How do you turn a genetic disorder into a money-making empire? Grumpy Cat has done it, but is it only acceptable because she is a funny looking feline instead of a human?

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services welcomed its third group of “entrepreneurs-in-residence” — mainly private-sector tech experts and start-up founders who are spending a year advising the agency on its health IT projects.

AstraZeneca became the latest biotechnology company to expand its manufacturing operations in Maryland when the British drugmaker announced plans last month to enlarge a production facility and add 300 workers in Frederick.

Pieris AG has achieved the fourth milestone payment for its lead Anticalin® program with Daiichi Sankyo Company, Limited (hereinafter Daiichi Sankyo; headquartered in Chuo Ward, Tokyo, TSE 4568), triggering an undisclosed payment, the company announced today. This milestone marks in total the sixth milestone achieved for the parties' two R&D collaborative projects. Specifically, the milestone was the decision by Daiichi Sankyo to initiate a GLP toxicity study in non-human primates. In 2013, Pieris transferred the program to Daiichi Sankyo, which is responsible for further development of the program.

Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited (TSE:4502) today announced its global oncology business unit, headquartered in Cambridge, MA, will be called Takeda Oncology. The creation of Takeda Oncology will improve the company’s ability to meet the unique and urgent needs of cancer patients, their loved ones and health care providers worldwide. Takeda will sustain its long-standing entrepreneurial approach to oncology research and development while expanding its global commercial network and resources as Takeda Oncology. Takeda is retiring the Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company brand, and replacing it with Takeda Oncology to reflect the new global oncology business unit.

Blueprint Health has formed an interdisciplinary group inside and outside of healthcare to develop and assess new healthcare technologies earlier in an effort to reduce risk and to better predict the ROI of solutions earlier, according to a company statement. The Blueprint Health Collective will be totally separate from its New York City-based accelerator.

Steve Silverman resigned this week as the director of the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development.

County spokesman Patrick Lacefield said Silverman, who has served in the role since 2009, left the post to purse a job in the private sector.

Governor Terry McAuliffe on Thursday announced a Virginia Bioscience Initiative, kicking off the effort with a public and private sector roundtable discussion on the commercialization of university bioscience research at the State Capitol.  University representatives and bio industry leaders joined the Governor, members of his administration and renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Dr. Robert S. Langer for this discussion.

Canadian researchers have developed “smart textiles” able to monitor and transmit wearers’ biomedical information via wireless or cellular network by superimposing multiple layers of copper, polymers, glass, and silver.

GI View out of Ramat Gan, Israel finally won FDA clearance to introduce to the U.S. market its self-propelled single-use Aer-O-Scope colonoscope. This device originally appeared on our radar almost a decade ago, but the regulatory road seems to have been rocky for GI View, and the company expects it will be at least another year before it begins introducing the Aer-O-Scope to the U.S. market.

I was asked by the U.S.-UK Fulbright Commission to give a series of lectures in the United Kingdom in 2013 on the topic of diplomacy. This was surprising, as I am even marginally competent in only one domain of diplomacy—the forms of international relations that involve nations working together in fields of medical science and health. So I proposed to address the question of what accounted for the success—despite inherent difficulties and adverse circumstances—of three important and ambitious international initiatives in medicine and related science undertaken by the United States.

Tom Telford ’s stomach ached. The New York City teacher had been drinking cup after cup of coffee as he labored to finish year-end grading and coach his high-school baseball team through the playoffs. He worried he might have an ulcer.

Health startup founders have one more day to get their applications in to be a part of DreamIt Health’s second Baltimore cohort.

The deadline is Friday for the new group of health startups. Get to it.

BioCity, the Bioscience incubation specialist with locations in the East Midlands (BioCity and Medicity in Nottingham), the North West (BioHub at Alderley Park) and Scotland (BioCity Scotland at Newhouse), has announced a new investment fund, created following a significant contribution by AstraZeneca.

Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Holdings (NASDAQ:RHHBY) recently announced the acquisition of Ariosa Diagnostics, which makes non-invasive prenatal testing equipment. The terms of the deal were not disclosed by Roche in its press release. According to WHO, there are over 200 million pregnancies worldwide annually and prenatal testing to detect Down syndrome is gaining strong traction.

Entrepreneurs on college campuses got another boost Thursday with Boston-area Xfund closing a $100 million fund to bankroll new ideas and support startups it’s backed so far.

The recent bumpy landing of Philae on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a ten year journey, and more than 1.4 billion euros in investment, is a fantastic example of European science, expertise and collaboration at work.

Biopharmaceuticals are among the most sophisticated and elegant achievements of modern science. The huge, complex structures of these drugs don’t just look extraordinary in the 3-D modeling systems used to design them; they also perform their jobs remarkably well, offering high efficacy and few side effects. And there is much more to come: existing treatment archetypes are evolving and becoming more sophisticated all the time, and continuing research is yielding entirely new types of products.

Learn How to Get Seed Funding Investment for Your Business from the Government! Featuring SBIR program managers from leading Federal agencies invited including DOD, NIH, NCI, and Homeland Security plus case studies from experienced SBIR recipients and much more! Network with the SBIR program managers during an Expo and meet other business owners.

This event is generously supported by Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County; Maryland Technology Development Corporation; BioHealth Innovation; and the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development.

