Fyodor, a Baltimore-based biotechnology company, announced today that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the company a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 grant. The $729,000 funding will help accelerate Fyodor’s effort to develop and validate a noninvasive multi-disease urine-based diagnostic test for Acute Febrile Illness (AFI), enabling the differential clinical diagnosis of leading global health diseases like malaria, typhoid, dengue, and leptospirosis from a single urine specimen in patients with fever.

Berlin, Germany, and U.S.A. - Epigenomics AG (Frankfurt Prime Standard: ECX, OTC: EPGNY), the German-American cancer molecular diagnostics company, announced today that it has entered into a joint commercialization agreement with Polymedco Inc., a leading provider of colorectal cancer tests in North America. Both companies will jointly commercialize Epi proColon®, Epigenomics' blood-based test for colorectal cancer (CRC) screening, in North America.

Chevy Chase-based New Enterprise Associates has joined in a $10 million financing for Cydan LLC, a Cambridge, Mass.-based orphan drug accelerator.

The additional funding comes months after the project’s launch in April, and brings its total financing to $26 million. Lundbeckfond Ventures and Bay City Capital led the most recent financing.

A veteran biotechnology reporter once complained privately that covering the industry was like watching grass grow—companies seemed to inch by slow degrees toward products and profits, sustained by a dwindling stream of funding.

For an antidote to that dreary picture, consider the swift developments at StartX Med, a life sciences accelerator program founded by Stanford University students in 2012. It’s a health care-oriented offshoot of StartX, the original student-initiated incubator program for researchers and others affiliated with Stanford.

BIO's announced agreement with National Science Foundation (NSF) to bring SBIR-funded, early-stage biotech companies to present at BIO Investor Forum 2013. Presenting companies in NSF track include ADMdx, Biodesy, Carmot, CertiChem, Jade Therapeutics, Nano3D Biosciences, Nanofiber Solutions, Parabon Nanolabs, Stemina, and Tymora Analytical Operations. All are funded by NSF and focused on drug discovery, diagnostics, and other platform technologies.

As health systems and hospitals consolidate and battle for patients, they are starting to employ online consumer marketing efforts. A new Provider Web Presence Index is now available to track the success of providers.

Payer+Provider Syndicate has created the Provider Web Presence Index, which was released Tuesday, and evaluates the quality of the web presence of hospitals compared with competitors. The tool is based on a single indicator, which incorporates measures of web traffic, inbound linking and site relevance.

When Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Intuitive Surgical hit the market in 1999 with its surgical robot, da Vinci, the company and many of its early adopters hailed the new technology as a revolution that would benefit patients, surgeons and the health care system as a whole. Da Vinci combines high-definition visual tools with robot-guided medical instruments that allow surgeons to do complicated procedures using a few tiny incisions. The da Vinci system, which is widely used in urologic surgeries such as the removal of prostate tumors, has been shown by Intuitive and outside researchers to reduce post-surgery complications and shorten hospital stays.

Two days into a government shutdown over resulting from the Congressional showdown over funding Obamacare, funding is at the front of mind for many researchers who rely at least partially on grants from National Institutes of Health and other government sources. A survey of 608 translational researchers revealed that although insufficient funding is a significant barrier to the path to commercializing their work, there are other related challenges that are just as critical to their future.

How can translational researchers improve the rate of reproducible results? What other factors are undercutting funding? Where can they find collaboration opportunities?

The STEM workforce in the DC area is sizable and totals about 330,000 workers. Some of these employees are retiring, some are changing jobs, and others are getting promotions leaving positions open. The healthy STEM climate means that there are a lot of job opportunities at all levels. But where do your students find STEM jobs? On TCM's targeted career center, CORE.

CORE is a comprehensive resource for finding all levels of biotechnology, technology, and business jobs in the Mid-Atlantic region.CORE provides detailed job and internship listings in 15 categories that are updated frequently and promoted through our social media channels for easy access. Many companies in the area that hire STEM workers are TCM members and are vested in hiring local talent. So prepare your students for success and direct them to CORE. In addition to job listings, we also offer timely career resource articles to help students meet the many challenges of their job search.

