Notice is hereby given that the Office of Intramural Research (OIR), National Institutes of Health (NIH), will host two webinars to enable public discussion of its proposal to reorganize the OIR Office of Technology Transfer (OTT). The proposal seeks to align authority and responsibility for the implementation and execution of patenting and licensing (P&L) functions within the NIH Institutes and Centers.

MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, and The University of Manchester have entered into a new research collaboration to generate cutting-edge protein formulation science.

As part of the collaboration, MedImmune will work with researchers at Manchester’s Centre of Excellence in Biopharmaceuticals (COEBP) on testing and understanding the fundamental principles of protein solution behavior in order to find better ways to administer breakthrough medicines to patients.

Rockville-based Emergent BioSolutions will expand its Baltimore manufacturing facility and add 158 new jobs over the next four years. Emergent will potentially double its 58,000-square-foot space on Lombard Street to include additional manufacturing, labs and warehouse space.

After growing up on Cleveland’s east side, Bill Fuller headed for North Carolina in 1990. He returned briefly in the 2000s, but he didn’t think he’d ever come back. But when BioEnterprise asked him in 2013 to become its newest CEO-in-Residence, he couldn’t resist the opportunity.

In Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley, hedge fund manager Joon Yun is doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation. According to US social security data, he says, the probability of a 25-year-old dying before their 26th birthday is 0.1%. If we could keep that risk constant throughout life instead of it rising due to age-related disease, the average person would – statistically speaking – live 1,000 years. Yun finds the prospect tantalising and even believable. Late last year he launched a $1m prize challenging scientists to “hack the code of life” and push human lifespan past its apparent maximum of about 120 years (the longest known/confirmed lifespan was 122 years).

Maryland is giving biotech firm Emergent BioSolutions a $2 million loan to double its footprint and staff in East Baltimore.

Emergent BioSolutions, which develops vaccines and other pharmaceuticals, will double its 58,000-square-foot manufacturing facility on Lombard Street to include more space for manufacturing, quality control cabs and warehouse space. Emergent expects to break ground on the expansion in the second quarter of 2015.

A new 30,000-square-foot business incubator planned for Johns Hopkins University's East Baltimore campus will more than double the university's capacity for startup companies and is a major step toward its goal of being a bigger player in technology commercialization.

The new incubator, called FastForward East, will be housed at 1812 Ashland Ave., a 170,000-square-foot building by Forest City Enterprises, Inc. The building will be the next to go up in Hopkins' Science + Technology Park, which is part of the 88 acre East Baltimore Development, Inc. project, for which Forest City is the master developer. Construction is expected to be complete in 2016.

The six startups that make up the new class of DreamIt Health Baltimore got to work Friday, Jan. 30. Along with offering the first chance for founders to get to know each other through icebreaker games, the orientation marked the first work session at a new coworking space in Power Plant Live.

States with robust innovation economies have assets in common: a corps of research-intensive universities, a highly educated workforce and a government supportive of their science and technology industries. Maryland has all of these things. What the state needs to strengthen is its entrepreneurial culture, so that it becomes a top destination for scientists serious about ushering their ideas out of the lab and into the marketplac

The 3rd annual Ag Biotech Entrepreneurial Showcase is on May 19, 2015 in Research Triangle Park, NC. Ten to twelve entrepreneurs from across the greater eastern U.S. will be selected, and cash prizes for the best presentations will be awarded.

The deadline to submit an Application to present is February 12.

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., and Harold Varmus, M.D.

President Obama has long expressed a strong conviction that science offers great potential for improving health. Now, the President has announced a research initiative that aims to accelerate progress toward a new era of precision medicine (www.whitehouse.gov/precisionmedicine). We believe that the time is right for this visionary initiative, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other partners will work to achieve this vision.

Perceptive Navigation, a medical device start-up company whose chief executive is Johns Hopkins cardiologist Dr. Ted Abraham, won a highly competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 grant. Perceptive Navigation, located at the Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus, works to commercialize the Vu-Cath, an image-guided catheter that can be used in complex surgeries. The device, which is on a needle, is used while doing medical procedures on small areas of the body.