Eyeing the biotech IPO boom earlier this year, Ariosa Diagnostics planned to go public as it battled larger competitors in the prenatal testing field. But the San Jose, CA-based company backed off in late April, and that was its last chance. Multinational healthcare firm Roche has bought Ariosa for an undisclosed amount, the companies announced today.

Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by definition, pretty dull, filled with those quotidian little tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laundry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local market.

A quick note: Nature announced yesterday that it will make all of its articles free to view, read, and annotate online. That applies to the historic science journal (launched in 1869) and to 48 other scientific journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group (NPG). Other titles include Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics.

Federal spending on scientific research hasn’t kept up with inflation in recent years, and it’s made it harder for researchers to fund their work. Some of them are turning to another source: crowdfunding. But this funding source raises new questions for scientists.  

"Today, on this stage in the auditorium of Richard Montgomery High School - a magnet school that symbolizes the quality education that is Montgomery County - I stand before you with great humility and excitement about the future as I begin my third term as your County Executive."

"I have learned throughout my life that families are our “links” to our past, our anchors in the present, and bridges to our future. So, to my family, your love, support and patience have kept me grounded."

Every once and a while we get a clear example of the gulf between those battling over important public policy issues and can understand why the public and policy makers are confused by resulting charges and counter charges. Last week was a good illustration.

The Washington Business Journal interviewed Leslie Ford Weber, JHU's director of the Montgomery County Campus and of government and community affairs for Montgomery County. The feature ran as an Executive Profile on Nov. 14, 2014. It was written by Vandana Sinha, an assistant managing editor at the Washington Business Journal. The photo was taken by Joanne S. Lawton.

That next blockbuster drug? It all begins with a hypothesis: GlaxoSmithKline just announced the winners of its second Discovery Fast Track Challenge – a competition that teams up American and European academia with GSK researchers to speed up their search for new therapeutics.

David Chalker, 50, has excruciating pain in his hip. He’s an Army veteran and because of the pain, he had to leave his job as a machinist, which left him in a great deal of debt and unable to pay for health insurance. He, his wife, and his three daughters needed to move in with his in-laws as a result.

The stampede is back on among venture capital firms to raise new money and close more funds, after years of standing pat following the recession and years of sluggish recovery.

Small businesses are a major driver of high-technology innovation and economic growth in the United States, generating significant employment, new markets, and high-growth industries.1 In this era of globalization, optimizing the ability of small businesses to develop and commercialize new products is essential for U.S. competitiveness and national security. Developing better incentives to spur innovative ideas, technologies, and products—and ultimately to bring them to market—is thus a central policy challenge.

An experimental vaccine to prevent Ebola virus disease was well-tolerated and produced immune system responses in all 20 healthy adults who received it in a Phase 1 clinical trial conducted by researchers from the National Institutes of Health. The candidate vaccine, which was co-developed by the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), was tested at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The interim results are reported online in advance of print in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Immunotherapy is at the forefront of cancer care; however, most cancers evolve the ability to dodge the body’s defenses.

Maryland startup BeneVir is developing immunotherapy viruses that rid the body of two types of tumor cells – those that cause cancer and the ones that make it recurrent.

Funding and Research Opportunities

The following funding opportunity announcements from the NHLBI or other components of the National Institutes of Health, might be of interest:
Notices:

• NIH Implementation of the US Government Policy on Institutional Oversight of Life Sciences Dual Use Research of Concern
• (NOT-OD-15-017) National Institutes of Health
• Publication of Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for Clinical Trials Registration and Results Submission under FDAAA
• (NOT-OD-15-018) Office of the Director, NIH
• NIH Request for Public Comments on the Draft NIH Policy on Dissemination of NIH-Funded Clinical Trial Information
• (NOT-OD-15-019) Office of the Director, NIH
• Request for Information (RFI): Inviting Comments and Suggestions on the Reagent-Related Barriers to Reproducible Research
• (NOT-OD-15-020) National Institutes of Health
• Reminder: Annual Reports to the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare due January 31, 2015
• (NOT-OD-15-025) National Institutes of Health
• Notice of Intent to Publish a Funding Opportunity Announcement for Sudden Death in the Young: Population-Based Studies (U01)
• (NOT-HL-14-241)
• National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute

Program Announcements

• Systems Science and Health in the Behavioral and Social Sciences (R21)
• (PAR-15-047) 
• Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research
• National Cancer Institute
• National Institute on Aging
• National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
• National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering
• Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development 
• National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research
• National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
• National Institute of Mental Health
• National Institute of Nursing Research
• Office of Disease Prevention
• Application Receipt/Submission Date(s): Multiple dates, see announcement.
• Systems Science and Health in the Behavioral and Social Sciences (R01)
• (PAR-15-048) 
• Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research
• National Cancer Institute
• National Institute on Aging
• National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
• National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering
• Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development 
• National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research
• National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
• National Institute of Mental Health
• National Institute of Nursing Research
• Office of Disease Prevention
• Application Receipt/Submission Date(s): Multiple dates, see announcement.

In 2015, hospitals will – and should – make more advanced use of "third platform" technologies based on mobile tools, social channels, data analytics and the cloud, according to a recent report from IDC Health Insights.

With healthcare costs unsustainable, but these new technologies now ubiquitous, IDC officials say hospital CIOs will increasingly be turning to new tools – especially as consumers expect healthcare to be as responsive to their wants and needs as other industries.

The color of your urine could be telling you something about your health condition. Yes, your standard yellow is where you want to be, but the different shades of the rainbow make an appearance on occasion.