Want to show your students that you're committed to their future? Purchase a banner ad on the CORE website to let local companies know about the courses, certificates, and degrees you offer to prepare your students for STEM jobs.

The University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Center for Vaccine Development announced on Thursday that it has received a renewed contract from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for its research and clinical studies.

“The University of Maryland’s Center for Vaccine Development has long been a partner of the federal government in the clinical evaluation of vaccines,” Karen L. Kotloff, a professor of pediatrics and medicine and the head of infectious disease and tropical pediatrics at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine, said. “Renewal of our contract is a testimony to our expertise in helping protect people throughout the world against diseases that pose significant public health threats.”

The Department of Health and Human Services isn’t the only federal agency interested in funding medical research.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Department of Defense’s primary innovation engine that’s responsible for developing new technologies for use by the military, also frequently undertakes project in biology, medicine and neuroscience.

After nearly 17 years, Elaine Amir, executive director of Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus, retired, effective Sept. 30. Elaine has been the face of Johns Hopkins in Montgomery County and a leader on several community boards and initiatives. Through her work, she touched many lives, both personally and professionally.

Before she left, Hopkins Happenings asked her to look back on her years leading JHU MCC:

Improving health literacy and patient engagement and developing alternative ways to appraise apps and physicians are among the ideas that have reached the finals of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation competition. The people and companies behind these ideas are vying for the opportunity to get funding as part of a program to fund transformative innovations in healthcare.

Among the judges are Angel investor Esther Dyson (@edyson), PatientsLikeMe Co-Founder and President Ben Heywood (@patientslikeme), Rhode Island School of Design President John Maeda(@johnmaeda), IDEO Life Sciences Chief Strategist Rodrigo Martinez(@rodrigoatcg), Games for Health Co-Founder Ben Sawyer (@bensawyer), Fast Company Staff Writer Ben Schiller(@btschiller) and NPR Science Correspondent Shankar Vedantam(@hiddenbrain).

Cydan, LLC, an orphan drug accelerator that identifies and de-risks programs with therapeutic and commercial potential, today announced that the company has expanded its initial round of financing, bringing its total financing raised to $26 million. Cydan launched in April 2013 with a $16 million financing from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Pfizer Venture Investments and Alexandria Venture Investments. New investors Lundbeckfond Ventures and Bay City Capital led the $10 million expansion of this round of financing and were joined by Cydan’s previous investors NEA and Alexandria Venture Investments. In conjunction with this investment, Lundbeckfond Ventures Managing Partner Mette Kirstine Agger, MBA and Bay City Capital Investment Partner and Managing Director Carl Goldfischer, M.D., are joining Cydan’s Board of Directors.

Sequencing the human genome seemed like a discovery so important that it couldn’t be overhyped—we had, after all, transcribed the blueprint for human life—but biotech executives somehow managed the trick. William Haseltine, the founder of Human Genome Sciences, predicted in 2000 that he would halve the time and money required to bring a drug to market. Randy Scott of Incyte Genomics claimed that, “In 10 years, we will understand the molecular basis for most human diseases.”

Not quite. The cost of bringing a drug to market has increased dramatically, quibbles about accounting methods notwithstanding. The process still takes more than a decade. We already had a thorough understanding of diseases linked to single genetic sequences, such as Huntington’s and cystic fibrosis, but if anything, exploring the genome has taught us how complicated the relationship between genes and diseases really is. Last year, for example, researchers in Canada linked 71 genetic regions to inflammatory bowel disease, bringing the total to 163 and counting.

An early-stage investment fund founded by Revolution has raised $200 million in commitments, blowing past its $150 million goal. The new fund, Revolution Ventures, will invest in technology firms, mostly under $10 million in revenue, that are seeking to disrupt traditional industries.

“We are doing the things that we’ve been doing for the last decade,” Revolution co-founder Steve Case said. “Trying to find early-stage companies that are using technology to disrupt traditional industries, create new business models and have all kinds of different aspects that we find interesting.”

