Monday, September 22, 2014

NHLBI’s Office of Translational Alliances and Coordination (OTAC) hosts this semi-annual Regional Innovation Conference to connect small businesses, angel investors, venture capitalists, strategic partners, and business leaders from the biotech, medical device, and pharmaceutical industries. Attendees will see featured presentations from NHLBI-funded companies, and learn from staff about recent changes in the Federal SBIR/STTR program, and other funding opportunities and cost-free resources available to small businesses.

Previous conferences have been held in Boston, MA, San Francisco, CA, San Diego, CA, and Rockville, MD.

Highlights/ Features:

• Company presentations 
• Hear about innovative technologies for heart, lung, blood and sleep disorder and disease indications from companies who have received (non-dilutive) SBIR/STTR funding 
• How to market your innovation 
• Our expert panel of investors, legal advisors, and successful entrepreneurs will talk about the highs and lows of early-stage life science investment 
• Networking 
• Ample opportunities to network with potential partners,  investors, and NHLBI staff

Johns Hopkins University’s FastForward business accelerator is so popular the school is expanding it to a second location.

FastForward, which is part of Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering, launched last year and is already at capacity with a total of 33 startups and projects. Administrators plan to expand the program in January to accommodate the high demand among students and faculty.

The BioMaryland Center is partnering with Maryland's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH) and the Center for Medical Technology Policy (CMTP) to incorporate improved health care quality and cost reduction criteria in the selection process for the BioMaryland Center's annual Biotechnology Awards program. $1M will be awarded to projects, $50,000-200,000 each, advancing technologies toward commercialization--with preference given to projects which improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.

October 1st is the deadline to apply for the next round of Biotechnology Development Awards. More information regarding the program is available online.

How to Apply: Two application forms (the Non-confidential Applicant and Project Summary form and the Confidential Application Details form) and a business plan must be submitted electronically by 5 p.m. EST on October 1, 2014.

The Maryland Venture Fund (MVF), the equity investment arm of the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED), has made follow-on investments totaling $700,000 in two of its portfolio companies. KoolSpan, developer of a suite of patented, hardware-based mobile security encryption solutions, received $400,000. BrainScope, which is pioneering sophisticated neurotechnology to quickly assess traumatic brain injury at the initial point of care, received $300,000. Both companies are located in Bethesda. The investments were made with funds raised by InvestMaryland, Governor Martin O’Malley’s key initiative designed to spur growth and development of small, high-tech companies in Maryland.

“KoolSpan and BrainScope have both made tremendous progress since the Maryland Venture Fund first invested in them, and we are excited to make these follow-on investments,” said Governor O’Malley. “In Maryland we are committed to supporting the growth of future leaders in industries that keep us safer, healthier and better connected than ever before. KoolSpan and BrainScope are perfect examples of the innovative, high-tech companies that set Maryland’s economy apart and provide the family-sustaining jobs of today and tomorrow.”

August 20th, 3-5 PM

MdBio Foundation welcomes you to an open house on the mobile laboratory MdBioLab. Tour the lab, meet the team, or just eat your ice cream - doors open 3 - 5 PM.

KICK OFF THE SCHOOL YEAR WITH AN ICE CREAM CONE AND TOUR OF MDBIOLAB.

MdBioLab will be parked at Howard Community College, 10901 Little Patuxent Pkwy, Columbia, MD 21044, Lot F - adjacent to Little Patuxent Parkway

When four professors of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, decided to start Strand Life Sciences in 2000 to aid clinical research through genomic testing using DNA sequencing, the initiative hardly attracted attention. UTI Ventures pumped in $1.3 million a year later and, in 2002, WestBridge Capital Partners invested $1.9 million, but that did not create ripples either. However, things changed dramatically in 2013, when Strand got $10 million from San Francisco-based financial firm Burrill & Co.

It used the capital to roll out personalised genetic test services in collaboration with hospital chains and clinics across India, including Max Hospitals, Mazumdar-Shaw Cancer Center, St. John’s Medical College Hospital, Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology and HealthCare Global Enterprises.

The organizers of the 2nd Annual Symposium for Pediatric Surgical Innovation and Competition judges are seeking proposals from inventors in medical institutions, private practices, device companies, and academic researchers who have medical device concepts or ideas for use with pediatric patients.

Proposals should address a significant, yet unmet need within the pediatric population with a device idea that lends itself to commercialization. Following the competition process, two prizes will be given, each for up to $50,000.

Please follow this link http://www.pediatric-surgery-symposium.org/prizes/ to review the submission guidelines and to submit your application online by September 22, 2014 at 17:00 EST.

