and help close out a packed week. More games, more apps, more food and more networking—plus, you get the chance to see first the winners of the second annual Innovation Awards.

BioFactura is a collaborator on a grant awarded to the Geneva Foundation. Ebola drug development funding will be provided under a Partnerships for Biodefense grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The project team is led by the Geneva Foundation (Seattle, WA) and includes partners at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID, Ft. Detrick, MD) and the Fraunhofer USA Center for Molecular Biotechnology (Newark, DE). During the 5-year grant, the team aims to develop an effective monoclonal antibody (mAb)-based drug against Sudan ebolavirus.

Currently, there are no established treatments for Ebola infection. Over the past five years, three Ebola outbreaks involving a Sudan strain of the virus have occurred. The need for strain-specific Ebola countermeasures is imperative for treating infected patients and effectively containing outbreaks. The research team looks forward to developing a promising and urgently needed Ebola treatment that targets the Sudan strain of the virus.

There has been a long-running debate in the pharmaceutical industry about the value of being first to market. Companies spend considerable resources seeking to increase the odds of beating their competitors to market and often fret about the commercial disadvantage of being late. In the high-stakes race to market for a novel drug class, companies firmly believe that every month of lead time ahead of a competitor is significant.

It’s not quite that simple. Our analysis of pharma launches confirms a weak first-to-market advantage on average, but with significant nuances dependent on market context. In many instances, the first-mover advantage actually vanishes, particularly when the lead time is short or when the first mover is a small company. This article seeks to identify those situations where first-to-market advantage is strong and those where it does not hold.

Say you invent a medical device. A pacemaker. An improved hip implant. A microchip for the brain. Maybe you can change the world, but first you’ll have to get approved.

A new graduate certificate program in the bioengineering department teaches students the ins and outs of gaining Food and Drug Administration approval. This process is necessary to test the safety and efficiency of all medical inventions before they hit the market, but it can take years of expensive research — and disapproval is common, said William Bentley, the bioengineering department chairman.