Karen Vignare, Ph.D., an innovator in curriculum design and in the use of technology in learning, has been named associate provost and will lead University of Maryland University College’s new Center for Innovation in Learning. Vignare began her new post on June 3.

The Center for Innovation in Learning will be a laboratory for continuous improvements to the university’s curriculum, faculty development model and student support through its own work and through partnerships with high-profile organizations that will help further the work of the center.

A new mobile health trends report released Wednesday underscores the mid- to low sophistication of current mHealth application technology but also emphasizes the explosive growth and integration headed for the market .  

The Research and Markets mHealth trends report shows the industry poised for a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent by 2017, to reach a value of $26 billion. This revenue, researchers project, will be derived predominantly from mHealth hardware sales and services. 

Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett is leading a 2013 trade and Sister-City China Mission trip from Sept. 15 to Sept. 25, 2013. The Mission is organized by Montgomery County Government and Maryland China Business Council ( MCBC ) with the support of the State of Maryland ’s Maryland Center China ( MCC ) in Shanghai, which has been assisting local companies in China since 1996. This combination of experience and long term relationships offers a unique opportunity to explore, enter or expand in one of the world’s most dynamic and fast growing markets and destinations.   Mission Statement:

Sister Cities create relationships based on cultural, educational and trade exchanges, creating lifelong friendships that provide prosperity and mutual benefits through “citizen diplomacy.”

Participants for trip include:

County Executive; State and County Government Representatives; Business, Education, Academic and Science Leaders; Chinese Community Leaders

The bridges had to be strong and stable — and made of spaghetti.

Charged with this unusual engineering task, a group of about 40 high school students worked intently Thursday with the uncooked yellow strands to build a roughly half-meter structure they had designed to support more weight than their competitors’.

Washington, DC, is growing as a close-knit entrepreneur community where startups can find angel investors who will also act as mentors to grow a business, venture capitalists say.

The DC area has fewer venture capital firms than Silicon Valley, but steady startup investment is coming from tech industry veterans who have experience working with area universities, government agencies, and telecom companies including AOL, said John Taylor, head of research for the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

The Daily Record is proud to announce its 2013 Most Admired CEO award winners.

The award recognizes men and women who have excelled professionally and in serving their communities.

The nominees were evaluated in terms of leadership and vision, competitiveness and service, community leadership and service, financial performance and growth and corporate leadership and board service.

When it comes to lending to tech startups, Silicon Valley Bank has an impressive grip on the market. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based institution has been in the D.C. area 15 years and claims half of the region's venture-backed companies as its clients. The bank, which has $21.5 billion in assets, has grown its Tysons Corner team by 25 percent in the past year to 10 people. I caught up with Megan Scheffel, who manages the bank's Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern U.S. regions.

The Maryland Technology Development Corp. (Tedco) has invested $1.1 million in 14 state startups.

The grants were made through the organization's Technology Commercialization Fund. The money will be put toward advancing the each company's technology and product commercialization efforts.

We often hear public leaders say “our diversity is our strength,” which has become somewhat a cliché over the years. While I don’t doubt their sincerity in believing what they say, I wonder how many truly understand what it means to have a large, diverse, and global population in their communities.

This past weekend, I attended the Chinese Biopharmaceutical Association’s (CBA) 18th annual conference, which attracted scientists, educators, businesses and entrepreneurs from the region as well as delegations from several cities in China. It was a high-energy conference hosted by an all-volunteer crew of local community members.

If there’s one thing everyone in healthcare can probably agree on right now, it’s that there is an awful lot of data being generated each and every day. What to do with that data, however, is another question.

As Ted Driscoll, digital health director at venture capital firm Claremont Creek Ventures, sees it, the explosion of data is a definite boon for personalized medicine. Indeed, he said recently, “Medicine is becoming synonymous with big data – the data sets are just huge, now – but we had to wait for the IT revolution to happen and mature” in order to begin to put that data to use.

