Biohealth Innovation
Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens plans to give Johns Hopkins University $20 million to help spur potentially vision-saving research at the school’s Wilmer Eye Institute.
The gift will be included in the 85-year-old’s estate and will create an endowment to fund a T. Boone Pickens Scholars program supporting scientists.
Each year, a committee of Cleveland Clinic doctors asks hundreds of their colleagues to weigh in on which emerging healthcare technologies they think will help shape their practice over the next 12 months.
Then, the committee evaluates nominations based on clinical impact, probability of commercial success, progress in commercialization and significant human interest, and produces a top 10 list announced at the end of the Clinic’s annual Medical Innovations Summit.
Biocrossroads, which provides money and support to Indiana’s life sciences industry, announced the seven finalists who stand to gain startup funding in its annual New Venture Competition. Six have biotech or healthcare in their sights. On Oct. 21, five of these companies will compete for $25,000 and access to the Indiana Seed II Fund‘s staff and network for early-stage business support at the Indiana Life Sciences Summit. Second and third place in this competition will rake in $15,000 and $10,000 respectively.
“The New Venture Competition has proven to be a great way for us to find and reward promising companies, and is an excellent opportunity for the competingcompanies to gain some exposure within Indiana’s life sciences community,’ David Johnson, president and CEO of BioCrossroads, said in a release.
StartUp Health, a New York-based incubator for health technology startups, admitted 14 new companies into its three-year development program this week. The program, which received 1,200 applications in the past year, aims to give new medical companies long-term mentoring and access to capital.
The new entrants include companies working on medication adherence, remote medical services and patient engagement in physical therapy. Cohero Health, a one-year-old company based in New York, aims to help kids with chronic asthma manage their condition.
Your liver could be "eating" your brain, new research suggests.
People with extra abdominal fat are three times more likely than lean individuals to develop memory loss and dementia later in life, and now scientists say they may know why.
“When I was a young entrepreneur, board meetings were by far the worst days of my life,” says Jeff Bonforte, the veteran company-builder who just sold his latest, Xobni, to Yahoo. “Board meetings are the height of insecurity for a CEO. Basically it’s a group of people who can both judge you and fire you based on that judgment.”
He’s had his fair share of bad experiences. At his first company, iDrive, he'd find himself every quarter standing in front of the room, sweating bullets, struggling to get through his meticulously-prepared slides. “It was a mess,” he says. “They’d just sit there and tell me how insufficient I was, how I needed to bring in someone more senior, or smarter. Then it just hit me. I don't need this. I don't need people to attack me for four straight hours. I need people who can help me.”
Under Armour Inc. is hunting for the techies that can help the company beef up its fitness tracking device known as Armour39.
Armour39, a digital performance monitor launched in March, tracks an individual’s heart rate, calories burned and workout intensity, and provides a “WILLpower” score that reflects how hard an individual trained during a workout.
MedImmune's venture arm has jumped in to lead a $12.5 million round for a Chapel Hill, NC-based startup that is working on a new drug to treat a common ailment spurred by chemotherapy. G1 Therapeutics, which was initially seeded by Hatteras Venture Partners to the tune of $600,000, says that the new funds will finance its IND work and point the company to proof-of-concept data on a drug designed to protect against myelosuppression--the loss of blood cells--during chemo. Hatteras Venture Partners and Mountain Group Capital contributed to the round.
G1 was founded on the work of Norman Sharpless at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Kwok-Kin Wong at Harvard Medical School. They concluded that a cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 inhibitor could play a big role in protecting the bone marrow of chemo patients.
QIAGEN N.V. (frankfurt prime standard:QIA) today announced the Empowered Genome Community, which is a first-of-its-kind initiative to help people who have had their genomes sequenced share, explore, and interpret their data with researchers and each other. To highlight how the community can spark new biomedical insight, QIAGEN also released an open collaborative analysis of myopia in 111 people whose genomes were sequenced through Harvard's Personal Genome Project (PGP), which is a public repository of well-phenotyped human genomes. Anyone - citizen scientist or full-time researcher alike - can directly review and help refine the analysis via QIAGEN's Ingenuity® Variant Analysis(TM) (https://variants.ingenuity.com/community-myopia) with the goal of jointly publishing robust insights on myopia next year.
A prominent health system CEO implored the Washington region's employers to not drop their company health plans in response to the Affordable Care Act, predicting disastrous consequences for the industry if they do.
