Former state economic development secretary Aris Melissaratos is leaving Johns Hopkins University for a job where he’ll have more power.

Melissaratos, who had been with Hopkins for seven years, on July 17 joined Stevenson University as interim dean of the Brown School of Business and Leadership. Melissaratos said he has always had an interest in academia and now will be able to play a leading role in preparing students to join the local workforce.

Baltimore-based Cerecor has gathered up the first half of a $33 million B round, with plans to devote much of that money to a midstage development program for an experimental depression therapy recently punted by a restructuring Merck ($MRK).

In documents filed with the SEC, the biotech noted that it has raised $16.2 million of a planned $33.2 million round. New Enterprise Associates, Apple Tree Partners and MPM Capital led the round, which is also going to fund R&D efforts on its catechol-O-methyltransferase inhibitor platform for conditions "characterized by impairment of executive function and working memory."

Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has revealed proposed designs for its new corporate headquarters and global research centre in Cambridge, which is scheduled to open in late 2016.

The plans for the new facility, which will be located on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus (CBC), include designs for the global centre, an R&D enabling building and an energy centre.

Analytical Informatics, Inc,  a portfolio company of the New Ventures Department of the University of Maryland, Baltimore is one of the semifinalists in 43North, the world’s largest business idea competition.   43North will award $5 million in cash prizes and is setting out to turn the best new business ideas from around the globe into reality.  The top award is $1 million, with six $500,000 awards and four $250,000 awards. There were with 6,932 applications from 96 countries and all 50 U.S. states.  That got boiled down to 2,603 qualified submissions and 113 semifinalists.  Analytical Informatics, Inc was the only Baltimore and Maryland based company selected.  

More than 80% of U.S. consumers conduct online research prior to making everyday purchases. This is a statistic that is growing, and extends beyond products to include services and, finally, even healthcare. With the abundance of information available, consumers are empowered--they want to be as informed as possible when selecting physicians, but how does someone navigate through the overwhelming results of Google searches and decide how to best make a decision as important as selecting a healthcare provider? I think most people would agree that selecting a physician and selecting where to have dinner have highly differing degrees of importance when it comes to online research.

President Obama’s visit earlier this month to 1776, the startup hub in downtown Washington, D.C., shined a spotlight on entrepreneurship and innovative thinking nationwide. It was a good location because the contemporary, well-lit loft that incubates and supports area startups has grown from zero to 215 members in only a year-and-a-half.

The president’s visit highlighted two entrepreneurial stories, not only of 1776 but also of the early steps by American University involving its Masters of Arts in Media Entrepreneurship program (MAME) and two campus collaborators. We became the hub’s first university partnership in a fruitful relationship that could be repeated at other campuses across the country.

It’s  tough for medical device companies to get that stamp of FDA approval, but the labyrinthine regulatory pathway certainly doesn’t help things. Regulators want to change that:

“…we learned that the delivery of new therapies to patients can be accelerated if medical device innovators — including entrepreneurs and university students and faculty — understand FDA’s regulatory processes,” FDA researcher Francis Kalush wrote recently.

There’s a panoply of alternative funding streams for healthcare startups out there – fledgling companies are seeking out avenues like prepaid revenue models, grant funding in lieu of venture capital, and the ever-popular crowdfunding approach.

The outcomes can be a mixed bag, however, said a panel of speakers at MedCity News’ CONVERGE conference in Philadelphia today.

DreamIt Ventures is kicking off its second health IT accelerator class in Philadelphia with a stronger life sciences theme than last year. More hospitals reviewed candidates this year and the result included four life sciences startups in its nine-member class. They take diverse approaches to the problems they solve — from molecular diagnostics to detect disease earlier to wound management.

It’s an interesting development because healthcare startup accelerators tend to stick to health IT and mobile health companies because it takes a shorter amount of time to develop products, there’s less risk and the path to getting FDA clearance can take a while. Although it’s not interested in therapeutics, DreamIt has definitely been warming up to medical technology that goes beyond health IT. One reason is that molecular diagnostics and 3D printing is increasingly accessible through mobile platforms.

NexImmune, an early stage biopharmaceutical company, today announced it has secured $3 million USD in financing led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA).  Other investors include Pfizer Venture Investments and Amgen Ventures. In association with the financing, Jim Barrett of NEA and Janis Naeve of Amgen Ventures were named to NexImmune’s board of directors.

NexImmune is developing immunotherapy products from its proprietary Artificial IMmune (AIM™) nanotechnology. The AIM technology, which was first developed by Drs. Mathias Oelke and Jonathan Schneck at The Johns Hopkins University, has several potential applications for the treatment of cancer, autoimmune disorders, and infectious disease. Proceeds from this financing will be used to support pre-clinical development of the company’s first product, AIM 101, an artificial Antigen Presenting Cell (aAPC) for the treatment of cancer.

The head of a young Baltimore cyber security company says a New York investor nixed a deal after discovering Maryland’s new cyber security tax credit wouldn’t transfer to investors.

