kloudtrack®, a leader in cybersecurity and cloud computing (cyber|cloud) technologies and solution services for sensitive data, process management and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC), will team up with the University of Maryland'sRobert H. Smith School of Business and Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) to establish the first Innovation Sandbox™ exchange catering to the innovation, workforce development and technology roadmapping needs of public and private sector healthcare, and medical and life science (HealthTech) organizations.   

The project was announced as part of today's Maryland Economic Development Association Summer Conference at UMD, themed "Health Innovations: Impact on Economic and Workforce Development."

After all the angst generated by the Affordable Care Act, and all the punditry, noise, and debate that accompanied its rollout, you might conclude that there are no practical solutions to our healthcare challenges.  But, of course, there are new answers and solutions and new, creative approaches to solving healthcare problems. You just have to look at innovative, private sector enterprises.  And if you do, you might find one of the more innovative answers to eldercare right there in your old-fashioned television set.  Just ask Kian Saneii, CEO of Independa.

But first, a little background.  One of the more troubling and difficult areas of healthcare is the growing needs of the elderly, including both preventive care and the management  of long-term, chronic illnesses.   This has been a well-understood fact for quite some time.  Saneii and the Independa team he began assembling in 2009 set out to find practical real-world solutions to these challenges.  How they did this is an instructive case study in innovation, pragmatism and common sense.

EY unveiled on Thursday evening its 2014 Entrepreneur of the Year Maryland winners in eight categories.

The honorees were announced in front of a packed crowd at a black-tie event at the Hilton Baltimore. The awards program recognizes high-growth entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence and success in such areas as innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities.

Maryland has retained top rankings in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s annual Enterprising States study released Wednesday.

For the third consecutive year, the State ranked No. 1 in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. For the second year in a row, Maryland ranked third in the nation for its Talent Pipeline.

Maryland is missing out on as many as 7,000 jobs and millions of dollars of investment as companies build data centers in neighboring Virginia, according to a report from Baltimore accounting firm Glass Jacobson.

Data centers provide cloud storage and are crucial to supporting the kinds of technology firms that have been opening in and relocating to Baltimore.

London-based Index Ventures has just announced a new $542 million fund for seed-stage companies that have raised under $20 million.

The firm says it will invest in European startups mainly, but may make a few bets on companies from Israel and the U.S.

I read an interesting Wall Street Journal article recently that discussed the war between tech companies to control future consumer distribution platforms. The article explains that the cash-flush giants “…each want to own the digital platform where people communicate, shop and seek entertainment.” This got me thinking about platforms in healthcare.

Right now, it’s fair to say that there are three major healthcare platforms. Insurance companies such as Aetna, WellPoint, United Healthcare and Humana have substantial members. However, mentioned in the article is the continual need for innovation. Tech behemoths are“…aware of all the big companies that died because they rested on their laurels.”

Novavax Inc. (Nasdaq: NVAX) said Wednesday it has raised $115 million in gross proceeds by selling 28.75 million shares of its common stock, which the Gaithersburg biotech plans to pour into its pipeline.

Some of the net proceeds will go toward advancing Novavax's Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) nanoparticle vaccine into a Phase 2 trial in elderly subjects this year. The biotech is also studying its RSV vaccine for pediatric and maternal populations.

The University of Maryland, along with the George Washington University and Virginia Tech, have added the Johns Hopkins University to the National Science Foundation's  Innovation Corps (I-Corps ™) regional collaboration called DC I-Corps.  JHU becomes the newest member university of the National Science Foundation's National Innovation Network.

The NSF has approved a request from the three original universities to officially include Johns Hopkins in the I-Corps program's "node" in the Mid-Atlantic called DC I-Corps, which was formed last year with $3.75 million in NSF funding. It is one of five regional nodes established nationwide by the NSF, and the first to expand its membership. Together, these five nodes currently form the basis of the National Innovation Network, which links together select universities with established entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to train faculty and student researchers from throughout the U.S. to transform ideas into products and get them on the market.

This brief analyzes entrepreneurship and job creation in the U.S. life sciences sector—defined as the group of industries engaged in the application of biological science and related knowledge for commercial purposes, primarily for human health care. This definition contains three major subgroups: drugs and pharmaceuticals; medical devices and equipment; and research, testing, and medical laboratories.