NCATS Research & Development Day will provide the unique opportunity to showcase the projects and technologies that have been incubating in a variety of NCATS drug development programs, including Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases (TRND) and Bridging Interventional Development Gaps (BrIDGs), to an audience of biopharmaceutical companies, venture capital, angel investors, foundations, and others. The object is to connect our collaborators with strategic partners that will provide financial and technical support to bring potential novel therapeutics to patients. The event will be held:

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research        

Cambridge, Massachusetts

When: Wednesday July 24, 2013 from 4:30 PM to 7:00 PM EDT

Where: Growlers 227 E Diamond Ave Gaithersburg, MD 20877

Join us for a co-hosted BioBuzz and Women In Bio event with our sponsor, Social & Scientific Systems, Inc., along with many others from the local biotech industry at another exciting BioBuzz event on July 24th from 4:30 - 7:00 p.m. in Gaithersburg.  Due to an overwhelming positive response to the location, we're continuing to holding the event this month at Growlers in Old Towne Gaithersburg. We're excited to see all of you soon, so please register today!

The year is only half over, but one of the biggest biotech stories of 2013 is going to be the resurgence of the biotech IPO market. It’s a good news/bad news story, depending on where you stand, and how far you look out into the future.

First, the good. The IPO surge is a vote of confidence in biotech from generalist investors who have spent years ignoring the industry. It’s good news for biotech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who back them. A lot of money will get pumped into researching and developing drugs for diseases that have been long neglected, like Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Regional innovation clusters will get a boost. Many small companies will have more negotiating leverage when they talk to Big Pharma companies about acquisitions. It might spur more much-needed venture investment in biotech startups.

Johns Hopkins researchers have coaxed stem cells into forming networks of new blood vessels in the laboratory, then successfully transplanted them into mice, a technique that could potentially be used to make blood vessels genetically matched to individual patients, the investigators say.

Their research results appear online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Healthbox, a leading business accelerator focused on healthcare technology and technology-enabled companies, is expanding its accelerator program to Nashville this fall with anchor partner BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. Healthbox is strategically building local partnerships in key cities to stimulate a pipeline of new solutions, while creating a global community of leaders passionate about improving healthcare. This is the second new Healthbox location revealed in 2013; another one was launched in Boston in April, preceded by one in Chicago in 2012.

“We have been planning our entrance into this market for the last year,” says Healthbox founder and CEO, Nina Nashif. “Nashville is the Silicon Valley of healthcare and the best place for us as we continue to expand the breadth and depth of our community.”

Monday, August 19, 2013 - Wednesday, August 21, 2013 

Time: 7:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Location:
Natcher Conference Center
45 Center Drive
Bethesda, MD 20892

Sponsored by:
Blood Diseases Program
Division of Blood Diseases and Resources
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
National Institutes of Health
Department of Health and Human Services 

The following funding opportunity announcements from the NHLBI or other components of the National Institutes of Health, might be of interest:

NIH Guide Notice:

NOT-OD-13-087: Notice of Change to Page Limits and Application Due Date in RFA-OD-13-008 Limited Competition: Restoring Research Resources Lost Due to Hurricane Sandy (R24)

• The purpose of this Notice is to revise the page limits for the Research Strategy section and to extend the due date of RFA-OD-13-008.

NOT-DK-13-012: Notice to Include AIDS Application Due Dates for PA-12-179 Exploratory/Developmental Clinical Research Grants in Obesity (R21)

• Effective immediately, applicants may submit AIDS-related research applications to PA-12-179 "Exploratory/Developmental Clinical Research Grants in Obesity (R21)" on the standard AIDS Application Due Dates.

NOT-HL-13-184: Correction of Key Dates for PAR-13-009 Secondary Dataset Analyses in Heart, Lung, and Blood Diseases and Sleep Disorders (R21)

• Key dates for PAR-13-009 "Secondary Dataset Analyses in Heart, Lung, and Blood Diseases and Sleep Disorders (R21) have been revised.

Requests for Applications (RFAs):

RFA-HL-14-010: Developing a Point-of-Care Device for the Diagnosis of Sickle Cell Disease in Low Resource Settings SBIR (R43/ R44)

• This announcement encourages applications that propose to develop a point of care device for the diagnosis of sickle cell disease (SCD) in infants and young children in low-income and low-resource settings. The aim of this program is to provide rapid diagnosis of SCD to children such that appropriate therapy can be given to reduce the risk of future complications.