As the Managing Director at a tech accelerator, I face a dilemma. I need to fund the most talented people, because they’ll be most likely to build great companies. But I also need to find the hidden gems.  I’m the sort of person who’s always looking for the best deals.  Let me tell you, great deals almost always come from unexpected sources.

Here’s the problem: If I look for talent in the same places everyone else does — at Stanford, Harvard, and MIT — I’ll have to fight crowds of investors and even other accelerators who are trying to do the same thing I am. I don’t like lines, and I hate waiting, so I don’t go with the crowd. I try to create value where others don’t recognize it.

Emergent Biosolutions, the maker of the only FDA-licensed anthrax vaccine, is expanding its footprint in Montgomery County, with a little bit of financial help from the state and county. Emergent is taking 50,000-square feet (the precise number was reported by the Washington Business Journal earlier this month) at 400 Professional Dr., a 129,360-square foot, five-story building here, owned by Corporate Office Properties Trust. It will be moving 112 of its current employees to the building in early 2015. Emergent plans to purchase building, which is adjacent to its current research and development facility located at 300 Professional Dr.

What is interesting about the deal is the rare glimpse it reveals about the type of state and county incentives available for such transactions: the State of Maryland contributed $2 million, Montgomery County $750,000 and the City of Gaithersburg $250,000.

These days, having a strategic investor or partner has become almost a matter of survival for healthcare startups.

Corporate investing and partnering has really taken off over the last few years as pharma and medical device companies have opened their doors and wallets to find innovation outside of their four walls.

Anyone can have a great business idea, and now students don’t have to be enrolled in the business school to get help making their ideas a success.

This semester, the business school’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship expanded its Innovation Fridays program to reach students of all majors. The program, which used to be advertised only to business school students, gives student entrepreneurs free consultations with successful business owners to get advice for starting their own small businesses, promoting social causes or creating new technology.

Earlier this year Sun Yat-sen University, a well-regarded institution in Guangzhou in the Guangdong province of China, announced that the university and affiliated hospitals were entering into a novel collaboration with Johns Hopkins Medicine. The agreement would see Hopkins faculty working bilaterally with Sun Yat-sen’s medical faculty both in China and at Hopkins in order to help the university become a world-class biomedical research institute. The deal has significant implications for U.S. hospitals because, facing declining revenues, international collaborations like these offer a new path for growth.

It was the 30th major, revenue-producing, international healthcare collaboration for Johns Hopkins Medicine, with several more currently under negotiation — when the rest of the world combined has perhaps a few dozen similar partnerships. One reason Hopkins is outpacing others is because it created an agile satellite unit – Johns Hopkins Medicine International (JHI) – within the much larger parent organization solely dedicated to these projects.

Bureaucracy is one of the dirty words in business. Nobody wants to publicly admit their company is bogged down with too many layers of management, or needs a dozen committees to sign off on every little decision. For a couple years now, I’ve been hearing entrepreneurs complain about suffocating bureaucracy in pharma.

So I started asking people to name names by answering this question:

GL-2045 is Gliknik’s Lead Recombinant Stradomer™ Designed to Improve on Pooled Human Intravenous Immunoglobulin

Gliknik Inc., a privately held biopharmaceutical company, today announced that it has entered into an exclusive worldwide licensing agreement with Pfizer Inc. for GL-2045, Gliknik’s recombinant stradomer™, a drug candidate that is designed to replace and improve on pooled human intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG). GL-2045 has shown promising results in a broad range of preclinical tests and is being developed as a potential treatment for a wide variety of autoimmune diseases, including those in which IVIG is clinically used.

“GL-2045 is the first of several innovative drug candidates Gliknik is advancing for people with autoimmune diseases and cancer,” said Gliknik CEO David S. Block. “We selected Pfizer as our partner to progress GL-2045 from among several interested and capable parties because of its exceptional development, manufacturing and commercial capabilities.”

Bureaucracy is one of the dirty words in business. Nobody wants to publicly admit their company is bogged down with too many layers of management, or needs a dozen committees to sign off on every little decision. For a couple years now, I've been hearing entrepreneurs complain about suffocating bureaucracy in pharma.