Suzanne Magee, CEO of Bandura LLC, said the credit should go to the investor. That’s how it works with the state’s biotech tax credit.

That was my question when I spoke with DreamIt Health newbie BioBots, specifically co-founder Ricardo Solorzano. He has spent three years working on technology to develop low-cost 3D bioprinters that research scientists can use to develop biomaterials. The company was formed by a couple of University of Pennsylvania graduates They view it as a way to change the way people think of regenerative medicine.

Solorzano and fellow co-founder Danny Cabrera joined Hive 76 in Philadelphia so they could learn more about developing these 3D printers.  They also work with intern Eric Wamakima. They spoke with MedCity News at DreamIt Health’s launch party for its second class

Maryland has a future in being the perennial powerhouse in cyber security but it's lacking something that will help the state's industry take off like a rocket — and that's depth.

In Friday's print edition cover story I wrote about how colleges and universities are scrambling to change curriculum to prepare more students for success in the cyber world post graduation. Industry executives have lamented that colleges aren't doing enough to prepare students to fill vacant positions — more than 10,000 across Maryland in 2013, according to career services firm Burning Glass.

Baltimore-area companies took home 12 percent of the money venture firms invested in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., region in the second quarter.

Greater Baltimore companies raised a total of $29.5 million in venture capital during the period, according to a MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Venture capitalists invested a total of $247.3 million in 58 companies in Baltimore and D.C. during the quarter.

Stanford University scientists say they have developed a new test for type 1 diabetes that will cost a fraction of the current price and could speed up diagnosis from days to hours. That could be useful anywhere, but especially in poorer countries where many people with diabetes go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed because the existing tests are too expensive to be widely offered.

In current tests, blood samples are sent to a lab, where radioactive materials are used to detect the cause of the disease: a so-called auto-antibody that attacks the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. This test is labor-intensive and costs hundreds of dollars.

Venture investors in Silicon Valley are frequent prey of startup founders who spot them in public places — and semi-public places — and start pitching. Last night, a discussion about awkward pitches led four VCs on a panel for the Silicon Valley Business Journal's annual Pitch event to tell tales from the mens room.

The consensus? There's no good way to do it.

Promising news for any unlucky american in immediate need of a doctor: BetterDoctor, the San Francisco based healthcare tool and online doctor search service, has closed a $10 million Series A funding round led by New Enterprise Associates and participated by existing investors including SoftTechVC and Finnish venture capital firm Lifeline Ventures.

The fund will be used to further develop the existing service, hire new employees and spread the service’s web and mobile applications to new platforms.

While the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins can't exactly compete with Ivy League Harvard when it comes to dominating the ranking of college rankings, the two D.C. area schools were ranked among the top 50 universities in the world by the Center for World University Rankings. Crushing other top-tier institutions like Dartmouth, Brown and McGill, the local academic titans nourishing the minds of students across the globe substantiated themselves as schools worth attending during a time of loan shark annihilation.

Qiagen N.V,, the leading global provider of sample & assay technologies that are used to transform biological materials into valuable molecular information, has launched 14 new GeneRead DNAseq V2 gene panels targeting an extensive range of cancer-related genes or gene regions. Gene panels are an integral part of many next-generation sequencing (NGS) workflows. They are used to enrich genes of interest in a sample prior to sequencing runs and as such can be seen as the core assay in the workflow.

Qiagen’s new GeneRead panels are customisable to include other genes or gene regions of clinical or biological interest and are compatible with any NGS sequencer. They are part of Qiagen’s industry-leading sample-to-library workflows, which are helping to drive the growing use of NGS in clinical applications.

President of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County since 1992, Freeman A. Hrabowski III thinks he knows what students need: lots of support. Morally, colleges owe it to students to do everything possible to help them succeed, he said in a recent visit to The Chronicle, and a higher retention rate means more tuition dollars, too.

The two-year anniversary of the monumental Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act may not have caused much fanfare, but Steve Kraus, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said Massachusetts should be celebrating.

Here are four takeaways from a conversation with the head of the firm’s health care investing, as he analyzes the shifts that have occurred in the two years since the Affordable Care Act was deemed constitutional.

Many medical researchers with ideas not tied to a drug backed by the pharmaceutical industry often find themselves without funding; patients with diseases or other medical conditions, particularly those that are rare, are without much power. That is, until recently.

Now, scientists are turning to crowdfunding to launch their research. Donors won't get a free CD, T-shirt or other giveaway like they do on Kickstarter. But what fundraisers give in return is hope for a treatment and at least insight into medical conditions.

Severe bleeding is a primary cause of death for soldiers wounded on the battlefield. Deep shrapnel and gunshot wounds can be notoriously difficult to control, particularly in soft tissue places such as the neck, shoulder, and groin. Now undergrad students at Johns Hopkins University have developed a prototype device to help address such trauma in a speedy fashion.

The new device is a large plastic syringe with two compartments, similar to epoxy injectors, holding a polyol and a diisocyanat, chemicals that produce polyurethane foam when mixed. The foam hardens shortly after injection and delivers pressure to the wound from within. The hope is that the foam will help soldiers from bleeding out while they’re on the way to a medical facility where a surgeon can address the wound directly.

