Yet another report’s pointing out biotech’s bullish venture appeal – and how medical device investment continues to flag.

In fact, biotechnology funding for human therapeutics is so strong that its venture funding outpaces pharmaceuticals sevenfold, a PricewaterhouseCoopers venture analysis of the first quarter of 2015 life sciences sector found.

The U.S. congress has proposed budgets cuts for research, but more and more scientists are turning to crowdfunding to bring their projects to light.

On May 20, 2015, the US House Republicans voted to place limits on funding for scientific research. The bill, which passed 217 votes to 205, still has to through the Senate, but it sets an ominous tone for future research.

When this year’s winners of the InvestMaryland Challenge were announced, Bricata stood out.

Amid the Maryland companies who finished atop the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development competition, the cybersecurity company was listed as hailing from Vienna, Va.

Osage University Partners, a Philadelphia-area venture firm that only invests in tech transfer spinouts, just closed its second fund – valued at $215 million.

About half of that funding will likely go towards life sciences companies – particularly in the therapeutics space, said managing partner William Harrington. Cancer, GI and cardiovascular drugs are the most interesting to Osage, he said, though the firm’s interested in diversifying its holdings. Most of the other investment will be made in tech companies.

The NIH has jumped onto the whole startup challenge-meets-accelerator trend – using it as a way to galvanize the private sector into licensing the government’s own technology.

It recently announced the winners of its Neuro Startup Challenge – a competition in which teams of students from various universities were tasked with with building out business plans around the NIH’s intellectual property. The teams worked to find ways to commercialize predetermined therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices sanctioned by the government for startup use.

Baltimore entrepreneurs cleaned up at the Maryland Technology Development Corp.’s annual ICE Awards, which recognize some of TEDCO’s most successful portfolio companies.

Analytical Informatics, Lookingglass and Opiatalk CEO Tom Popomaronis, all based in Baltimore, took top honors for innovation, corporate excellence and entrepreneurship.

The statistics are staggering: 1 in 2 women and 1 in 3 men will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. This means that cancer will very likely affect each and every one of us at some point in our lives -- whether it is through our own personal diagnosis or through that of someone we love. In light of this, I'd like share eight things that we as survivors and potential targets of this disease need to know.

The region's biggest venture capital raise of the year belongs to RegenxBio.

The Rockville-based biotech company has closed a $70.5 million Series D round led by new investor Vivo Capital, a Silicon Valley health care backer, and existing investors Venrock and Brookside Capital.

Baltimore City was among five urban locales to be selected for the first-ever City Accelerator initiative.

Run by Citigroup’s Citi Foundation and Living Cities, the initiative is providing money to five cities in order to promote innovation in local government.

QIAGEN today announced the opening of its new principal office in Malaysia to serve its growing base of customers for Sample to Insight solutions, enabling them to help fight diseases using molecular diagnostics, break new ground in research for the life sciences and pharmaceutical industry, and protect the public through food safety and forensics testing applications.

Relevant Health, a newly launched innovative health technology startup accelerator focused on bringing products to market, announced that it is now accepting applications from health tech startups for its Fall 2015 class. Additionally, the accelerator launched its website and the portal to its streamlined application process. U.S. and international startups are encouraged to apply.

Relevant Health’s five-month program involves an intensive product-focused curriculum that gives founders of health tech startups the skills to define, develop, position and launch a viable health tech product. The new accelerator will be based out of a brand-new cowork space in the Rockville Innovation Center, centrally located in the heart of the Montgomery County (Maryland) life sciences corridor. Companies admitted to the accelerator will have access to the cowork facility along with other support that includes up to $50,000 in funding, mentorship, development support from a pool of software engineers, and access to the local health tech ecosystem.