The D.C. region raised $418 million in venture funding in April, May and June, according PricewaterhouseCoopers' MoneyTree report, more than twice the total of second quarter 2012.

The "DC/Metroplex," as defined by PWC, includes far-flung areas of Virginia and Maryland, not just the District and its suburbs. With the strong second quarter haul, the region has raised nearly as much in the first half of 2013 ($704 million) as it did all of last year ($735 million). For comparison, companies in the area raised $203 million in Q2 2012, and $286 million in the first three months of 2013.

Biotechnology companies can access financial and management resources through venture capitalist (VC) firms. An analysis of 1,490 VC investments shows that country-of-origin (CO) of biotech companies has an effect on the participation by VC firms in various biotech subsectors. Specifically, it is found that US biotech companies tend to have higher amount received per VC firm, greater number of VC firms investing in them and greater biotech investment experience of the investing VC firms. Asia-Pacific biotech companies have consistently less VC firms investing in them and these investing VC firms tend to have less biotech investment experience. VC firms with greater biotech investment experience are also investing in European biotech companies more than those from the Americas less US. CO also correlates with outcomes in the four of the six key biotech subsectors studied. These findings suggest a strong CO effect of VC investment in biotech companies.

Venture capitalists invested $318 million in young Maryland companies from April through June, an increase of 115 percent from the first quarter, according to a report released Friday by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

About half of that financing, or $150 million, went to Precision for Medicine Inc., a Chevy Chase company that provides services for medical drug discovery, the report said. That was the highest amount any business in the country raised in the quarter and was matched only by a New York e-commerce website.

Venture capital funding for health IT totaled $623 million during the second quarter of 2013, according to a report by Mercom Capital Group, FierceHealthIT, reports.

The report found that there were 168 health IT-related venture capital deals in Q2 2013, compared with 104 the previous quarter. At the half-year mark, health IT-related venture capital funding was nearly equal to all of such funding in 2012, the report found.

Students at the University of York are challenging what they see as the closed worlds of nanotechnology and healthcare by crowdsourcing funds to produce a new type of treatment for cancer using magnetic nanoparticles.

Atif Syed and Zakareya Hussein, students in the department of electronics and nanotechnology engineering, are using US-based funding site Microryza to find $3,000 to develop a pharmaceutical patch that delivers tiny nanoparticles into the body via hair follicles.

“We are a team of guerrilla fundraisers who have launched a global campaign to fund research into a potential treatment for the cancer that killed Steve Jobs. The potential therapy, a cancer-busting virus, is currently sitting in a freezer in Sweden – but it can’t be tested for lack of just £2million” was iCancer’s pitch on Indiegogo, a crowdfunding portal. The company brought in more than $160,000 from this campaign.

Microryza is another crowdfunding platform exclusively for scientific research projects, available only to PhDs and professors who can attempt to raise money through this private channel instead of applying for grants.  “This solution helps close the gap for potential and promising, but unfunded projects,” Bill Gates says about Microryza. With Kickstartr’s popularity, there has been an explosion of growth in crowdfunding portals, both general as well as ones targeting a specific niche.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. (NYSE:EBS) today announced the appointment of General George A. Joulwan (retired) to the company’s Board of Directors. General Joulwan has a highly distinguished military career that spans 36 years from 1961 to his retirement in 1997. Highlights of General Joulwan’s military service include: Serving as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR); Commander in Chief, U.S. Southern Command; Commanding General, V Corps and Commanding General, 3rd Armored Division, United States Army Europe and U.S. Seventh Army, Germany. He has received numerous military decorations and foreign awards and decorations for his bravery and service, including two Silver Stars for valor.

Fuad El-Hibri, executive chairman of the board of Emergent BioSolutions, stated, “General Joulwan has devoted his four-decade career to serving the country, protecting our freedoms, and architecting peace around the world. He is a true and distinguished public servant, who is highly-respected in the global military community. As we expand our portfolio with specialized products that address the needs of U.S. and worldwide governments, his expertise and stature will be invaluable in guiding Emergent's management team towards further growth.”

Montgomery Business Development Corporation is pleased to announce the launch of their new website montgomerybusiness.org.

The enhanced website includes business-friendly features, data resources and information to support existing and future business and development in our vibrant economy.

