Biohealth Innovation
The registration date for Maryland’s popular biotechnology tax credit program has been rescheduled because of wide-spread power outages.
Online registration for the Maryland Biotechnology Investment Incentive Tax Credit will open at 9 a.m. July 9. Registration was moved from July 2 out of concern that some investors would not be able to participate because of the power outages affecting hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in the Baltimore area.
Imagine for a moment you’re a hotshot biomedical scientist at a university. You have invented a technology in your lab that you think has potential to make a big difference for the world of medicine. Despite all the accolades you might be getting in Nature, you are savvy enough to know you still have a pretty raw concept. Your idea needs someone who can build a business around it, and invest a lot of time, money, and talent to prove it’s the real thing.
Who would you call?
There aren’t that many people who you can call anymore, and the number is shrinking. This question has been gnawing at me for a while, as I’ve sought to understand the historic contraction that’s occurring in the biotech venture capital business, and what effect it will have on the biotech industry’s ability to turn bright ideas into valuable new healthcare products.
Maryland's secretary for business and economic development rallied Lower Shore leaders behind a state venture capital initiative that seeks to invest millions of dollars into companies and entrepreneurs with innovative ideas.
The state is poised to award a total of $84 million raised through an online tax credit auction earlier this year, but Lower Shore companies that don't apply cannot benefit from the infusion known as InvestMaryland, Christian S. Johansson, secretary of the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, told leaders gathered in Salisbury on Monday to unveil the new facility of the Tri-County Council for the Lower Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Seven pharmaceutical companies and four research institutions, working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have launched a groundbreaking partnership, to expedite the discovery of new treatments for tuberculosis. The partnership, known as the TB Drug Accelerator (TBDA), will target the discovery of new TB drugs by collaborating on an early-stage research. The long-term goal of the TBDA is to create a drug regimen that cures patients in just one month. Existing drugs, which are all at least 50 years old, require six months to cure the disease — a lengthy process, during which at least 20 to 30 per cent of patients end up discontinuing the treatment before the completion of the course.
MedImmune, the global biologics arm of AstraZeneca, today announced that the company’s expansion project at its Frederick, Md., Manufacturing Center (FMC) won the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering’s overall 2011 Facility of the Year Award. This is the first time MedImmune has won this prestigious internationally renowned accolade.
The annual Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA), sponsored by the ISPE, INTERPHEX and Pharmaceutical Processing magazine, recognizes state-of-the-art projects utilizing new, innovative technologies to improve the quality of products, reduce the cost of producing high-quality medicines, and demonstrate advances in project delivery.
If you are planning to submit an SBIR/STTR proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) before the August 5 deadline, one of your first considerations should be which of its many Institutes/Centers (IC) will be a fit for your project.
The NIH is an umbrella organization with 27 Institutes/Centers within its purview. Even though you submit a single SBIR/STTR application to NIH, your application is typically “housed” in one of the ICs after funding decisions are made. The program managers at each of the ICs are able to provide some feedback on the fit between your SBIR/STTR project and the IC. So here are two BBC tips to get you started.
United Therapeutics Corporation (NASDAQ: UTHR) today announced that its Board of Directors authorized the repurchase of up to an additional $100 million of the company's common stock. This program will become effective on July 31, 2012, and will remain open for up to one year. Purchases may be made in the open market or in privately negotiated transactions from time to time as determined by United Therapeutics' management and in accordance with the requirements of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The company also announced that it had recently completed its previously-announced $300 million repurchase program by purchasing 2,045,192 shares of common stock for $88 million during the second quarter of 2012.
Crowdfunding—the new, hip way to raise money for early-stage technologies and interesting projects—has found a happy home in the world of high-tech, where many people are eager to experiment with new models and new approaches.
But can the same model work for the much stodgier health-care industry?
The founders of MedStartr, a crowdfunding platform for medical technologies, say that it will. On the 4th of July, the site will go live, with dozens of health-related technologies and services looking for benefactors.