Anyone can have a great business idea, and now students don't have to be enrolled in the business school to get help making their ideas a success. This semester, the business school's Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship expanded its Innovation Fridays program to reach students of all majors. The program, which used to be advertised only to business school students, gives student entrepreneurs free consultations with successful business owners to get advice for starting their own small businesses, promoting social causes or creating new technology.

These days, having a strategic investor or partner has become almost a matter of survival for healthcare startups. Corporate investing and partnering has really taken off over the last few years as pharma and medical device companies have opened their doors and wallets to find innovation outside of their four walls.

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, September 30, 2013 – Gliknik Inc., a privately held biopharmaceutical company, today announced that it has entered into an exclusive worldwide licensing agreement with Pfizer Inc. for GL-2045, Gliknik's recombinant stradomer™, a drug candidate that is designed to replace and improve on pooled human intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG). GL-2045 has shown promising results in a broad range of preclinical tests and is being developed as a potential treatment for a wide variety of autoimmune diseases, including those in which IVIG is clinically used.

Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's Research Park Corporation - also known as bwtech@UMBC - hosted a ceremony today for the first graduating class of the Cyber Cync Program: AccelerEyes, Five Directions and Oculis Labs.

The event also marked the expansion of bwtech@UMBC's Cyber Incubator program, a sign of the program's success and the positive economic impact both initiatives are making on the region.

A new investment fund structured by JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will, for the first time, allow individual and institutional investors the opportunity to finance late-stage global health technologies that have the potential to save millions of lives in low-income countries.

With $94 million committed by a pioneering group of investors – including anchor support from Grand Challenges Canada (funded by the Government of Canada), the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (acting through KfW) and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation – the Global Health Investment Fund (“GHIF” or the “Fund”) will help advance the most promising interventions to fight challenges in low-income countries such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and maternal and infant mortality. To help mitigate the risk of investing in the clinical development of new technologies, the Gates Foundation and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency have committed to partially offset potential losses in the Fund, which will seek a financial return for investors by targeting high-impact technologies with public health applications in both developed and emerging markets.

President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act into law on April 5, 2012.  BIO advocated strongly for this new law, which includes several important policies designed to stimulate capital formation for growing businesses, including those in the biotech industry.  Some of the new policies were self-effectuating, while others are awaiting rulemaking at the SEC.  Below is a summary of the relevant provisions in the new law, along with a status update on the implementation process for each.

Newt Fowler looked across Baltimore’s Renaissance Hotel ballroom and noted who was missing from the tables.

Sure, there are plenty of leaders in today’s innovation economy in Baltimore, Fowler told the crowd Thursday at the Greater Baltimore Committee’s Economic Outlook Conference.

“They’re just not in this room today,” he said.

What we’ve got in our corner: Everything from good schools to a really funky music scene.

What we need to do: Everything from reform our corporate tax structure to rearrange our offices.

What’s at stake: The economic drivers who will keep Baltimore, and Maryland, competitive with the rest of the country and the rest of the world.

Baltimore’s Sage Growth Partners sees opportunity where others see a headache.

Over the past few years Sage, a health care technology consulting firm, has seen business pick up as more health care providers look for help installing and managing the new electronic record systems. CEO Don McDaniel declined to disclose the company’s revenue but said Sage has seen 50 percent annual growth for the past five years. That’s a trend he expects to continue as the company makes a move to break into consulting for startup companies in the health IT sector.

Companies spent $294 billion on research and development performed in the United States during 2011, compared with $279 billion during 2010 (table 1). Funding from the companies’ own sources was $222 billion during 2010 and $239 billion during 2011; funding from other sources was $57 billion in 2010 and $55 billion in 2011 (table 2). Data for this InfoBrief are from the Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS), which was developed and cosponsored by the National Science Foundation and Census Bureau.

The National Institutes of Health is making available approximately $3.7 million for awards to enhance training opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to prepare them for careers in the biomedical research workforce that could take them outside of conventional academic research.

The first set of NIH Director’s Broadening Experience in Scientific Training (BEST) awards are supported through the NIH Common Fund’s Strengthening the Biomedical Research Workforce program.