About 20 kids garbed in lab coats, booties and goggles entered a laboratory on Friday through a door marked with a bright-red “BIOHAZARD” sticker.

Filling the small room, they gathered around lab coordinator and microbiologist Cindy Reichelderfer, who held up several petri dishes in which scientists had tested for the presence of anthrax.

A group of former executives from Martek Biosciences Corp. have formed a new company that plans to open memory and brain wellness clinics around the country.

Steve Dubin, who was Martek’s CEO, and David Abramson, who was the company’s president, are part of the group that formed NeurExpand Brain Performance Center. They are partnering with Dr. Majid Fotuhi, a Lutherville neurologist, who developed a 12-week program that uses diet, brain exercise and other factors to improve memory. Fotuhi is the author of several books on memory and is a Harvard Medical School graduate with a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University, according to his website.

Overseas medical technology companies continue to stream into Greater Boston, lured by the area’s famous ecosystem of researchers, startups, and potential collaborators.

One company that flew in under the radar was Qiagen N.V., a Dutch holding company with corporate offices in Germany, which quietly acquired two privately held Massachusetts companies last year and may—or may not—be expanding its foothold in the Boston area.

Rexahn Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NYSE MKT: RNN), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, announced today that it has signed an exclusive license agreement with the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) for a novel drug delivery platform, Nano-Polymer-Drug Conjugate Systems (NPDCS). This technology targets the delivery of currently marketed chemotherapeutic agents directly into cancerous tumors. The direct delivery of chemotherapeutic drugs into the tumors has been shown to result in increased efficacy and reduced toxicity.

The NPDCS platform combines existing chemotherapeutic agents with a proprietary polymer carrier that contains a signaling moiety which directs the drug into the tumor. This approach minimizes the levels of freely circulating anti-cancer agents in the body, which can dramatically reduce potential adverse events, and maximizes anti-tumor activity by accumulating in the cancer tumor. NPDCS is a broad platform that has the potential to generate multiple therapeutic candidates going forward.

Summer wouldn't be complete without a trip to the sandy shores of an ocean, bay, lake or river. As the gritty stuff gets in between your toes, you may wonder why beaches are distinctive sandy stretches and why sand looks and feels the way it does.

And then again, you might not — you didn't come to the beach to think, did you? But for those in an asking mood, a sandy beach is essentially where pulverized, weathered rock along with some fragments of shelled creatures and other biota have collected, tossed up by the waves and as sediment from inland areas.

National Cancer Institute scientists have released the largest-ever database of cancer-related genetic variations, providing researchers the most comprehensive way so far to figure out how to target treatments for the disease.

Open access worldwide to the new database, based on genome studies, is expected to help researchers accelerate development of new drugs and better match patients with therapies, NCI said in a statement on Monday.

Here's another reason the dysfunctional federal budget process is bad for Americans: besides hurting the economy and hitting us in the pocketbook, partisan feuding over budget cuts could undermine our health and even shorten our lives.

That's because House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and others in Congress have been using the budget process to target research in the behavioral and social sciences for elimination, even though they're indispensable to understanding and improving Americans' health.

A Silver Spring company is looking to build the county’s first net zero facility, a building that would produce enough energy to sustain itself annually.

United Therapeutics —a biotechnology company that works on the development and commercialization of unique medical products — is expanding its campus with the new facility on the corner of Spring Street and Colesville Road in downtown Silver Spring. The building at 1000 Spring Street will have solar panels, a green roof and special placement of windows to allow for natural light and cross breezes to push hot air out of the facility, among other environmentally sustainable features, according to a presentation the design team gave to the Silver Spring Citizens Advisory Board on July 8.

The Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program, an initiative of the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech) in the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, has awarded $3.8 million to 17 teams combining Maryland companies with university researchers to bring technology products closer to market, program officials announce today.

MIPS, a technology acceleration program, grants money matched with company funds to faculty engaged in each project.

Johns Hopkins Hospital has reclaimed the top position on U.S. News & World Report’s 2013-2014 list of best hospitals.

The return to No. 1 comes a year after Massachusetts General Hospital edged out Hopkins for the top spot on last year’s honor roll list. Hopkins had been No. 1 since 1991.