Aim to expand next-generation sequencing beyond current focus on life sciences research.
QIAGEN plans to offer sample-to-result workflows that integrate its sample preparation and assay products with a next-generation benchtop sequencer and new bioinformatics
Initiative combines broad range of QIAGEN products with acquisition of sequencing specialist Intelligent Bio-Systems, Inc. and a new strategic collaboration with SAP AG QIAGEN N.V. QGEN today unveiled an advanced initiative to enter the field of next-generation sequencing (NGS) that aims to establish these technologies as routine processes used in new areas such as clinical research and molecular diagnostics.
University of Baltimore is getting a new digital communication program, courtesy of a $1 million donation from Go Daddy founder and UB alum Bob Parsons.
The gift will establish a new professorship in digital communication and support on-campus and online lectures by Parsons.
The drug discovery business is going through tough times. Drug candidates aren't moving through the pharmaceutical industry's pipelines fast enough. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs struggle to get the funding they need to bring their new ideas to fruition. These issues are driving new alliances and partnerships between academic researchers, venture capitalists, and big pharma, but whether the new models will solve the problem was a question on the minds of many of the 15,000 attendees at this week's BIO International Convention in Boston.
The themes are familiar: venture capitalists are limiting their investments in biotech, in part because it's hard for fledgling life-science companies to go public, and although big pharma is desperate for innovative ideas and depends heavily on small biotechs for new drug candidates, these larger companies don't want to take on risky, early-stage projects. The new alliances, some of which involve direct collaborations between pharmaceutical companies and academics, are a response to what one panelist called this "crisis."
As you may know, the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development (MCDED) led the County's participation at the 2012 BIO International Convention held June 18-21 in Boston, MA.
Our team of business development professionals participated in dozens of business partnering forum meetings with national and international biotech companies during the course of the Convention. On June 19, MCDED held a press conference from the floor of the BIOMaryland Pavilion, kicked off by Human Genome Sciences CEO and Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) Board Chairman Tom Watkins and Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett. The press conference highlighted the success of the County's biotech investment incentive program - the nation's ONLY such local program which helped spur more than $6 million in investments to 10 County-based biotech companies in 2011 - and the creation of the County-inspired, regional biotech intermediary BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI). BHI is chaired by Scott Carmer, Executive Vice President, Commercial Operations, MedImmune and sponsored by Human Genome Sciences and several other local private-sector companies and academic institutions. The press conference also featured a panel, moderated by MedImmune CEO Peter Greenleaf, of County-based, serial biotech entrepreneurs discussing why and how they started companies in Montgomery County.
At least 68 “big” deals — investments of at least $2 million — have been done in digital health so far in 2012, according to a new report by the healthcare accelerator Rock Health. Nineteen states were in on the action.
Not so surprising, California lead the way in both the number of deals done and the overall investment. And traditional healthcare investing strongholds like Massachusetts were among those that did the most deals. But there were lesser known regions involved as well that invested significant dollars and did a notable number of deals, namely Texas, Illinois, Georgia and Connecticut.
Here’s a list of every region that did digital health deals so far this year.
At least 68 digital health companies have raised $2 million or more so far this year for a total of $675 million in digital health investments, according to a new report by healthcare accelerator Rock Health.
Look closer, though. Five companies accounted for nearly 40 percent of those total dollars.
It’s clear that patient shopping tools and home health technologies are where the big bets are going. Here’s the breakdown of the Big 5 deals.
US biotechnology firm Human Genome Sciences (HGS) has set a deadline of 16 July 2012 for offers to acquire the company, but has failed to tempt GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) into the process.
HGS has undertaken the strategic alternative review to sound out potential buyers who now have until the deadline to submit definitive proposals to purchase all outstanding common shares in the company.
The company adopted the strategy immediately after GSK made its offer to acquire HGS, valuing the company at $2.6bn.