AOL founder Steve Case predicted last January that the region east of the Mississippi River would raise more venture capital than Silicon Valley in 2014.

And the winner is … Silicon Valley. By a friggin' landslide.

Please join us in wishing her well as she embarks on retirement and new adventures.

When:

January 20, 2015 4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. (Remarks at 5:15 p.m.) La Tasca - Baltimore - 201 East Pratt St. (Parking validated at 100 Pratt St.- $5) Cash bar; light horse d'euvres

and/or

January 28, 2015 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. (Remarks at 4:15 p.m.; BioBuzz networking 'til 7:30 p.m.) Growlers - Gaithersburg - 227 West Diamond St. Cash bar; light horse d'euvres

Venture capital funding hit its highest annual mark since 2001 as venture investors participated in $47.3 billion across 3,617 deals. Even versus 2013, the past year was huge as venture capital skyrocketed 62% YoY due to multiple $500M+ mega-rounds while deal growth was more modest, climbing 8%. Of note, two quarters each – Q2’14 and Q4’14 – notched over $13B in funding.

All that venture capital money so famously "sitting on the sideline" finally made it into company coffers in 2014.

Mark McCaffrey, a partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, called 2014 an "exciting year" for venture capital investing, where two deals exceeded $1 billion and 40 "megadeals" exceeded $100 million.

All of us here at Startup Maryland are very excited to invite you to Collaborate, an innovation conference we're participating in January 23rd & 24th in Washington DC.

"Startup Maryland is delighted to be in the Resource Expo showcasing our initiatives around Celebration, Connections, Coaching and Capital.," stated Michael Binko, founder and president of Startup Maryland. "We'll be highlighting the results of the third-annual Pitch Across Maryland, our upcoming Raise Your Game bootcamp for entrepreneurs and our plans to engage side-line angel investors across the region," added Binko.

January 30th, 2015 8:00 AM-10:00 AM

Learn from Eitan Yudilevich, Ph.D. Director of U.S. - Israel Binational R & D Foundation (BIRD) about grants available to collaborate new high tech product development with Israeli companies. Grants up to $1 million are available to engage innovative companies from The Start Up Nation to kick start your company’s product development to a new level.While there is no fee, RSVPs are required.

New Jersey's first private medical school in 50 years is planned for part of the 110-acre Hoffmann-La Roche property. Roche plans to vacate the land in 2015 after an 80-year history in Clifton and Nutley.

Novartis India has agreed to transfer its over-the-counter division (OTC Division) to GlaxoSmithKline Consumer (GSK CPL), a consumer healthcare joint venture (JV) between Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis and GSK, for about INR1.097bn ($17.6m)

The cash just keeps flowing in health IT, as does M&A activity.

According to Mercom Capital Group, venture capital in the health IT space reached $4.7 billion in 2014, up from $2.2 billion the year prior. Rock Health recently put the figure at $4 billion, although it’s count does not include deals under $2 million.

FierceBiotech on Wednesday delivered the first big verdict on the “mood” of the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference – based largely on its executive breakfast held this week in San Francisco. The verdict: Real confidence well above and beyond the typical happy face you’d get, regardless, at JP Morgan.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Maryland, has received $4 million in funding from the Mann Fund to develop a next-generation retinal prosthesis system. The Mann Fund was created by philanthropist Alfred E. Mann 15 years ago to support the development of biomedical technologies.

In the summer of 2013, Pamela Shavaun Scott started having "24/7 severe headaches" — so severe that she couldn't sleep. It wasn't before December that she heard for sure that it was a brain tumor.

Harvard University has long played an outsized role in spurring the growth of the Boston area’s life sciences industry, but the school’s contributions have largely unfolded behind the scenes.

Unlike the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge’s Kendall Square — the beating heart of biotech — Harvard has been known less for spinning off startups than for licensing cutting-edge research and grooming the industry’s business leaders.

A trio of scientists have started working with researchers at GlaxoSmitKline on a potential cure for cancer. In fact, they believe they've found the diseases' "Achilles heel."

Last month, GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) selected a Wistar/Penn project for its 2014 Discovery Fast Track Challenge program, which was created to accelerate the development of new medicines.

A Exciting Opportunity for Investor Meetings and Showcases

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 21, 2015  

We invite you to submit your high-growth and innovative companies to individually meet with and showcase to an exclusive Global 1000 Transaction Network of Corporate Investors, Venture Capitalists, and Angel Investors at the Combined University Startups and Global 1000 Meet | Partner | Deal Conference in Washington, DC, on March 11 and 12, 2015.

The United States shouldn’t worry just yet about losing the number one spot as far as disease-related research in the world goes – that’s pretty solid – but that doesn’t mean the country is steadily moving forward the way it could or should.

‘Tis the season for dieting and purchasing gym memberships you may or may not use.

There are plenty of tactics out there for how to drop excess weight fast, and generally speaking, most of them probably won’t be the quick fix resolutionaries are hoping for (yes, that’s a made up word).

In 2012, we authored a report titled The Evolving Business Case for Social Media in Healthcare – a publication covering the range of social media influences on the industry.  These influences were essentially cloud-based approaches to sharing information between consumers, individual care professionals and healthcare organizations.