President Obama’s settled the score on this one: It’s precision medicine. Not personalized medicine.

The life sciences community has been throwing around both terms, but there’s actually a keen distinction between the two.

Biotechnology companies in the Washington region attracted less money from investors in 2014 than any other year since 1999, recent data show, even as the sector saw a significant increase in venture capital dollars in other parts of the country.

Local industry observers aren’t sounding alarms just yet. They say one down year, no matter how down it may be, doesn’t necessarily mean the region has fallen out of favor with life sciences investors.

DreamIt Health Baltimore is leasing 4,500 square feet of space at Power Plant Live!, a space Executive Director Jason Hardebeck envisions as a future hub for health care technology startups.

DreamIt's lease runs through May when the business accelerator wraps up its 16-week program. Hardebeck said he has been in talks with Cordish Cos., the property's developer, to re-purpose the office as a co-working space for graduate companies once the accelerator program ends. DreamIt would also maintain a presence there.

February 10th at 2pm ET

Every Phase II NIH SBIR/STTR application requires a commercialization plan, which essentially describes how the company plans bring its innovative technology to market.  In this Hangout, we will discuss the key elements of a successful commercialization plan.

Position Summary

GenVec is seeking a highly motivated professional who is able to make strong contributions in supporting all business and corporate development activities. The successful candidate will work directly with the Chief Executive Officer and will interact extensively with the scientific, legal, and financial personnel of the company to review and evaluate the scientific and commercial aspects of potential transactions. The Business Development Analyst will be responsible for supporting a portfolio of business development projects which address in-licensing, out-licensing, and acquisition opportunities for GenVec.

Roche has become the latest pharmaceutical company to join the connected health party at Qualcomm Life — in this case to do remote patient monitoring. The goal of the strategic collaboration is to generate big data insights on patients’ condition to reduce complications from chronic conditions, according to a company statement.

Vaccinations are obviously a hot topic for debate – it’s exhausting. But with the recent measles outbreak at Disneyland, it’s even more clear that this is getting just a bit ridiculous.

Parents really want to know who’s vaccinated and who’s not. And families in some states should be a little more concerned than others, according to numbers from the Centers for Disease Control.

Qiagen NV  (NASDAQ: QGEN  ) solutions are used every day by healthcare providers to analyze patient DNA and RNA in order to guide treatment and by researchers pursuing next generation medicine. The opportunity for Qiagen to help the industry deliver the right drug to the right patient at the right dose at the right time is big, but a significant drop-off in revenue from a legacy product meant that potential didn't translate into significant sales growth last year.

LSN researchers recently decided to take a deep dive into interviews we have held with venture philanthropy groups from around the world to see what the future likely has in store. After analyzing data gathered over the past three years from more than 150 investors, we uncovered a few notable trends.

Every startup wants to change the world, but DC-based incubator and seed fund 1776 fosters the type of early stage companies that just might have a chance.

The incubator is focused specifically on startups for the public good and you won’t find any benign photo sharing apps in 1776’s portfolio.

MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, is probably best known for its work in discovering and developing therapeutics based on antibodies -protein molecules produced by the body as a primary immune response. However, for a number of reasons, including the large size of the molecule, antibodies may not always offer the most appropriate solution for treating some diseases. In those cases there may be alternative, innovative approaches which can be explored in parallel with our usual work with antibodies.

A U.S. House of Representatives panel today released a widely anticipated proposal for speeding the development of new medical treatments. The massive, 393-page document, dubbed the 21st Century Cures Act, has been under development by Fred Upton (R–MI) and Diana DeGette (D–CO) of the House Energy and Commerce Committee since last April. It grew out of a series of hearings and roundtables last year on ways to spur biomedical research innovation and streamline clinical trials and the drug approval process. The result is a long list of ideas summarized in this document.

The Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer is proud to announce the winners of its 2015 Awards. Now in its 32nd year, the awards have recognized the outstanding efforts of scientists, technology transfer professionals, and their partners in academia and industry. Many technological breakthroughs that have become an essential part of our everyday lives have been winners of the FLC awards.

