Roche (SIX: RO, ROG; OTCQX: RHHBY) announced today that its fourth-generation HIV combination antigen-antibody assay, the Elecsys HIV combi PT assay, has received FDA PMA approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Improvements Act of 2017, H.R. 2763, unanimously passed a House committee last week, moving one step closer to approval.

“The bill ultimately helps small businesses advance innovation and research that will help industries across California and the nation,” Knight said. “The advantages of supporting small business in their ventures are endless as some of the greatest entrepreneurial developments in technology originate from the support of the surrounding community and government resources.”

Nearly two years after its launch, Johnson & Johnson’s crowdfunding website for global public health projects in underserved communities has raised almost $500,000 for 51 projects to date.

The percentage of projects posted on the website that are funded has increased from 33 percent one year ago to 65 percent this year, according to an email from Fetzer.

Innovations born in the world of academia have contributed more than a trillion dollars to the US economy over the past two decades, according to a new report.

Examining the licensing of university technology, a study undertaken by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) and the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), reveals that over a 20 year period  ‘academic patents and the subsequent licensing to industry’ boosted industry output by $1.33 trillion.

GlycoMimetics, Inc. (NASDAQ: GLYC) today announced the closing of its underwritten public offering of 8,050,000 shares of its common stock at a public offering price of $11.50 per share, which includes the exercise in full by the underwriters of their option to purchase up to 1,050,000 additional shares of common stock. All of the shares in the offering were offered by GlycoMimetics. The aggregate gross proceeds to GlycoMimetics from the offering, before deducting the underwriting discounts and commissions and offering expenses, were approximately $92.6 million.

Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, U.S. and UK are the world's most innovative countries according to a new report by produced by Cornell University, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Now in its 10 edition, the Global Innovation Index surveys 130 economies using dozens of metrics - from patent filings to education spending - for a high-level look at the innovative activity that increasingly drives economic and social growth.

Over the past four years, 1,668 deals involving university spinout companies from across the globe attracted approximately $35.6 billion from 2013 to 2016, according to a new report from Global University Venturing. The report, however, highlights that global deals peaked in 2014 with 529 deals and total investments dollars peaked in 2015 with nearly $14 billion invested. As the authors highlighted, these global numbers were unsustainable and 2016 saw significant declines in both deals and dollars. In 2016, the total deals reported were 407 (21.6 percent decrease from 2015) and dollars invested was $6.4 billion (a 54.3 percent decrease from 2015).

On June 15, two startups based on Johns Hopkins technology received Incubator Company of the Year Awards at an annual event sponsored by the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO) and several other organizations.

The brain continues to surprise us with its magnificent complexity. Groundbreaking research that combines neuroscience with math tells us that our brain creates neural structures with up to 11 dimensions when it processes information. By "dimensions," they mean abstract mathematical spaces, not other physical realms. Still, the researchers "found a world that we had never imagined," said Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, which made the discovery.

Event is for Post-Docs & Professional Scientists currently working in the Therapeutic Areas of:

• Oncology
• Respiratory, Inflammation & Autoimmunity
• Cardiovascular & Metabolic Diseases
• Infectious Diseases & Vaccines
• Related scientific disciplines

Event will include music, lawn games, hors d'oeuvres, drinks.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County's bwtech Research & Technology Park is partnering with the state Department of Commerce to create an international cybersecurity center that will help lure foreign cyber companies to establish a presence in Maryland.

The Maryland Department of Commerce and bwtech@UMBC Research & Technology Park today announced the establishment of an international cybersecurity center, iCyberCenter@bwtech. The governor made the announcement in an address to cyber industry leaders and officials at the Houses of Parliament in London during the administration’s economic development and trade mission to Europe.

In Uganda alone, nearly 600,000 newborns require medical intervention for complications at birth. That's a problem that Teresa Cauvel and Sona Shah are on a mission to solve. Neopenda, the health tech startup they founded in 2015, makes wearables that monitor four newborn vitals: Heart rate, respiration, blood oxygen saturation, and temperature.