Emergent BioSolutions (NYSE: EBS) announced that it has signed a strategic long-term manufacturing agreement with ProMetic Life Sciences Inc. This agreement provides ProMetic access to Emergent's cGMP FDA-licensed biopharmaceuticals facility located in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

The SR One VC unit of GlaxoSmithKline plc (ADR) (NYSE:GSK) has contributed in the Series C $39 million funding round of PsiOxus Therapeutics. The company is raising funds for conducting clinical trials of an oncolytic virus treatment with a checkpoint inhibitor. The fundraising has been initiated after the Phase 1 trial results of a study involving infusion of the oncolytic virus enadenotucirev that showed tumor cell infections

A multidisciplinary team led by Johns Hopkins researcher Venu Raman, Ph.D., with notable contributions from Guus Bol, Farhad Vesuna and Phuoc Tran of Johns Hopkins, has identified a new therapy for lung cancer, the most common cancer worldwide. The therapy has been in development for six years and involves a first-in-class molecule designed by the team. The molecule, RK-33, interrupts the cell cycle of lung cancer cells without harming normal cells, and it is effective both on its own and in combination with radiation therapy.

Pharma firms need better incentives to create novel antibiotics to head off an ‘apocalyptic scenario’ where commonplace infections become deadly once more. And the latest report from economist Jim O’Neill, who has been commissioned by the UK government to investigate how to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR), offers two ways to make developing antibiotics more attractive to industry. He recommends rewarding firms that develop a new antibiotic with a substantial lump sum. Secondly, a global innovation fund should be set up with $2 billion (£1.3 billion) to be invested over five years to boost blue skies research into drugs and diagnostics. But questions remain over how to run such a scheme and where the money would come from.

Annapolis, Maryland - Speaking proposals are now being accepted for the 2015 CyberMaryland Conference, held October 28-29 in Baltimore, Maryland. This year's theme, "Leading the Cyber Generation," offers unparalleled opportunities that demonstrate how continuing development of cyber assets on the human and technological side will drive business and job growth.

CyberMaryland Conference seeks presenters with new ideas in the areas of cyber workforce development, threat intelligence, innovation and policy. Case studies in cyber product integration, social applications, digital health and wireless technology security, big data analytics and intrusion software are highly valued. In addition to topics related to intrusion software, trends in anti-malware software and new data protection applications are sought.

The ACSM American Fitness Index® Data Report is a Scientific Snapshot of the State of Health and Fitness at the Metropolitan Level.

Donna Harris reaches for her bag, which is slumping against an overstuffed beige couch in the basement kitchenette of a Washington, D.C., theater.

“I’ll be back,” she calls to her business partner, Evan Burfield, a tall 38 year old whose forearm tattoo is hidden under a checkered shirt sleeve. He’s sitting at a nearby lunch table, simultaneously checking email and interrogating a nervous entrepreneur about revenue projections.

Internet2 has announced the establishment of a new award, honoring the lifelong contributions of the chancellor of the University System of Maryland (USM). The Internet2 William “Brit” Kirwan Mentorship Award will be presented annually, beginning in 2016, to a member of the Internet2 community who embodies the spirit of Kirwan’s role as a mentor to countless professionals in the research and education (R&E) community. He is well known for his ability to connect people in higher education and inspire others, and for giving his time to serve the community. Kirwan, a long-time Internet2 supporter and member of its Board of Trustees, will step down from his USM chancellorship next month.

AstraZeneca, a global, innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business,  to invest approximately $285 million in a new high-tech facility for manufacturing of biological medicines in Södertälje, Sweden.

The new plant will be focused on filling and packaging of protein therapeutics. It is anticipated that the new facility will supply medicines for clinical trial programmes of AstraZeneca and MedImmune, the company’s global biologics research and development arm, from the end of 2018, and will deliver finished products for commercial use once fully operational by 2019.

Continuing on its current investment spree, Chinese internet giant Tencent has now led a $750K seed funding round for Tissue Analytics, a tele-medicine app that guides you to take care of chronic wounds.

Existing investor DreamIt Health — the Philadelphia-based accelerator program which Tissue Analytics is an Alumni of (the startup got a pre-seed fund from the accelerator program), also participated in the round along with numerous other angel investors from Philadelphia.

Europe’s sluggish economic growth of recent years has been reflected in some surveys about entrepreneurship. The percentages of adults engaged in early-staged entrepreneurial activity, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Model, ranged (as of 2010) from 4.2% in Germany to 5.8% in France—compared with 7.6% of Americans, 14% of Chinese, and 17% of Brazilians. A year later, an EY report found European entrepreneurs less confident about their countries as places for startups compared with adults surveyed in the U.S., Brazil, or Canada.

