As a result of research performed by scientists at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of a drug to treat the deleterious effects of radiation exposure following a nuclear incident. The drug, Neulasta®, is one of a very small number that have been approved for the treatment of acute radiation injury.

The research was done by Thomas J. MacVittie, PhD, professor, and Kim Hankey, PhD, Study Director, both in the Preclinical Radiobiology Laboratory at the University of Maryland School of Medicine Department of Radiation Oncology's Division of Translational Radiation Sciences (DTRS). The investigators did their research in a non-human clinical model of high-dose radiation. Ann M. Farese, MA, MS, assistant professor in the same lab and department, also contributed to the work.

Welcome to ARP Network Quarterly Notes! Our goal is to keep you informed about ARP Network and Agricultural Research Service (ARS) current information. We hope that the notes build networking opportunities for businesses to connect with ARP Network Members.

February 16, 2016 2:30pm EST

Are you a scientist, entrepreneur, business developer, investor or economic development professional working in the area of human nutrition, animals, plants or sustainable agriculture? Are you interested in collaborating with world class scientists to scale up promising technologies? If these questions resonate with you, then this is a webinar for you!

ARS utilization centers are available for establishing partnerships to scale-up ARS research into commercial processes. Each of these state-of-the-art utilization centers has a unique set of resources, facilities, technical experts and scientific research capabilities for the industrial scaleup of lab-based technologies

SHARE For Cures (SFC), a new Washington, DC-based non-profit that makes it easy for individuals to access and securely share their health data with researchers, announced today a new partnership with BioHealth Innovation, a Maryland-based innovation intermediary focused on connecting health technology innovators and entrepreneurs with government agencies and corporations.

Through the partnership, SHARE For Cures will become an affiliate of Relevant Health, a Rockville, MD-based technology accelerator supported by BioHealth Innovation.

It's wise to think ahead when it comes to cancer, says William Nelson, one of the nation's leading oncologists and director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University.

That includes taking steps like avoiding tobacco and tanning beds, especially when you're young.

In his final State of the Union address, President Obama announced a "moonshot" program to cure cancer. Obama named Vice President Joe Biden, whose son Beau died from brain cancer last year, to lead the government effort, which could even have bipartisan appeal. In 2015, House Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly passed the 21st Century Cures Act, which raises funding and lowers barriers for audacious medical research. (The Senate is considering its own version.) The bill's sponsor (and Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee), Fred Upton, tweeted his support for the Obama-Biden effort.

The Washington region could hit the billion-dollar mark in cybersecurity venture funding in 2016. Jonathan Aberman, managing director of Amplifier Ventures, a seed and early-stage venture capital fund based in McLean, said big fourth-quarter investments in cybersecurity companies helped boost overall venture funding in 2015 – and will continue to grow in 2016. He said the Washington region, a growing center for cybersecurity business and research overall, will see more big deals in 2016.

An ambitious effort to spark employment and redevelopment in Central West Baltimore is set for a public launch Monday.

The effort, called the Innovation Village, labels itself as Baltimore's first innovation district and spans some of the areas hardest hit in April's unrest.

Last year, three biomedical engineering (BME) MS students—Teresa Cauvel, Rebecca Peyser, and Sona Shah—took BME Lecturer Katherine E. Reuther’s new design course and came up with an idea for a health technology startup they called Neopenda. Their concept, born in January and shaped through Reuther’s class over the spring semester, was a low-cost, low-power, low-maintenance way to monitor neonatal vitals through engineered “hats,” a headband containing a small circuit that measures heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature, and blood oxygen saturation in critically ill infants and then sends the data to a centralized monitoring device.

It’s been a frenetic couple of weeks between Consumer Electronics Show and J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference so now it’s time to take a broader look at what investors took away from them. The latter conference has certainly evolved since its start as Hambrecht & Quist.

Our livers rested, our business cards sheathed – one more year of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference has come and gone. Given that the week was relatively quiet in terms of breaking news, the focus rested more solidly on trend analysis, moodiness – and what was not said. It also showed undercurrents of change.

Frederick software startup Luminal has raised $20 million and is changing its name to Fugue.

The Series C round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with investment from Core Capital. The new financing brings the company’s total funding to $34 million.

At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) CEO Andrew Witty made headlines when he signaled that he might be open to splitting the pharma giant in separate parts, a move some investors say would unlock more value.

Venture capitalists invested a whopping $451 million in Maryland companies in the last three months of 2015, the largest quarterly amount in the state in 15 years.

Germany has a long-standing reputation for life science innovation. However, most pharmaceutical and biotech companies are now headquartered in the US, and significantly more digital health solutions are developed in Silicon Valley and Boston than in Berlin or Munich.

At its recent AgeTech Expo, Aging2.0 held the 3rd annual Pitch-for-Pilots (P4P) competition where market-ready startups pitched their innovations to senior care providers in the audience in hopes of securing pilot partnerships.    Selected from more than 150 applications, the pitching companies presented the challenge they are addressing, their solution, what kind of pilot they would like to run and any requirements for the potential provider partner. The prize at hand for senior care partners? A free, 6-week pilot with at least 10 senior participants. 

Hundreds of people packed into Morgan State University’s Murphy Fine Arts Center on Thursday for this year’s TEDxBaltimore. FEATURED JOBS Design Assistant / Project Manager C.N.Robinson

Entry Level Management Trainee - Marketing / Sales / PR GVG, Inc. Med Tech/CNA/Caregiver Brightview Senior Living Post a JobSee More Jobs The day-long event featured 15-minute talks from 17 speakers on topics ranging from scientific discovery and space exploration to prison reform and racial inequality. There were too many interesting ideas to talk about them all, but here are a few that captured my attention:

"We have released our annual Regional Report. The report benchmarks the region against other metropolitan regions, the national average and specifically markets comparable to the Greater Baltimore region. This year’s report analyzes the region’s employment, innovation, quality of life, jobs and investment."