Using an input-output “I-O” approach to estimating the economic impact of academic licensing and summing that impact over 20 years of available data for academic U.S. Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) Survey respondents, the total contribution of these academic licensors to industry gross output ranges from $320 billion to $1.33 trillion, in 2009 U.S. dollars; and contributions to gross domestic product (GDP) range from $148 billion to $591 billion, in 2009 U.S. dollars. Estimates of the total number of person years of employment supported by U.S. universities’ and hospitals’ and research institutes’ licensed-product sales range from 1.268 million to over 4.272 million over the 20- year period. An explanation of the I-O approach is provided, and the assumptions used and the potential effects of the assumptions on the estimates are discussed. AUTM associated contributions to GDP, calculated using the I-O approach, are compared with U.S. GDP as a whole, and to selected industry, as defined by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes, contributions to GDP. Factors affecting the AUTM contributions to GDP appear to differ from those affecting U.S. GDP as a whole, as well as from those affecting selected NAICS industry contributions to GDP.

Advances in biotechnology innovation have had an enormous transformative impact on many sectors of the U.S. economy — life-saving drugs for patients of all ages, protecting plants that are key to feeding the world and industrial biotechnology applications that are leading to bio-based fuels, chemicals and products that can protect our environment.

The bioscience’s need for a stable and supportive public policy framework is vital to industry firms large and small. It is almost impossible for any state or region to ignore the need for selective incentives to either hold existing bioscience companies or attract new enterprises.

Just as some politicians are increasing their calls for Washington micromanagement of  the Bayh-Dole law (which allows universities and federal laboratories to license federally supported inventions for commercial development) a new study shows how impressively the current decentralized, market driven system is performing.

Patients with active systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) were able to control their disease with Benlysta (belimumab) plus standard of care (prednisone), pharmaceutical giant GSK said in announcing the results from a 10-year continuation study.

GSK presented the study’s results at the Annual European Congress of Rheumatology (EULAR 2017), held June 14-17 in Madrid.

New Enterprise Associates has closed its 16th flagship fund on $3.3 billion, per the Wall Street Journal, the largest venture vehicle ever raised.

A monumental fundraise, yes, but billion-dollar funds are nothing new for NEA—its latest vehicle also represents the firm’s seventh consecutive $1-billion-plus venture fund. In 1978, NEA closed its first fund on $16 million. The firm has gone on to garner $17 billion in committed capital across 15 funds, not including NEA 16. Here’s a look at the firm's largest funds to date, according to the PitchBook Platform:

Despite the best cybersecurity efforts, the number of breaches in the healthcare world is remaining fairly constant, according to the latest Protenus Breach Barometer.

The Barometer is based on data provided by DataBreaches.net.

The Maryland Science Center has promoted from within to replace president and CEO Van Reiner, who will retire this year after 13 years with the Inner Harbor attraction.

Mark Potter, the organization's vice president of development for the past six years, will assume the top spot following Reiner's retirement in October.

A Sanofi executive discusses his company’s leadership-development programs and approach to building employee capabilities amid rapid change.

Rich Bendis, Founding President and Chief Executive Officer, BioHealth Innovation, Brian Darmody, Associate Vice President for Corporate and Foundation Relations and former Association of University Research Parks (AURP) President, and Julie Lenzer, AVP of Innovation and Economic Development at UMD engage in a discussion of the transformed university tech transfer office at the AURP BioParks 2017 conference, held in conjunction with BIO 2017 at San Diego, California.

The session was moderated by David Winwood, Associate Executive Director and Chief Business Development Officer at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at LSU, and included an earlier panel on the transformation of medical research campuses into hubs of innovation and scientific breakthroughs.

This event is a prelude to BIO 2017 in San Diego, which generated a record breaking delegation from the state of Maryland, including numerous private sector biotechnology companies based in Maryland, Ben Wu, from Maryland Department of Commerce, Tamie Howie, from the Maryland Technology Council, and biotechnology economic development representatives from across the state.

At BIO 2017 the delegation will discuss partnering opportunities with the FDA in White Oak, state financing for biotechnology companies, and presentations from Maryland's leading biotechnology companies at the Maryland Pavilion.