How many types of cells are there in the human body? Textbooks say a couple of hundred. But the true number is undoubtedly far larger.

Piece by piece, a new, more detailed catalogue of cell types is emerging from labs like that of Aviv Regev at the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which are applying recent advances in single-cell genomics to study individual cells at a speed and scale previously unthinkable.

A lot of people make news in the biopharma business. Few of them are influential.

Influence, simply put, is the ability to make your mark in such a way as to get other prominent people in this business to rethink the way they do business. Last year, that definition caused us to put GlaxoSmithKline's ($GSK) Deirdre Connelly on the list for her plan to do away with sales quotas in the U.S. The influential idea then was that ethics had to come before numbers--a big issue at a company that has been challenged time and again by an unethical approach to business that spurred a series of sordid messes and a second take at a painful reorganization.

A U.K. government-appointed review team into the issue of antibiotic resistance, headed by economist Jim O'Neill, has urged the global pharmaceutical industry to fund a $2 billion innovation fund to kick-start research into new antibiotics. O'Neill argues that without the fund, the incentive for major pharmaceuticals to develop new antibiotics is not there. This is due to the low return-on-investment and too great a focus on short-term profit-and-loss. The issue of "who pays for new antibiotics?" was recently posed by Magnus Steigedal, director of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Strategic Research Area on Health, who came to a similar conclusion that the world cannot wait around for big pharma alone.

Like almost everyone else, doctors and nurses now use smartphones on a regular basis. So what's the best way for the healthcare industry to take advantage of that?

That was the theme of many of the projects being developed in this year's DreamIt Health Baltimore program, an intensive four-month bootcamp for health-tech startups that began in January. For the second year in a row, Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine co-sponsored the accelerator program in Baltimore, with the six startups setting up shop at an Inner Harbor work space.

The 21st Century Cures bill advanced Thursday when The House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee sent the unanimously passed bill onto the full committee, which will address it next week.

The bill could potentially be enacted into law later this year.

Drug costs are astronomical – this we know.

But we don’t have a transparent, informed way of calculating – or understanding – the true costs of drug development, argued Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor of pharmacoeconomics at Harvard University, in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine. 

Awful patient experience, poor communication, increasing out-of-pocket costs. Investors assembled for a panel discussion of the future of investing in aging technology at the AARP Innovation@50+ focused more on pain points that could apply to healthcare generally not specifically to senior care.

Jody Holtzman, senior vice president of thought leadership at the AARP, moderated the panel.

In just three months, demand for lab and office space at the Johns Hopkins innovation hub, FastForward East, has exceeded supply. The FastForward program, designed to move academic findings through translational research into the commercial marketplace, was introduced to East Baltimore earlier this year in an interim facility in the Rangos Building at 855 N. Wolfe St. In that time, all of its offices and lab benches have been rented.

Currently, preparations are being made to expand FastForward East from 6,000 square feet to 25,000 square feet of office and lab space. This facility will be a part of a new seven-level, $65.6 million laboratory and office building development, 1812 Ashland.

WHO’S GETTING FUNDED

Sickweather sold $95,000 in debt out of $250,000 offered, according to an SEC filing. The company makes an illness-tracking app, and recently released an Apple Watch version.

CyberSpa sold $350,000 in equity, according to an SEC filing. The downtown company makes technology that provides technical support on Windows PCs.

Emergent BioSolutions announced that a new phase I study has begun at the University of Oxford that will evaluate the use of its modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) Ebola Zaire vaccine candidate as a prime boost to GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK - Analyst Report) Chimp Adenovirus type 3 Ebola vaccine candidate.

The study will enroll 38 volunteers and be conducted in the UK and is being supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department for International Development. Emergent BioSolutions manufactured the supply of MVA Ebola Zaire vaccine candidate to be used in this phase I study.

What’s the difference between a “good” state for telemedicine and a “bad” one?

The American Telemedicine Association released two reports at its annual conference earlier this month in Los Angeles, a state-by state analysis of coverage and reimbursement policies for telemedicine services and another on physician practice standards and licensure in each state.