The Johns Hopkins Technology Transfer Office (JHTT) is the University’s intellectual property administration center, serving Johns Hopkins researchers and inventors as a licensing, patent, and technology commercialization office and acting as an active liaison to parties interested in leveraging JHU research or materials for academic or corporate endeavors. SNNLive spoke with Wesley Blakeslee, Executive Director of Johns Hopkins Technology Transfer Office at the BioMaryland booth at the BIO International Convention 2012 in Boston, MA.

Johns Hopkins University is creating a new center to help public health agencies and accountable provider or payer groups better take advantage of health IT technologies.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Population Health IT, or CPHIT, is intended to broaden the focus of health IT systems including electronic health records and e-health beyond clinicians treating individual patients, says Jonathan Weiner, director of the new center. The idea is to "harness these health IT systems to create solutions for the many population health issues facing our nation," he says in a July 11 announcement.

What kind of community does Johns Hopkins offer for a scientist?

An excerpt of an interview in November of 2011, with Wes Blakeslee, Executive Director of Johns Hopkins Tech Transfer. In this segment, Wes talks about the unique environment that Johns Hopkins offers. Have lunch with a Nobel Prize winner. Be with the best of the best.

As more drug manufacturers fight for a share of the market, those with biotech sales jobs understand that their companies' success lies in its ability to develop innovative new products. Now, Maryland-based Human Genome Sciences has announced its breakthrough treatment for inhalational anthrax is one step closer to commercialization.

The company said the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has acknowledged receipt of its resubmission of the Biologics License Application (BLA) for raxibacumab, a human monoclonal antibody that differs from other treatments because it targets anthrax toxins after they are released by bacteria into the blood and tissues of the body.

Cash-burning R&D-stage biotechs have big appetites for cash, which is typically addressed with an equity-based diet.  It’s also supported through corporate partnerships and other less dilutive means such as grants and foundation funding.  But another important and often under-appreciated source of capital are the debt markets – taking a loan out to provide working capital for further R&D.

One might ask why and how a company that won’t have profits for a decade can raise any money through the issuance of debt, but it happens frequently, and the “venture lending” business is actually very robust.  Players like Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Oxford Finance, Hercules Technology Growth Capital, and Horizon Technology Finance (and many others) are all very active supporters of emerging life science companies.

Maryland has named a longtime venture capitalist to head its program for investing in startups and early-stage companies.

Thomas Dann, founder and managing director at CastleHaven Advisors LLC, a D.C. private-equity firm, was named managing director of the Maryland Venture Fund.

Healthcare IT has become a new priority for East Coast accelerator DreamIt Ventures with the hire of a veteran angel investor group director.

Karen Griffith Gryga recently joined the accelerator’s Philadelphia office. Earlier this year it added a minority-led business component and started a program to work with startups based in Israel.

She has worked as executive director of Mid-Atlantic Angel Group, which has invested in life science and technology companies.

President Barack Obama signed the US Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (S. 3187) into law, reauthorizing user fees that the FDA charges pharmaceutical and device manufacturers as they gain approval for their products.

The law also establishes a new user fee program—raised as part of Obama’s newly-legitimized health care legislation—that will require companies making generic versions of protein-based drugs, or biologics, called biosimilars, to pay upon approval of their generic products. The newly signed law also makes several changes to FDA policy meant to speed the approval process for drugs and devices, enacts changes aimed to increase the safety of the drug supply chain, and incentivizes the development of new antibiotics.

Human Genome Sciences, Inc. announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has acknowledged receipt of the resubmission of the Biologics License Application (BLA) for raxibacumab, a treatment for inhalational anthrax, and has established December 15, 2012 as the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) action date.

The FDA has deemed the resubmission a complete, class 2 response to its November 14, 2009 complete response letter, which requested further analyses of existing data as well as additional information.

A couple years ago, when Alex Fair was tossing around ideas on how to raise money for his new healthcare marketplace, FairCareMD, he knew that putting the startup on the uber-popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter would be out of the question. Kickstarter has collected $250 million for 24,000 projects since it was founded three years ago, but virtually none of that has gone to health-related companies. “I said, ‘Hey, there’s an opportunity here,’” Fair says. “No one’s really doing health care crowdfunding.”

Enter MedStartr, Fair’s New York-based site that’s making its debut today. MedStartr allows entrepreneurs to find backers for healthcare technologies and services. The site, which Fair says ran a brief alpha test starting in April, is launching with six projects, including MedStartr itself. During that early project, which was designed to test the concept, Fair was surprised to find MedStartr was able to raise enough capital to run the company. “Of the 71 people we invited to view the alpha, six invested,” he says. It’s a sign, he believes, that “crowdfunding has hit the public consciousness.”