Building on previous research that highlights the importance of entrepreneurship and business dynamism to innovation, productivity, and net job creation, this brief analyzes how those trends apply to the life sciences sector. Overall, the life sciences sector plays an outsized role in new job creation and makes important contributions to entrepreneurship—not to mention the perhaps immeasurable benefits these firms play in enhancing and extending human life.

Tiny biotech startups will have a new place to germinate in the San Francisco Bay Area. Healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Labs division is opening a new 30,000 square foot incubator in the biotech-rich suburb of South San Francisco.

The flexible space, complete with common rooms, wet labs, and offices, could hold as many as 50 companies, according to Melinda Richter, a Bay Area incubator veteran tapped last year to head Janssen Labs nationwide. That would roughly double the group’s nationwide capacity, part of the international company’s aggressive reach beyond its walls to find, and fund, new science and technology. “We’re taking a big footprint,” Richter said, with half devoted to shared research equipment and services and half to space that can be customized to individual tenants.

The heightened private equity and venture capital (PEVC) deal activity in the global healthcare industry during the recession years, 2008-2010, witnessed a decline post-2010. However, the fall in deals was not uniform among the constituent sectors, with the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and healthcare equipment sectors experiencing a much sharper decline in investor interest than the healthcare technology and provider segments. Investors started to bet on providers based with the conviction they can provide quicker and safer returns than the pharmaceutical and biotechnology space, which is ridden with regulatory challenges and patent expiries.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan's Private Equity and Venture Capital Investment in the Global Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Industry reveals the total number of PEVC deals in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry decreased from 1063 in 2010 to 480 in 2013. Though the returns from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry have been dwindling, they are better compared to the performance of other industries.

Although it seems raising as much venture capital as humanly possible is Silicon Valley’s mantra, there are reasons to be cautious when signing termsheets. Startups raising a couple of million dollars had a median exit price of more than $10 million, while the outcome for those raising double that was actually worse, a recent study shows.

The report, by San Francisco-based Exitround, a marketplace for M&A deals for small tech companies, found companies raising $2 million to $3 million were more likely to exit at a valuation over $10 million, while for startups raising $3 million to $10 million the median exit price was less.

Several Baltimore startups are among the winners of this year’s Maryland Incubator Company of the Year awards.

The winners were announced Tuesday evening at an awards ceremony at the American Art Visionary Museum in Baltimore. The awards are supported by the Maryland Technology Development Corp., the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, the Maryland Business Incubation Association, M&T Bank and several other state companies.

A U.S. Senate panel on Tuesday approved a budget bill that would increase funding for the National Institutes of Health by $605 million for the fiscal year that begins October 1.

Lawmakers on the Senate’s appropriations subcommittee that oversees education, health and labor programs passed legislation that would increase the NIH’s budget to nearly $30.5 billion in the coming year. That $605 million jump represents a greater increase than the $198-million increase the Obama administration had requested.

When GlycoMimetics Inc. announced a license agreement with Pfizer three years ago, the decision seemed like a no-brainer. This deal, which surrounded the sickle cell drug candidate GMI-1070, was worth up to $340 million, after all. The Gaithersburg company seemed to be in an enviable spot, while some of its Maryland counterparts struggled.

Behind the scenes, the decision to partner with big pharma didn't come easy. CEO Rachel King, speaking this morning at a Tech Council of Maryland panel in Bethesda, recounted the calculus behind the move.

September 2014 is bringing 5 NEW CLASSES to our schedule that will help you

BE THE ENTREPRENEUR THAT YOU WANT TO BE!

Aspiring Entrepreneurs:

1. The Intentional Entrepreneur: This one day class will help you identify your entrepreneurial skills and abilities, as well as address any concerns you may have about owning your own business. This class is a must for anyone considering starting their own business!

2. The Intentional Entrepreneur for Veterans: For veterans thinking about starting a business.

Early Stage Entrepreneurs:

3. New Venture: For the entrepreneurs in the early stages of business development.

4. New Venture for Veterans: For veterans seeking to launch an idea.

5. Tech Venture: For entrepreneurs in the tech or life sciences field seeking to start a business. (BHI EIR Todd Chappell will be one of the instructors teaching this class)

Two early career physician-scientists, Peter de Blank and Matthew R. Steensma, have been named inaugural winners of the Francis S. Collins Scholars Program in Neurofibromatosis Clinical and Translational Research, sponsored by the Neurofibromatosis Therapeutic Acceleration Program (NTAP) at The Johns Hopkins University. The program will create a community of expert clinician-scientists and groom them to be leaders in neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) research and clinical care. The awards will be presented at a ceremony on Tuesday, June 10, at the Whittemore House in Washington, D.C.

