BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI) announced today that John P. Sullivan has joined BHI as a new Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), working with Ethel Rubin, PhD, ventures team head, to provide product, corporate and private investment strategy for NIH portfolio companies.

“We are pleased to have Mr. Sullivan join the team of EIRs serving NIH,” said Richard Bendis, BHI President and CEO. “His expertise in building, operating and acquiring health technology businesses will certainly be an asset as he works to provide the institution with industry insights and commercialization perspectives.”

Established with NIH in 2012, the EIR program is designed to connect NIH-funded start-ups with experienced industry experts who can help them maneuver through multi-disciplinary technical challenges and the business and regulatory environment to deploy new healthcare and biomedical technologies. 

A sign of the BioHealth Capital Region’s industry growth is the increase in hiring taking place throughout the region.   More than 1800 job opportunities are listed on BioHealth Innovation’s website (www.BioHealthInnovation.org/Jobs).  Many with relatively young companies expanding their regulatory, manufacturing and R&D teams.  To post positions, Email:  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

HOLD THE DATE - January 29, 2019  8 am. – 12:30 p.m.

Meet 1:1 with SBIR program managers. Learn more about their funding programs (SBIR and more!) 

8-8:30 Networking and Registration

8:30 – 10:00 a.m. – Program Overviews*

10:00 – 12:30 p.m. – 1:1 Meetings with Program Managers**

Agencies represented include:   
NSF, NIH NIA, NIH NCATS, NIH NCI, NIH NHLBI, NIH NIDA, US Army (invited)

*The program overview will be available by videoconference.

**You do not have to participate in 1:1 meetings.  However, to do so, you must attend the overview session in person.
PRE-REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED:  RSVP by noon 1/27:  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Please join me in celebrating two exciting leadership changes at JHTV. Steve Kousouris, who has been serving as Interim Executive Director of Technology Transfer at JHTV since June, has assumed this role permanently effective Jan.1. Additionally, Mark Bailey, previously Associate Director of Finance, will assume responsibility for the portfolio that Steve has overseen since 2013 in the capacity of Director, Finance & Administration.

Autolus Therapeutics plc (NASDAQ: AUTL), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing next-generation programmed T cell therapies, today announced that it has signed a long-term, full-building lease with Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE) for the construction and development of an 85,000 square foot build-to-suit facility to be located in the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center in Rockville, Maryland. The new facility will house offices for Autolus' U.S.-based research and development, commercial and corporate functions and serve as its first full commercial-scale manufacturing center, with a planned capacity to produce 5,000 T cell therapies annually. In addition, Autolus has established a temporary U.S. headquarters in Rockville until the new facility is ready for occupancy, which is currently expected to occur in 2021.

2018 was a record year for biopharma initial public offerings (IPOs), with an all-time high of $6.3 billion raised by 58 U.S. companies as of December 17, according to Renaissance Capital, compared with 36 companies garnering some $4 billion in 2017.

For months, it had been clear that 2018 would be a banner year for pharmaceutical innovation. The question was, by how much would it shatter the previous (1996) record of 50 approvals (excluding diagnostics and imaging agents)? We now know. It exceeded it by over 20 percent. Last year, U.S. regulators approved a total of 61 drugs – 59 by FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), plus two recombinant therapies (Andexxa and Jivi) by its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER).

Indicators of Innovation, a report issued today by the New Jersey Business & Industry Association, shows New Jersey at a challenging crossroads in its efforts to reclaim itself as the “Innovation State.”

Brianna Wronko has an engineering degree from an Ivy League school and is the CEO of a health-care diagnostics company. Until this week, she never thought she’d be stuck holding business meetings in a San Francisco hotel bathroom.

Pharmaceutical companies are starting to see the retail supply chain as more than just a way to get drugs from point A to point B. It can be an opportunity to ensure better products and services and create a competitive advantage with consumers – but only if data is connected and well managed.

A pair of Baltimore-based digital health startups were among the award winners at the conclusion of the Accenture HealthTech Innovation Challenge this week.

The Food and Drug Administration plans to create a new office to improve the review of new medicines — one that will develop a standardized approach to using personalized medicine, digital data, and patients’ own reports, according to Commissioner Scott Gottlieb.

GlaxoSmithKline - Advancing the science of vaccines and improving lives around the world.

Is the pain stabbing or burning? On a scale from 1 to 10, is it a 6 or an 8?

Over and over, 17-year-old Sarah Taylor struggled to make doctors understand her sometimes debilitating levels of pain, first from joint-damaging childhood arthritis and then from fibromyalgia.

Precision medicine is using knowledge about a person’s genetic code to tailor treatments to that individual for the most optimal outcome. Think of sequencing tumors and then determining a treatment regimen based on biomarkers or genetic variants.

MOVE over Caltech, Georgia Tech, and MIT – the University of Oxford has been named the best university in the world for computer science degrees for 2019. The ranking compares the top computer science programs in the world. ETH Zurich ranked number 2 on the list, followed by Stanford University (No. 3), the University of Cambridge (No. 4), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (No. 5).