GlaxoSmithKline, better known as GSK, has launched a new web effort aimed at providing both information and inspiration for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, in what the company says is arguably the most engaging platform in the marketplace.

The rollout of the new COPD.com goes beyond what was previously offered, certainly by GSK but possibly many others, according to Darielle Ruderman, senior director of repository consumer marketing for the North Carolina-based company.

The mobile revolution was one of the most transformative events in IT. It set IT in a tailspin trying to secure so many different device types connecting to the network and moving outside of the organization.

After initial resistance, IT realized that by supporting mobility they were supporting user productivity. And thus an established industry of mobile device management solutions was born, allowing IT to create policies and strike a balance between data security and mobility.

Much of the discussion on big data has focused on claims information from insurers and EHRS from providers, but a collaborative effort underway at Stanford Medical School with SAP is hoping to tap into a different set – genomic data.

The possible benefits of sharing genetic data on a wide scale have great potential for both global population health and for drug makers alike, said Dr. Carlos Bustamante, who heads the Department of Genetics at the Stanford School of Medicine. Benefits range from possibly learning why certain drugs never make it out of clinical trials because of what population they are tested on to a more inclusive global snapshot at differing populations and what drives their health spending, among others.

Montgomery County Department of Economic Development (DED) announces the addition of Valerie Fremont as Senior Business Development Specialist for the County’s life sciences and health IT sectors. Fremont brings 13 years of industry experience to the County along with experience in the international, national and regional biotech community.

”We are happy to welcome Valerie to the department and fortunate to be able to call upon her vast experience in the life sciences arena,” said DED Director Steve Silverman. “Not only does she bring a wealth of knowledge of two of our most important sectors—life sciences and health IT—but she also is already well known in that community. The County and our companies in those sectors will all benefit mutually from those important connections.”

Today, the American Heart Association has launched the Chicago Open Innovation Challenge, a crowdfunding competition to uncover new innovative digital health tools to prevent or manage heart disease and stroke. The top three finalists will receive grants from the American Heart Association totaling $25,000 and a chance to present at the Heart Innovation Forum in Chicago on November 14, 2014. Each award winner will be featured on healthcare crowdfunding platform MedStartr.

Who Can Apply?  Early-stage healthcare technology and life sciences companies with novel ideas that seek to help patients, providers or medical facilities meet the American Heart Association’s 2020 Impact Goal—to improve the cardiovascular health of all Americans by 20 percent while reducing death from cardiovascular diseases and stroke by 20 percent by the year 2020—are encouraged to apply. 

The answers Bert Vogelstein needed and feared were in the blood sample. 

Vogelstein is among the most highly cited scientists in the world. He was described, in the 1980s, as having broken into “the cockpit of cancer” after he and coworkers at Johns Hopkins University showed for the first time exactly how a series of DNA mutations, adding up silently over decades, turn cells cancerous. Damaged DNA, he helped prove, is the cause of cancer.

Now imagine you could see these mutations—see cancer itself—in a vial of blood. Nearly every type of cancer sheds DNA into the bloodstream, and Vogelstein’s laboratory at Johns ­Hopkins has developed a technique, called a “liquid biopsy,” that can find the telltale genetic material.

DC I-Corps, a new, NSF-supported program designed to foster, grow and nurture an innovation ecosystem in the Mid-Atlantic Region, is now accepting applications for its fall cohort, beginning on October 9. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis up until that date. Apply here.

Open to research teams and technology entrepreneurs from universities, federal laboratories, agencies and the general community, the free program guides researchers in exploring the commercial potential of their inventions.

Through DC I-Corps, you will:

• Significantly improve your chances for SBIR and other grant funding, as well as early stage venture investment;
• Work closely with six or more real-world advisors that have startup, venture capital, and technology commercialization experience over a six-week period; and
• Come to a clear go or no-go decision regarding the commercial potential of your technology.

The program is geared towards innovations coming from engineering fields, medical/health/life sciences, and physical and computer sciences. DC I-Corps builds upon the successful National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps program.

The program is jointly offered by the University of Maryland, George Washington University, Virginia Tech, and Johns Hopkins University. For more information and to apply, technology researchers and entrepreneurs are encouraged to visit www.dcicorps.org.

Are you a company in the fields of cloud computing, network security, interoperability, chemical and biological defense, infectious disease or vaccines?  Then you'll want to attend the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development's Defense Labs Tech Transfer event which includes panel discussions and a tech transfer showcase.   Hear from Federal Labs including NSA, DISA, RDECOM, Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC), and USAMRIID, see demonstrations, speak with inventors, discuss available patents, licenses, collaborations and commercialization of new technologies to add to your portfolio.  