“It has become increasingly hard for young clinician-scientists to get the funding and dedicated time necessary to become leaders in translational science for rare diseases such as NF1,” says Jaishri Blakeley, M.D., director of the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Neurofibromatosis Center and NTAP. “We created the Francis S. Collins Scholars Program, recognizing that a cadre of well-trained and dedicated clinician-scientists focused on NF1 is critical in order to make the scientific leaps that are possible in this modern era.”

A highly personalized medical technique is allowing patients with advanced kidney cancer to live nearly three times as long as they normally do. In an experiment involving 21 patients, around half lived more than two and half years after diagnosis with kidney cancer that had begun to spread. Five patients are alive after more than five years.

“That seems to be out of proportion with what you would expect for any commercial therapy and longer than what you would expect from patients with similar prognostic variables,” says Robert Figlin, an oncologist at Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute in Los Angeles, who is leading the study.

Upcoming Funding Opportunity Deadlines -NEW FORMS-C Required for SBIR/STTR applications

The next NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Omnibus deadline is only two months away on August 5, 2014, which means your small business should be preparing your application.

As the United States slowly emerges from the Great Recession, led by our cities and metropolitan areas, a remarkable shift is occurring in the spatial geography of innovation.

For the past 50 years, the landscape of innovation has been epitomized by regions like Silicon Valley — suburban corridors of spatially isolated corporate campuses, accessible only by car, with little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing and recreation.

Senseonics, a privately held medical device company focused on the development and commercialization of the first fully implantable, long-term continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system, announced that it has raised an additional $20 million of private equity financing.  Senseonics also announced that Mirasol Panlilio, formerly of Abbott Diabetes Care and LifeScan, has joined the company as Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing.  

Current investors Anthem Capital, Delphi Ventures, Greenspring Associates, Healthcare Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and other strategic partners all participated in the financing round.  Senseonics intends to use the proceeds to continue its product development initiatives including completing pivotal trials in Europe, obtaining CE mark, and initiating IDE trials in the United States. “We’re very happy of the continued support from our investors as we near the completion of the product development efforts for our first generation long-term CGM system, “ said Tim Goodnow, CEO and President.  Senseonics has recently begun its European pivotal trials and expect to complete site initiation of all seven European sites before the end of summer.

PETER PRONOVOST: The biggest misperception is certainty. When you receive a diagnosis from a doctor, we don’t always know for 100% sure if it is correct. In reality, medicine is an inexact science. In 2012, Johns Hopkins researchers, including myself, found that in intensive-care units alone, diagnostic errors may account for as many deaths as breast cancer in the U.S.

This is part of a growing body of research highlighting the need to focus on diagnostic accuracy. We need to create health-care systems in which learning is incorporated into daily practice, so that physicians can receive feedback on the accuracy of their diagnoses. We can do this by standardizing care around best practices and standardizing data collection regarding clinicians’ diagnoses and the results they get: Health information technology makes this possible.

DATE: June 13, 2014, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.

LOCATION: Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research, University of Maryland, in Rockville, MD

Emerging Strategies for the Production and Characterization of Biosimilars

The biomanufacturing industry faces an unprecedented challenge with the emergence of biosimilars.  The pathway to approval for biosimilars is a fluid process and several key aspects are still not determined.  The University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will deliver a one-day symposium on the current trends of characterization and production of biosimilars.  On Friday, June 13, 2014 at 8:30 am join the thought-leaders, policy-makers, and creators of biosimilars as we present current trends, ideas, and predictions.

In the translational medicine space -- where medical research is "translated" into health tools and solutions for patients -- the majority of engaged physicians are either biomedical researchers interested in advancing our understanding of the basic science, or are practicing doctors who want to improve clinical practice while focusing on patient care.

The number of physicians who receive training in understanding this translational research space is few, and even fewer are those who are able to take this skill set into the market to develop new technologies based off this understanding.

At Medgadget we speak with quite a few physicians-turned-entrepreneurs, and one of the most enthusiastic and impressive we’ve known is Dr. Amy Baxter. We first met Dr. Baxter at the AARP conference in Atlanta last October where she was showing off a simple, yet effective tool she developed for pain relief called “Buzzy.” There’s been a lot of, well, buzz about the device ever since she pitched it on Shark Tank and turned down the investors. Informed by her experiences as a pediatric emergency physician, Dr. Baxter took time out of her schedule to answer a few questions we had about the device and why she thinks everyone who experiences pain should have one.