So far, most companies aren't taking that step. But enough have to raise the alarm for William "Bill" Robertson, CEO of Gaithersburg-based Adventist HealthCare, which operates two Montgomery County hospitals and network of affiliated services.
The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute announced today that Randy W. Schekman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at the University of California, Berkeley, Thomas C. Südhof, an HHMI investigator at Stanford University, and James E. Rothman of Yale University are the recipients of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells.
According to the Nobel Assembly, this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine honors three scientists who have solved the mystery of how the cell organizes its transport system. Each cell is a factory that produces and exports molecules. For instance, insulin is manufactured and released into the blood and chemical signals called neurotransmitters are sent from one nerve cell to another. These molecules are transported around the cell in small packages called vesicles. The three Nobel Laureates have discovered the molecular principles that govern how this cargo is delivered to the right place at the right time in the cell.
Osiris Therapeutics shares rose Friday morning after the company said it is selling some of its stem cell therapy technology, including its transplant treatment Prochymal, to Mesoblast Ltd. in a deal that could be worth more than $100 million.
Prochymal treats bone marrow transplant cells that attack the recipient’s body, and it is approved in Canada and New Zealand but isn’t being sold. Osiris said it wants to focus on businesses with the greatest commercial potential. Its remaining products include Grafix, which is used to treat chronic and acute wounds, Ovation, which is used in tissue repair, and Cartiform, a treatment for acute cartilage injury.
There have been more than 30 initial public offerings of biotechnology companies so far this year, and there’s a line around the block of promising new entrants looking to debut on the public markets.
Angelika Warmuth/European Pressphoto Agency But don’t call it a bubble. Those in the know are calling it a boom, and saying the good times are likely to continue for biotech, even in the face of clinical setbacks and other bumps in the road.
The health care industry has survived economically by cross-subsidizing margin shortfalls in one activity with the revenues generated from others. But the very existence of these cross-subsidies is symptomatic of deep flaws in the health care reimbursement system. As we move forward we need to be mindful of two principles that must be at the heart of any fundamental health care reform: “no margin, no mission” and “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” As the era of health care cross-subsidization ends, these principles must guide our actions.
MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, has acquired Spirogen, a privately-held biotech company focused on antibody-drug conjugate technology for use in oncology.
MedImmune will acquire 100 per cent of Spirogen’s shares for an initial consideration of $200 million and deferred consideration of up to $240 million based on reaching predetermined development milestones. Existing out-licensing agreements and associated revenue streams are excluded from this acquisition.
Shares of MacroGenics are surging in Thursday midday trading after the biotechnology company raised $80 million in its initial public offering.
MacroGenics sold 5 million shares of stock for $16 per share. It had expected to sell 4 million shares for $14 to $16 each. The $80 million total does not include expenses or underwriting discounts.
People love to rank U.S. biotech clusters. Most of these reports are full of data on venture financing, patents, jobs, and NIH funding. But many are riddled with flawed and biased methodology, and are usually designed to push a political agenda.
These rankings, which many people take at face value, have been irritating me for a long time. So last week, I decided to ask a few different questions in order to compare the relative strength of biotech hubs we cover at Xconomy.
Here’s what we know about the Affordable Care Act: 32 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured will now have coverage. What you might not know is that Obamacare could also boost entrepreneurship by decoupling healthcare from employment.
How would that work? Existing research estimates that universal health insurance coverage could increase self-employment by as much as 3.5 percent. The reality is that many would-be risk-takers stay with their employers in large part due to the assurance of health insurance, in what economists refer to as “job lock,” or “entrepreneurship lock.” But, this pressure to be employed by a larger company is loosening as the Affordable Care Act makes it easier and less expensive to purchase individual coverage. Now, hopeful entrepreneurs can go out on their own in a far more efficient allocation of their skills, without gambling their own health coverage, or that of their family.
If UMD researchers are well on their way to creating a robot that can wiggle through the brain to root out the tumors deep within, then anything is possible. Plankton crawled through Spongebob's cranium and now Dr. J. Marc Simard, a neurosurgeon at the University of Maryland School of Medicine; Jaydev Desai, a roboticist at the University of Maryland; and Rao Gullapalli, a radiologist, believe they're developing something that can do the same.
It was Dr. Simard who fist came up with the idea after watching a show on TV featuring plastic surgeons using sterile maggots to root out damaged tissue from a patient. "It sounds strange, but it's a real thing," he said in an interview with NPR. That's when the lightbulb went off. "If I could train maggots to resect brain tumors I would. I can't do that, so robotic maggots are the next best thing."