Featuring:    

Tech Transfer Showcase 9:00 a.m. -  4:00 p.m. - Visit the exhibit floor and see the latest technologies being developed by NSA, DISA, RDECOM, USAMRIID, and the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center. 

As the dust settles from this past week's mammoth $1.3 billion merger, Siemens Health Services CEO John Glaser tells Healthcare IT News what led up to the Cerner deal, how his experience as a health system CIO could help smooth integration challenges and what to expect – from the two companies and electronic health records in general – over the months and years to come.

Wrap up a great summer with one last BioBuzz networking event on August 27th from 5:00 - 7:30 p.m. at American Tap Room in Rockville, MD. This location is a short walk from the Metro located in the Rockville Town Center so there are no excuses not to come.

New this month, join us for Table Talks at BioBuzz.

For a new twist to the networking events, starting this month we will be hosting "Table Talks at BioBuzz". We have enlisted industry experts on various topics who will be joining us to facilitate discussions around their industry related topics of choice. They will be strategically situated at a few tables at our venue so that you will be able to join which ever conversations interest you throughout the evening and participate in some stimulating discussions; while still enjoying the usual, casual atmosphere that BioBuzz offers each month.

This month's Table Topics and discussion leaders will be announced later this week so keep an eye out.

Dr. Marvin Malek has been yearning and advocating for a publicly financed, single-payer health care system for at least two decades. Now, as Vermont stands on the threshold of being the first state to launch such a plan, he’s confessing to trepidation.

“I am pretty damn nervous,” he confided before bounding off for rounds at the Vermont Central Medical Center, still clutching the bicycle helmet he wore on his ride to work.

At a laboratory in Baltimore, hairless mice kept in racks of plastic crates are labelled with yellow cards, each identifying a person fighting cancer. These mice are cancer “avatars”—the lumpy tumors visible under their skin come from actual patients.

The animals serve as personalized, living test tubes. Each mouse will eventually be treated with a different drug and its tumors measured. Results showing which medicine worked best will be sent back to a doctor trying to treat a difficult cancer case.

Grand Challenges Canada, funded by the Government of Canada, has announced funding of seven projects implemented in ASEAN member countries. This funding, totalling $784,000, will support projects that combine scientific/technical, social and business innovation to solve pressing global health challenges. 

The funding was announced by Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird during a visit to Burma, where he is participating in the ASEAN-Canada Post Ministerial Conference. As one of ASEAN's longest-standing dialogue partners, Canada has enjoyed positive and fruitful relations with the ASEAN region, cooperating on many issues, including regional integration, economic interests and innovation.

The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche is set to pay $450 million for a Danish biotech company that develops drugs that silence microRNAs (something considered key to tackling certain diseases).

Roche is targeting the Danish biotech firm Santaris Pharma, according to The Wall Street Journal. Santaris Pharma A/S is a biopharmaceutical company founded in 2003 in Copenhagen. Santaris Pharma A/S has become a leading clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that develops RNA-targeted medicines. Santaris works on developing drugs for a wide range of diseases using microRNA and mRNA. Their research focuses on infectious disease and metabolic disorders.

The FDA has given Medtronic approval to introduce its Attain Performa Model 4298 quadripolar lead and the Viva Quad XT and Viva Quad S cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators (CRT-D) in the U.S.

Having four electrodes on a lead allows cardiologists to select from any one of 16 available pacing configurations. Additionally, the short distance between the inner two electrodes provides more ability to finely tune CRT-D therapy.

A few days after their state's primary elections, Chinese-American community leaders in Maryland woke up to an email in their inboxes.

It was from Lily Qi - director of special projects for the government of Montgomery County, an affluent suburb of Washington - thanking them for their support in the reelection campaign of County Executive Ike Leggett, whose primary victory cleared the way for a third term.

"In a low turnout election like this one, every vote counts and the immigrant community holds great sway in tipping the balance," Qi said in her note. Throughout the campaign, Qi had tirelessly reached out to the Chinese-American community, which accounts for 5 percent of

Johns Hopkins University is teaming up with Google on a project aimed at speeding up technology commercialization.

Under a new partnership agreement with Google, Hopkins will work on the search engine giant’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, which focuses on developing new technology and moving it quickly to the marketplace.