This year, nearly 100 nominations were submitted from eight federal agencies, which made the decision to select 23 winners a difficult one. But those selected represent technology transfer at its highest level.

Johns Hopkins University will give $15 million to promising researchers over the next three years.

Two new grants, totaling $15 million over three years, are intended for early-career researchers, who are increasingly being passed up for federal research grants. The grants will also support researchers who collaborate with others outside their school. Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels is concerned about a potential dearth in new researchers entering the field, and in early January told the Baltimore Business Journal he planned to earmark more university funds to support their work.

Silicon Valley Bank’s annual healthcare M&A report, Trends in Healthcare Investments and Exits, examines the merger and acquisition and IPO activity of private, venture-backed biopharma and medical device companies.

Twenty-five U.S. institutions have been selected by the NSF-funded National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter) to join the Pathways to Innovation Program.

The Pathways to Innovation Program is designed to help institutions fully incorporate innovation and entrepreneurship into undergraduate engineering education. The program is run by Epicenter, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and directed by Stanford University and VentureWell (formerly NCIIA).

DATE: February 11, 2015 3:30 - 5:00 PM

LOCATION: Montgomery County Department of Economic Development, 111 Rockville Pike, Suite 800, Rockville, MD 20850  

We're kicking off 2015 with a new (permanent) location and a wide variety of new programs for innovators and entrepreneurs in Montgomery County.  Have you heard of the Thingstitute?  Do you know about the Venture Mentoring Program?  Guess what - there's also a new life sciences accelerator!  All of this (and much more!) including Montgomery County's new emphasis on identifying funding sources for your business.  You won't want to miss this program.

In what it's calling a 'historic' announcement, the Department of Health and Human Services has set new goals to speed the U.S. healthcare system toward value-based care.

HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell announced Monday that the agency wants to tie 30 percent of fee-for-service Medicare payments to quality or value through alternative payment models, such as accountable care organizations or bundled payments, by the end of 2016. It also aims to have 50 percent of payments affiliated with these models by the end of 2018.

DreamIt Health Baltimore announced its second cohort on Monday.

The startups that make up the accelerator’s class of 2015 include a telehealth platfrom, an app to improve patient handoffs and a photo-sharing service for healthcare professionals. Five of the six companies are from outside Baltimore, with one hailing from Spain. Officials also noted that two of the companies are female-founded.

Improving patient handoffs, autotransfusion, Epic alumni and a couple of women-led startups figure into DreamIt Health Baltimore‘s second class of early stage healthcare companies. They will also be the first to occupy its permanent office at a new shared working space.

In a phone interview with DreamIt Ventures Managing Director Jason Hardebeck, he noted that the accelerator has added new partners — University of Maryland in Baltimore, including its medical school, and The Abell Foundation.

In early January Brenton “Brent” Saunders, the chief executive of upstart pharmaceutical giant Actavis , reclined in a medical chair on a stage in an Orlando hotel ballroom as a plastic surgeon pierced his face 30 times, delivering needles full of Botox to the crooks of his eyes and nose and injecting Juvederm Voluma, a dermal filler, into his cheeks. A cameraman documented every prick and projected it on a huge screen behind him. These are bestselling products for Allergan AGN -0.51%, which Actavis is buying for $67 billion, the biggest health care deal in six years. The audience, 1,000 Allergan sales reps, went wild.

CEOCFO: Mr. Fannon, what is the basic concept at BioIT Solutions?

Mr. Fannon: BioIT Solutions was formed to address needs for advanced computational, workflow and data management systems for biological research, drug development and diagnostics. Biology has become an information science. As scientists decoded the genome and discovered genes that encode proteins, results were stored in databases that form the basis for new approaches to biological discovery. There is a lot of emphasis on digital biology these days -- work that used to require painstaking lab experiments can now be done, very efficiently, using databases and computational tools. The significant and rapid convergence of biology and information science is creating excellent opportunities for effective solutions for research, diagnostics, and personalized medicine.