The Colonial Room of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco was filled beyond capacity Monday afternoon, and the offices of digital-health seed fund Rock Health were buzzing with hundreds of partygoers just a couple of hours later.

Swiss drugmaker Roche said on Wednesday it had entered into an agreement with QIAGEN that includes a provision of non-exclusive licenses to recently granted Roche patents, pertaining to the detection of mutations in the EGFR pathway.

In a laboratory first, Duke researchers have grown human skeletal muscle that contracts and responds just like native tissue to external stimuli such as electrical pulses, biochemical signals and pharmaceuticals.

It didn't take R. Michael Gill very long to come up with some priorities after Gov.-elect Larry Hogan named him the next Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development secretary last week.

Gill wants to keep McCormick & Co. Inc. (NYSE: MKC) in state. He wants to bring the FBI headquarters to Maryland. And he wants to emphasize customer service in dealing with businesses.

Lockheed Martin Corp. is normally known for big things – tanks, planes, ships, those kinds of projects.

But a new partnership the defense giant has formed with a San Diego company has Lockheed looking at something very, very small.

The ETC (Emerging Technology Centers) www.etcbaltimore.com, Baltimore City’s award-winning technology innovation centers, announced today that the following six companies have been accepted into the AccelerateBaltimore™ 2015 program:

Show me the money, I'm not seeing it here.

According to NVCA, U.S. VC firms raised $29.8B in 2014, making it the best fundraising year since 2007 ('13 was $17.7B). Overall this is good news, but there has not been local traction. Here is the data from NVCA on the D.C. located funds that raised capital in '14:

AstraZeneca today announced that MedImmune, its global biologics research and development arm, has entered into a licensing agreement with Omnis Pharmaceuticals (Omnis), a privately-held biotechnology company focused on the development of oncolytic viruses. This agreement will allow MedImmune to combine key agents from its investigational immunotherapy portfolio with Omnis' lead investigational oncolytic virus programme, a genetically engineered strain of vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). The programme is currently being studied in a Phase I clinical trial as a monotherapy for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma and other cancers that have metastasised to the liver.

Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York — Maryland has a lot of competition for entrepreneurs' attention. Experts say a tax credit specifically for angel investors could sweeten the deal for entrepreneurs and investors who decide to do business in Maryland.

Establishing an angel investor tax credit will be a top priority for the Greater Baltimore Committee during the state's upcoming legislative session. GBC sees the tax credit as a way to boost the state's economy by supporting growing startups that will create jobs and bring new business to Maryland. Investors and adivsors of Baltimore-area startups say the tax credit would not only help startups grow in Maryland, but keep them — and their investors — from laying roots elsewhere.

Sample and assay technologies provider Qiagen NV recently announced the launch of its latest diagnostic TB test– QuantiFERON-TB Gold-Plus (QFT-Plus), subsequent to the product’s receipt of CE Mark in Europe.

QFT-Plus is the fourth generation of the most accurate test used in the diagnosis of tuberculosis (TB) infection. It involves Qiagen’s proprietary QuantiFERON technology which can uniquely identify presymptomatic infections that standard diagnostic technologies fail to detect.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities, the real estate firm that helped transform Mission Bay into a thriving life-science hub, now wants to raise up to $20 million to build digital-health companies from scratch in San Francisco.

Alexandria, the nation’s largest owner and developer of real estate for the life-science industry, said in August that it would start three new accelerators nationwide to support startups in biotech, agriculture and digital health. The biotech space is up and running in New York City with $51 million in financing, and the agriculture space is expected to open within the next six months in North Carolina.

J. Craig Venter was one of the first scientists in 2001 to map the human genome. Now this trailblazer in genome sequencing research has his sights set on creating the world's largest database of human genomes. And he's calling in Baltimore startup Personal Genome Diagnostics Inc. to help.

BD Medical, a part of Becton, Dickinson and Company, announced receiving FDA clearance for its Intelliport Medication Management System. The product monitors manual IV bolus injections, automatically records how much of which medication a patient receives and warns of allergies by interfacing with the hospital’s electronic medical records.

The Beyond the Pill movement took an interesting turn this week when Qualcomm announced plans to open an investment business with Novartis, according to a company statement. Qualcomm will launch the investment company through its Qualcomm Ventures business. The news splash at the start of the JP Morgan Healthcare conference came about a week after the two companies said at the International CES in Las Vegas that they would collaborate on digital health as part of Novartis’ Trials of the Future program.

AstraZeneca today announced that MedImmune, its global biologics research and development arm, has entered into a licensing agreement with Omnis Pharmaceuticals (Omnis), a privately-held biotechnology company focused on the development of oncolytic viruses. This agreement will allow MedImmune to combine key agents from its investigational immunotherapy portfolio with Omnis’ lead investigational oncolytic virus programme, a genetically engineered strain of vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). The programme is currently being studied in a Phase I clinical trial as a monotherapy for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma and other cancers that have metastasised to the liver.

Qiagen announced on Sunday that it has acquired the enzyme solutions unit of Enzymatics, a supplier of enzymes used in next-generation sequencing and other genetic analysis technologies in life sciences research and clinical applications, for an undisclosed amount.