Tuesday, November 5, 2013 from 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM (EST)
Join business, government and technology leaders for a high-level conversation on the transformation of health care through technology and innovation. Bloomberg Government's first annual health care summit, "Mind the Gap: Connecting Health Care Policy with Next Century Innovation," will convene health care innovators, medical professionals, and government officials who are helping to redesign U.S. health care during a time of innovation.
Panelists
Join the conversation: #BGOVHealth
October 16, 2013 at 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Johns Hopkins - Montgomery County Campus
The National Capitol Area Local Chapter of SoPE in concert with the JHU Carey Business Schoo, MedChi, Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Center for Biotechnology Education, and the Medical Society of Northern Virginia present:
"The Health IT Explosion" What Big Providers Want: Value Proposition, Pricing & Closing the Deal!
Presenters:
Pete Celano, is an MBA from UVa, and has been in Digital Health for ten years. He was a co-founder of a start-up in Remote Patient Monitoring called BeClose.com (McLean, VA) and has been consulting primarily for big providers such as MedStar where he focuses on identifying solutions that Improve Outcomes, Reduce Costs, Enhance Revenue and Extend Access. He's also consulted in Mobile Personal Emergency Response Systems, Home Testing for Obstructive Sleep Apnea, Holter Monitors, GERD drugs and Infusion Therapy.
Anand Iyer, PhD, currently serves as President and Chief Operating Officer of WellDoc Inc. WellDoc is a healthcare company that utilizes technology-based solutions to improve diabetes and other chronic disease outcomes and enhance a patient's quality of life while systematically reducing healthcare costs. Prior to WellDoc, he was the leader of the global wireless solutions practice at PRTM Managment Consultants.
Joe Peterson, MD, is currently CEO of Specialists On Call (SOC), the nation’s premier provider of specialty physician consultations delivered via teleconferencing. Most recently a partner in United Westlabs, a hospital services company. Dr. Peterson has served on the Board of Directors of the Global Health Council, as a jurist for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awards in public health, and on the Board of Directors of the Aids Action Coalition.
October 29th, 6:00pm
National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, Rockville, MD
Please join us for an enhanced networking reception with leaders from the Mid-Atlantic Region's life science community. Take time to network with your peers and make new connections. After networking, Christopher Austin will give a short overview of the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS). He will speak more specifically on what NCATS will be doing, the goals and the impact of the life science community in terms of collaboration.
Are you a Maryland biotechnology company or research organization working to commercialize a technology/product?
Apply by October 17th for the 2013-2014 BioMaryland Biotechnology Development Awards.
The BioMaryland Center annually awards $50,000-200,000 through its Biotechnology Development program to a fund life sciences projects which advance the movement of research and development toward commercialization.
More than $5 million has been distributed to 28 organizations through the Biotechnology Development Awards program since its inception in 2010. The program has yielded multiple success stories—including a university spin-out and a local company securing $25M in funding while quadrupling the number of its employees.
Wondering where the venture capital funding has gone in the healthcare industry? According to CB Insights, it’s the following 10 cities–for Q3 ’13 at least. (Listed in order of amounts of deals; note that though San Francisco saw more deals, San Diego saw more funding.)
The New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC, pronounced “Nice”) is a not-for-profit organization, working to improve healthcare for all New Yorkers through health information technology (health IT).
Founded in 2006 by healthcare leaders, in partnership with the New York State Department of Health, NYeC receives funding from state and federal grants to serve as the focal point for health IT in the State of New York. NYeC works to develop policies and standards, to assist healthcare providers in making the shift to electronic health records, and to coordinate the creation of a network to connect healthcare providers statewide. The goal of NYeC is that no patient, wherever they may need treatment within the State of New York, is ever without fast, secure, accurate, and accessible information.
Johns Hopkins University ranks 15th globally out of 400 research universities in the recently released 2013-2014 World University Rankings compiled by London's Times Higher Education. The position marks a one-spot improvement over JHU's ranking in the weekly publication's 2012-2013 list.
The top 15 features 11 American universities—including the California Institute of Technology, which claimed the top spot for the third year in a row—and four foreign universities—Oxford (third), Cambridge (seventh), and Imperial College London (10th) in the U.K.; and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (14th) in Switzerland. Harvard, Stanford, and MIT joined Caltech and Oxford in the top five.