Venture capitalists invested more than $451 million in 14 different Maryland companies in the fourth quarter, tripling the amount raised in the third quarter. It was the state's best quarter since the second quarter of 2006, when just over $406 million was raised.

This position is located in the Office of Technology Transitions and reports directly to the Director, Office of Technology Transitions. If selected for this position, you will manage the OTT staff, as the advisor to the Director, and provide continuity between administrations. The Deputy Director will be a senior level staff serving as a point of contact for entities like the Laboratory Operations (LOB), Laboratory Policy Council (LPC), and Secretary's External Advisory Board (SEAB). The Deputy Director will manage the intra-agency tech Transfer Policy Board (TTPB). The Deputy Director will serves as an integral part of the Office of Technology Transitions, overseeing the day-today operations of the Office, continuously seeking efficiencies by providing oversight and coordination. The Deputy Director will develop and manage fit-for purpose oversight processed and procedures for technology transfer and reporting systems, including intellectual property, across the DOE enterprise. The Deputy Director will lead the development of annual OTT deliverables, working with appropriate DOE programmatic elements. The Deputy Director will lead OTT staff to ensure delivery of state of the art data management processes and solutions supporting effective technology transitions and outreach to the private sector. The Deputy Director will lead interactions needed with the Executive Office of the White House, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the General Services Administration (GSA), Congressional Committees and Subcommittees, State Officials, the non-profit sector, and other non-commercial entities to ensure DOE technology transitions polices and priorities are appropriately linked with related initiatives, and to improve existing, or develop new, processes and procedures for supporting technology transfer solutions.

The Obama administration has launched a ‘moonshot’ initiative to cure cancer that will involve increasing resources – both private and public – to fight cancer and break down walls between disciplines in the oncology arena. The effort will be led by vice president Joe Biden, who lost his son to brain cancer last year, President Obama announced during his final State of the Union speech. Biden worked with Congress last month to provide the US National Institutes of Health with its strongest budget in over a decade, Obama noted. ‘Let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all,’ he added.

Washington-area businesses raised more venture capital in the fourth quarter than they had in any quarter since 2001 — largely due to a few large deals.

The surge is not likely to be repeated soon given the recent stock market turmoil. Indeed, venture funding nationally declined during the period.

The TCM Industry Awards Celebration is the only awards ceremony that honors the best in Maryland’s technology and life science communities and is one of Maryland’s largest and most prestigious award ceremonies.

Awards go to those who develop the treatments, design the systems, and teach the children. It’s a celebration of great minds and the companies that believe in the future, and is attended by over 800 executives from the technology and life science industries, drawing a significant amount of local and national publicity.

What's the difference between a relatively flat economy and a vibrant and diversified region with high job and economic growth? Working together. That was the pitch Thursday morning as economist Steve Fuller unveiled the findings after months of research for a project dubbed “ The Roadmap for the Washington Region’s Economic Future.”

You’ve heard of 3-D printers creating architectural models, airplane parts and even prosthetic limbs. But bones? Warren Grayson, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, says it’s possible and not so far off in the future.

TPG Growth, the middle market and growth equity investment platform of TPG, a leading global private investment firm with approximately $70 billion of assets under management, today announced a $75 million investment in Precision for Medicine, Inc. Additional details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Kenneth Clark remembers the last time new investors moved into biotech. They came in the late 1980s.

They left in the early ’90s.

GE Healthcare, the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario), and the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine (CCRM) are building a centre for advanced therapeutic cell technologies in Toronto with an investment of CAD $40M from GE and FedDev Ontario. The centre is being established to accelerate the development and adoption of cell manufacturing technologies that improve patient access to novel regenerative medicine-based therapies. CCRM and GE will welcome partners from pharma, biotech and cell therapy companies to bring this initiative to life. 

It wasn't expected to be a major State of the Union address—a final speech from a president in his last term, recounting achievements and expressing hope for the future. And then Obama made some news: "Let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all." And to lead the administration's effort, the president picked VP Joe Biden, who recently lost his son Beau to cancer, and who has said that finding a cure is one of his major life goals

ATCC, the premier global biological materials resource and standards organization, announces today that it licensed CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. ATCC plans to use the gene editing technology to develop a portfolio of new products and services to support basic and translational research.

Ligand Pharmaceuticals  enters into a global license agreement with Emergent BioSolutions under which Emergent will use Ligand's OmniRat, OmniMouse and OmniFlic technologies to discover fully human mono- and bispecific antibodies.

AUTM today released its highly regarded annual U.S. Licensing Activity Survey report for FY2014. Along with real world and human impact stories about technology transfer’s ability to improve lives and boost economies, the report analyzes licensing activities at U.S. universities, hospitals and research institutions, with data such as the following:

In a partnership announced today, MedImmune, AstraZeneca’s global biologics and development arm, and the University of California, San Francisco will initiate further exploration of disease biology, specifically delving into core underlying mechanisms in microbiome and regenerative medicine. With an emphasis on basic research and translational sciences, the organizations’ work will include working toward identifying biomarkers and understanding disease progression and the effects of biomarkers on clinical trial outcomes.

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Qiagen said yesterday that it has inked a master collaboration for companion diagnostics codevelopment with Array BioPharma, the 15^th pharma agreement of this type.

The way Health and Human Services Chief Technology Officer Susannah Fox sees it, the U.S. government totally missed the Internet boom and has been trying to catch up with ever since.

“I would say gently that the government was caught flat footed when the Internet came about,” she said