Meet the humble “Magnetosperm,” a tiny, sperm-like robot with incredible potential in the medical world.

It’s approximately six times longer than a human sperm, and scientists at the American Institute of Physics say in a paper that Magnetosperm “technology could be used not only to help with fertilization, but also chemotherapy treatment.”

Disruptive change is now a fact of life for many industries. Healthcare is no exception. Although healthcare has been changing for decades—think about the introduction of diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) or the initial push toward managed care in the 1980s—the Affordable Care Act (ACA) promises to accelerate both the rate of change and the level of uncertainty confronting the industry. Payors face navigating a difficult transition: from an industry in which the customer is often a corporation or small company and the business is paying claims to one in which consumers make healthcare purchasing decisions, the direct provision of care may be necessary for success, and consumer and retail capabilities really matter. Furthermore, payors must make this transition amid regulatory and consumer uncertainty and in a fairly short time frame. This industry and business-model shift is on a scale that few companies and few sectors in the economy have been through.

MdBio Foundation is looking for solutions to build a diverse and highly qualified STEM workforce.  Read the latest from CEO Brian Gaines published in the Washington Business Journal.

Google turned heads last week when it disclosed that its workforce includes a troublingly low rate of women and minorities. We applaud Google for its leadership in sharing this data. The disclosure sparked national questions about the hiring practices at our most innovative companies.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health has awarded $25 million to the J. Craig Venter Institute to back an initiative to study infectious diseases like malaria and influenza at the genetic level to help find better treatments and preventive measures.

The institute, with offices in Maryland and California, will use the 5-year grant from NIH to establish the Genome Center for Infectious Diseases to study the genetic secrets of a wide range of bacteria, viruses and parasites, officials said on Thursday.

A biotech entrepreneur wants to arm physicians with an electronic companion diagnostic tool to help hospitals reduce hospital-acquired infections.

Last year, antibiotic-resistant infections caused more than two million illnesses and 23,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control. About 70 percent of those antibiotic-resistant infections were caused by hospital-acquired infections.

The Association of University Research Parks (AURP) and the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) are pleased to invite you to attend the 2014 BIO International Convention to be held June 23-26, 2014 in San Diego. 

BIO 2014 is the largest venue for private company-to-company meetings ("partnering") in the world and offers tech transfer, licensing, and intellectual property professionals with unparalleled access to pharmaceutical and biotech companies, investors, and other potential partners from around the globe. According to the Campbell Alliance's Deal Makers' Intentions report from 2013, partnering events such as BIO 2014 drive the majority of successful deals in the biopharma industry.

Ventana Medical Systems, Inc. (Ventana), a member of the  Roche  Group and MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, today announced they are jointly developing a PD-L1 (SP263) immunohistochemistry assay to enroll patients in clinical trials for MedImmune's MEDI4736 anti-PD-L1 therapy for non-small cell lung carcinoma. This includes the recently commenced MEDI4736 ATLANTIC trial that will enroll only patients who express PD-L1 as determined by the VENTANA assay.

MEDI4736 is an investigational, engineered, human monoclonal antibody directed against programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1).   Signals from PD-L1 help tumors avoid detection by the immune system.   It is believed that by targeting PD-L1, MEDI4736 may block this ligand from sending out signals to T-cells to 'ignore' tumor cells, thereby countering cancer's immune-evading tactics.  

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the Chesapeake Innovation Center are teaming up to teach cyber entrepreneurs how to pitch to investors.

The seven-week program — Perfect Pitch — is scheduled to begin in September and conclude at the end of October. The program will end just before the start of the CyberMaryland Conference on Oct. 29.

Early June is Health Datapalooza time, and this year’s event was again a whirlwind of energy, insights, and over 2,000 very motivated and passionate health data enthusiasts (health datapaloozers doesn’t sound right). The hallway conversations provided tons of of pragmatic, productive and engaging conversations, inspired by keynotes and presentations from Todd Park, Bryan Sivak, Jeremy Hunt, Atul Gawande, Steve Case, Jerry Levin, Vinod Khosla, Kathleen Seblius, Dwayne Spradlin, Francis Collins, Fred Trotter, and many more (if you haven’t heard of some of them, look them up, it’s worth your time).