A bunch of tech geeks kicking around ideas for their fledgling company might come up with a product that’s pure genius. Yet those same whizzes might not find the right moniker for the startup or product they’re banking their future on.

The name sometimes falls a little flat when it comes to customers and investors.

Well, this is interesting.

RockThePost, a site that connects startups and investors, just announced that it has merged with CoFoundersLab, a site that helps entrepreneurs find cofounders.

RockThePost, which launched in 2011, sought to form a new kind of social network that brought together money-hungry startups with equity-hungry investors. Although the site never became a household name, its model proved somewhat successful: CoFoundersLab actually raised a portion of its initial $750,000 seed round on RockThePost.

DED awarded a Montgomery County Economic Development Fund grant providing up to $12 million in property tax incentives for customers of BYTEGRID®, a leading data center company located in Silver Spring that is focused on the nationwide acquisition, development and operation of premier multi-tenant data center facilities.

“Montgomery County is focused on increasing our attractiveness to large private and public enterprise organizations seeking to optimize costs by outsourcing IT infrastructure,” said Steve Silverman, Director of Economic Development for Montgomery County. “This strategic grant for BYTEGRID’s data center customers shows our commitment to fostering a pro-business climate that already includes leading digital age businesses in healthcare, financial services, IT services and cyber security. The key takeaway here is that Montgomery County, Maryland is in the regional and national big data game to win.”

Paul Thompson, director of IT innovation at Medtronic, explained how he held on for four years to bring the “hospital of the future” to life. His work is part of the company’s larger push to move from a device maker to a healthcare services provider, which he compared to IBM’s move from hardware to services.

At the end of this session at CONVERGE, an audience member asked what metrics Thompson and his team must meet each year to be considered a success.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski toured the MedImmune laboratories in Frederick on Monday morning and talked with employees.

Mikulski told the workers she was proud of what they are doing, creating medical solutions to health problems. She also talked with company executives about the company's future.

When Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) Innovation debuted about a year ago, R&D chief Paul Stoffels promised to build an interconnected, global operation that would sink some deep roots into the world's busiest biotech hubs. On Thursday, the group showed off just how far it had come in a short time, highlighting a slate of a dozen new deals, ranging from fresh research collaborations to new investments in a range of upstart drug and device developers--all aimed at putting the multinational pharma giant on the cutting edge of new product development.

The first half of 2014 has seen less job-cutting by biopharma companies than a year earlier, at least according to one recent report.

The latest monthly job report by Challenger Gray & Christmas, released July 3, showed that biopharmas announced plans to eliminate 4,215 jobs between January and June of this year, down more than one-third (37%) from the 6,709 jobs announced as being jettisoned in the first half of 2013.

Founder salaries

Q.: Is it okay to pay yourself (and other founders) a salary when you’ve only raised money from friends and family? If so, how much is reasonable? What’s an acceptable salary to pay yourself once a non-family seed round is raised?

In biotech’s early days, telling a story to a wide audience used to be part of the path to success. Founders would share a compelling early narrative to potential investors, reporters, and just about anyone else who would listen. Nature papers were the coin of the realm.

But far from shouting to the rooftops, lately it seems that more and more biotechs are pursuing a different approach. Instead of keeping their technology under wraps until a first financing happens, these companies go into what we call “permanent stealth mode.” The principle here seems to be, “say no more publicly than necessary, and even then, keep it vague.” Meantime, let your actions speak for you: Raise money. Sign partnerships with pharmaceutical companies. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, hand consumers and investors a finished product or service.

Date:  Monday, September 22, 2014

Location: North Carolina Biotechnology Center 15 TW Alexander Drive Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3547 http://www.ncbiotech.org/

Background:

NHLBI’s Office of Translational Alliances and Coordination (OTAC) hosts this semi-annual Regional Innovation Conference that brings together small businesses, angel investors, venture capitalists, strategic partners, and business leaders from the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. NHLBI staff will be available to describe the details and impact of recent changes in the Federal SBIR/STTR program, as well as note other funding opportunities and resources for NHLBI small businesses.

Previous conferences have been held in Boston, MA, San Francisco, CA, San Diego, CA, and Rockville, MD.

On a recent tour of the latest addition to University City Science Center’s campus in Philadelphia – an innovation hub in an established building on its campus set to officially open next week — I unexpectedly came across an office belonging to Merck.

It’s all the more interesting because it’s just a few doors down from DreamIt Ventures and its accelerator DreamIt Health, which has a second class of health IT entrepreneurs moving in next week. The Science Center’s own digital health accelerator will also be working in the building.

New Enterprise Associates averaged a U.S. funding deal every three days in the first half of this year, the hottest six months for the industry since the end of the dotcom boom in 2001.

Not far behind NEA's 64 first half deals were Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (54), Andreessen Horowitz (52) and Google Ventures (50), according to a report from investment database research firm CB Insights.