The University of Maryland Robert E. Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices celebrated its official launch on Thursday, January 3, 2019. The event kicked off included presentations by researchers at the Institute and supported by the the Institute taking place at the A. James Clark School of Engineering, the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Children’s National Health Center, University of Maryland Insitute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research.

Wednesday, January 23, 2019, 12:30 - 4:00pm

Are you a young company or thinking of starting up a new firm.  What do you need to know related to taxes?  --tax credits? Filing? Tax liability? Other accounting issues? Learn the answers to these questions and more.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to participate in person / by video conference**       

• 12:00 p.m. - Networking Lunch   
• 12:30-1:30 p.m. - Panel and Q&A with experts
• 1:30 p.m. - 1:1 meetings*

*Attendance at Panel is required to participate in 1:1 meeting with expert.

**In person at BHI HQ, 1 Church Street, Rockville, MD or by videoconference.

The Pistoia Alliance announced key trends for the life science industry in 2019 based on The Life Sciences Innovation Report developed with Clarivate Analytics.

Congrats to Alexandria a BHI partner and Board Member for their commitment to early-stage BioHealth investing.

Alexandria Venture Investments, the strategic venture capital arm of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. based in Pasadena, was recognized by Silicon Valley Bank as the most active biopharma investor by new deal volume in 2017-2018.

University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) Dean E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, announced today that Claire M. Fraser, PhD, a pioneer in the field of microbialgenomics, who is the Dean’s Endowed Professor, Department of Medicine, and Director of the Institutefor Genome Sciences (IGS), has been chosen as president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). AAAS is the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting edge research through its Science family of journals.

The STSI's 107 individual indicators are sorted into five composites: research and development (R&D) inputs, risk capital and entrepreneurial infrastructure, human capital investment, technology and science workforce, and technology concentration and dynamism.

Maryland placed third on think tank Milken Institute’s 2018 State Technology and Science Index, ranking innovation pipelines. Maryland also placed third in 2016’s report.

The first Food and Drug Administration approvals for cell and gene therapies are already more than a year out, but 2019 is likely to be a significant year for the field, particularly in areas like international interest, industry consolidation and pricing. That was the theme of a panel discussion Monday morning at Biotech Showcase in San Francisco, which coincides with the 2019 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.

BioSpace is proud to present its NextGen Bio “Class of 2019,” a list of 20 up-and-coming life science companies in North America that launched* no earlier than 2017.

What are the top universities in the United States? The list is decided by the CEOWORLD magazine university ranking which considers 7 important factors to help make a balanced comparison. These include influence, reputation, specialization, recruiters Responses and employers Feedback, which in turn help to rate and rank the top unis.

In wrapping up the year, AGT was proud to be featured as a State of Maryland “Success Story” for its growth in Maryland and achievements in the gene and cell therapy industry.

Now in its 37th year, the conference has ballooned from a small event with 150 attendees that was essentially the " birth of biotech," to an event attended by everyone from the biggest pharma company to the smallest biotech. JPMorgan said more than 485 companies are scheduled to present this year.

Personal Genome Diagnostics is starting off the year with news of a pair of partnership agreements as it looks to expand its approach to cancer testing.

Congratulations to Bahija on making MedImmune the leading BioHealth company in Maryland and accelerating its growth. Also many thanks for the MedImmune longtime support of BHI and helping the BioHealth Capital Region become the 4th largest Life Science region in the country.

Six years after AstraZeneca’s then new CEO Pascal Soriot named Bahija Jallal president of the big MedImmune subsidiary in Gaithersburg, MD, putting her at the center of the company’s R&D turnaround plans, the longtime pharma exec is joining the great migration of industry professionals to biotech.

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s $74 billion planned purchase of Celgene Corp. puts it in line to lead the drug industry’s hottest market, cancer, as early as next year.

Many thanks to Dan for his leadership of Emergent, his service as a loyal BHI Board Member and for helping accelerate the growth of the BIO Health Capital Region

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. (EBS) today announced that its CEO Daniel J. Abdun-Nabi will be retiring and that its board of directors has unanimously appointed Robert G. Kramer, Sr., the company’s current president and COO, to succeed him as president and CEO, effective April 1, 2019. Mr. Abdun-Nabi has also indicated that he plans to step down as a member of the Emergent board of directors, and Emergent expects the board of directors to appoint Mr. Kramer to fill the board vacancy created by Mr. Abdun-Nabi’s retirement.

Here is a significant opportunity for MARYLAND to grow in SBIR success.

One of the best ways to measure the effectiveness of state programs intended to encourage the success of SBIR applications is the approval-rate of their submissions. Although this data has been historically unavailable across every federal agency, it is now accessible for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the second largest provider of SBIR/STTR awards, according to a 2018 Digest report. The NIH distributed $446.2 million in SBIR/STTR awards in 2017, with every state except North and South Dakota receiving an award. Although California and Massachusetts had the most successful SBIR/STTR applications in 2017, accounting for roughly one-third of the total when combined, neither state ranked among the top 10 in success rate.

A biotechnology venture capital firm is ringing in the new year with its latest fund, having raised a quarter of $1 billion.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Atlas Venture said Wednesday that it closed its first Opportunity Fund, or AVOF I, with an oversubscribed fund raise of $250 million. The firm plans to invest the money in companies already in its portfolio.