I am sure many of you have watched an episode of Shark Tank on ABC. The show allows a startup entrepreneur to pitch their idea to a panel of five respected venture investors, who either like or don’t like the opportunity, and if they do, compete for the investment. Many of the times I have watched the show, I end up cringing watching these poor entrepreneurs become the victims of undermarket valuations or a rushed decision which makes for “good TV watching” for the viewers at home, but bad business decisions for the company. I wanted to compare Shark Tank to reality in the venture capital world, to confirm my assumption.
If Maryland is to meet the workforce demands of a growing cyber security industry, it’s going to have to offer students a hands-on experience in internships, one of the state’s top educators said on Tuesday.
“We need to start focusing on providing a significant amount of internships. It gives the students real-world experience,” said William “Brit” Kirwan said, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, to an audience at CyberMaryland 2013 in Baltimore.
The University of Maryland (UM) BioPark announced today that the Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI) Center for Translational Research (CTR) has signed a lease to relocate from its current operational base at the University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center in Baltimore County to the BioPark in West Baltimore. The CTR, one of three entities within the CHI Institute for Research and Innovation (CIRI), collaborates with biomedical researchers to focus on the intersection of biomedical advances in omics-based diagnostics and precision medicine. Under the terms of the signed lease, half of the CTR's overall anticipated 50-person work force will occupy more than 11,000 square feet of laboratory and office space within the BioPark.
"It's exciting to add the CHI Center for Translational Research to our growing list of BioPark occupants," said Jim Hughes, President, Research Park Corporation, University of Maryland, Baltimore. "This organization is national in scope – and yet we are able to offer them an ideal location that allows the Center to stay local – moving from Baltimore County to the UM BioPark. Here, they have access to the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Medical Center, as well as the opportunity to be part of a growing life sciences community."
A total of 87 applicants from more than 30 cities across Russia sought to land one of just three residency openings in the U.S.-Russia Innovation Corridor (USRIC), a collaborative innovation initiative led by American Councils for International Education. Of the 12 finalists selected for interviews, two startups and one university technology transfer office will take on a renewable three-month residency in USRIC.
Through USRIC, the residents will collaborate with U.S. partners and develop new markets, using the resources of the Maryland International Incubator (MI2) housed at the University of Maryland at College Park (UMD).
DC Innovation Corps (I-Corps), the new, National Science Foundation-backed program aimed at translating the region's vibrant research community into successful startups and licensed technologies, kicks off its first cohort this week at the George Washington University with 20 teams of inventors and current and aspiring entrepreneurs.
The cohort launches with a diverse mix of teams from the Children's National Medical Center, Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland, the George Washington University, Virginia Tech, George Mason University, and regional entrepreneurs from the Emerging Technology Center, Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech) and bwtech@UMBC.
Washington, D.C. has become one of the centers for high-tech innovation, spurring some of the biggest investments from venture capital firms in the country. In fact, according to The Atlantic Cities, D.C. ranks among the top 10 cities for venture capital funding.
With the influx of startups and entrepreneuers looking for funding, venture capitalists are beginning to leverage social media to brand their firm, position themselves as thought leaders, and attract the top talent in the city. With the help of Klout, an online-influence scoring site, we checked out which local VC firms are leveraging Twitter the best. Take a look at the factors involving Klout scoring here, and without furhter ado, here the highest ranking VC firms in D.C.
The HIMSS Innovation Center opens today in Cleveland, a city, known around the world for the Cleveland Clinic and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and one that prides itself on being a city of firsts.
HIMSS leaders who describe their 50,000-plus member organization of health IT professionals as "cause-based," make no bones about their intent to shake things up in healthcare – more than a little bit.
British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline will seek marketing approval for the world's first malaria vaccine next year after trial data showed the shot significantly cut cases of the disease in African children.
The vaccine known as RTS,S was found, after 18 months of follow-up, to have almost halved the number of malaria cases in young children in the trial, and to have reduced by around a quarter the number of malaria cases in infants.
"Based on these data, GSK now intends to submit, in 2014, a regulatory application to the European Medicines Agency (EMA)," GSK, which has been developing the vaccine for three decades, said in a statement.
Kids today ... are actually doing some amazing stuff. Take 15-year-old Jack Andraka, who recently won the grand prize of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for developing an early detection test for pancreatic cancer.
Andraka came up with the idea for the test after a close family friend died of pancreatic cancer. Using free online science papers, he formed a basis for the test, which looks for increased levels of a biomarker for pancreatic cancer in blood and urine. He contacted 197 scientists, seeking help with his research, and was rejected by each one, before Dr. Anirban Maitra at Johns Hopkins University agreed to donate lab space and help him develop his research.
(Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