Wall Street may or may not be going through its long-awaited correction these days, but regardless, it still seems to have a hearty appetite for digital health initial public offerings. That appetite is provoking venture capitalists to fund ever-more startups. Through June of this year, $2.3 billion has been sunk into digital health offerings compared with $2 billion in all of 2013, reports digital healthcare accelerator Rock Health.

“We think there's going to be four to five IPOs each year for the next five years.” said Steve Kraus, the lead healthcare partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, Cambridge, Mass.

As a small company, you have a number of things going for you because of your size: You're agile. You can react quickly to market changes. You can still innovate on a whim.

Big businesses know this all too well, which helps explain what's driving an increase in the number of corporate venture capital arms cropping up in the past few years. If the old chestnut is correct, a rising tide floats all boats. So as the economy recovers and some sectors like technology seem like they're heading toward irrational exuberance, corporate VC firms are eager to get in on the action. 

With an aging Baby Boomer population and broadband bandwidth improved a hundredfold from a decade ago, telemedicine is exploding as a convenient and less costly alternative to the traditional visit to the doctors' office.

This year in the U.S. and Canada, 75 million of 600 million appointments with general practitioners will involve electronic visits, or eVisits, according to new research from Deloitte.

In the August 18, 2014 issue of Forbes Magazine, the University of Maryland, College Park was ranked as one of the nation’s most entrepreneurial research universities. These rankings are based off of the number of alumni and students who have identified themselves as founders and business owners on LinkedIn against the school’s total student body which includes undergraduates and graduate combined.

Linda Wittbrodt was perusing Michigan Technological University’s website when she stumbled across a faculty project seeking funds to teach senior citizens online skills.

Wittbrodt thought that was cool, so she donated $25 through a new approach the Upper Peninsula university is using: pitching of an idea online and asking people to make a donation, a strategy known as crowdfunding.

The University of Maryland has launched an unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) test site in southern Maryland. With support from the University System of Maryland, the site will bring together leaders in academia, industry and government to accelerate UAS research.

Based in St. Mary’s County, a few miles from Naval Air Warfare Center Aviation Division at Patuxent River and the Naval Air Systems Command headquarters, the UMD UAS test site has been set up as a catalyst for research and development, according to its sponsors.

Anne Wojcicki bounds into a conference room in Mountain View, California, straight from a five-mile ride from home on an elliptical bike. The 40-year-old cofounder and CEO of the consumer genetic testing firm 23andMe is breathless, and not just because of the workout. On this warm day in mid-June, Wojcicki is “super-excited” about an announcement scheduled for two days hence: the Food and Drug Administration has agreed to review a health-related genetic report the company wants to make available to customers. 

ATCC, the premier global biological materials resource and standards organization, announced today that it has received ISO 13485:2003 certification for the development, manufacture, and distribution of standards, controls, reagents and in vitro diagnostic test kits.

Every day researchers in life science, medical diagnostics, applied sciences, and clinical drug development leverage ATCC’s expansive collection of cell lines, microorganisms, cellular and microbial panels, genomic and synthetic nucleic acids, biological products, and associated derivatives to generate quality research and reproducible results. ISO 13485 enhances ATCC’s existing Quality Management Program as an ISO 9001:2008 certified and ISO 17025:2005 and ISO Guide 34:2009 accredited organization.

IT deal flow remained steady in 2Q. About $17 billion of PE capital was invested through 89 transactions, with both figures in line with previous quarters. The software segment of the industry is particularly active, with 2014 on pace to surpass the annual deal flow totals of any year following the financial crisis. Software has become industry-agnostic in some respects, as everything from colleges to hospitals to industrial conglomerates have incorporated software solutions into their operating models. For PE investors, software providers offer strong recurring revenue streams and also boast greater add-on potential for platforms.

Rockville-based electronic prescription software service provider DrFirst on Wednesday announced $10 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank.

The health IT company has expanded its products over the years to include software in medication management, adherence and care coordination. The company said the financing will go toward product development and an anticipated international expansion in the next year.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. EBS -1.39% today announced that it has submitted a Biologics License Application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Anthrax Immune Globulin Intravenous (Human) [AIGIV] as part of a development contract with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). AIGIV, which was acquired in the Cangene acquisition completed earlier this year, is being developed as an intravenous therapeutic treatment for inhalation anthrax.

“This accomplishment is a testament to the diligent work of our employees within the recently acquired Cangene operations and their years of successful collaboration and partnering with the U.S. government,” said Adam Havey, executive vice president and president biodefense division at Emergent BioSolutions. “We commend BARDA for their steadfast commitment to advancing this key anthrax countermeasure program and remain dedicated to supporting their mission to protect our civilian and military population.”