Commercializing Technologies for Societal Impact

The governments of the United States of America (through the Department of State) and India (through the Department of Science & Technology) have established the United States - India Science & Technology Endowment Fund (USISTEF) for the promotion of joint activities that would lead to innovation and technopreneurship through the application of science and technology. The Endowment Fund activities are implemented and administered through the bi-national Indo-US Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF).

The fund aims to select and financially support promising joint U.S.-India entrepreneurial initiatives that address the theme of “Commercializing Technologies for Societal Impact” through a competitive grant program.

OpGen announced today that it has signed a supply agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific to combine its Acuitas Rapid Test for Pathogen ID with Thermo Fisher's real-time PCR solutions.

The biotech industry remains poised for growth, EY said in its annual industry report released today, despite continuing pressure from payers to contain drug prices and an investor pullback from capital markets that helped deflate profits and slow down revenue growth for public companies last year.

"Beyond Borders: Staying the Course" observed that while biotechs will continue to pursue the prices they seek for new drugs by citing their value—either in patient outcomes or lower costs—so too will payers seek to contain those prices.

A provocative study published earlier this month in the journal Science and Public Policy contends that Europe lacks the cutting-edge science long seen in the U.S., and increasingly published in Asia: “Europe lags far behind the USA in the production of important, highly cited research,” co-authors Alonso Rodríguez-Navarro, Ph.D., of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and Francis Narin, Ph.D., founder of CHI Research (now The Patent Board).

Technology talent often found in California's tech mecca Silicon Valley is starting to spread to other parts of the U.S., thanks to the rising cost of living in the Bay Area and government tax breaks for companies that move to another state. And because of that, Baltimore is starting to see growth in the industry.

“Processors are overdesigned for most applications,” says University of Illinois electrical and computer engineering professor Rakesh Kumar. It’s a well-known and necessary truth: In order to have programmability and flexibility, there’s simply going to be more stuff on a processor than any one application will use. That’s especially true of the type of ultralow power microcontrollers that drive the newest embedded computing platforms such as wearables and Internet of Things sensors. These are often running one fairly simple application and nothing else (not even an operating system), meaning that a large fraction of the circuits on a chip never, ever see a single bit of data.

The “birthplace of biotechnology” is to receive $10 million for a pioneering precision medicine programme.

It was announced this week that the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine (CIAPM) has been awarded the money from the local government’s budget, a decision welcomed by the California Life Sciences Association (CLSA).

When Ripley Ballou — Rip to his friends — started to feel sick at a party in 1987, he thought it was because of his friend's home-brewed beer.

Ballou was taking a break from his work on developing a malaria vaccine at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, which he was doing in collaboration with the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Back then, researchers could be a principal investigator as well as volunteer in their own projects.

Typically when someone gets #Cancer, it is not the initial tumor that kills them. At some point, the tumor spreads to other parts of the body, such as the brain, the liver, or other parts to the point where it becomes untreatable. What if a therapy could be developed that could slow or even stop this process? A post-doctorate fellow at #Johns Hopkins may well have discovered such a therapy, according to the Baltimore Sun.

Robust private-sector investment and prudent regulation from policymakers have helped establish Maryland as a cradle of innovation and a leader in the U.S. innovation economy. Few states can match Maryland's highly skilled workforce, market access and technology-centered policy incentives, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ranked Maryland No. 1 in the country for entrepreneurship and innovation.

The American Visionary Art Museum provided the backdrop Thursday night for this year’s edition the Maryland Incubator Company of the Year Awards.

The awards seek to spotlight startups making moves around the state, as well as the incubators that provide support to help them grow.

Governor Terry McAuliffe today announced that Granules India Ltd., a vertically integrated pharmaceutical company, will invest $35 million into its wholly owned subsidiary, Granules Pharmaceuticals Inc., to expand its pharmaceutical R&D and manufacturing capabilities in Fairfax County. Virginia successfully competed against New Jersey for the project, which will create 102 new jobs. In 2014, the company invested $15 million to establish the wholly-owned subsidiary operation, creating 75 jobs.

emocha mobile health is turning its technology toward the nation’s growing opioid crisis.

Providing a way for medical staff to remotely observe patients taking required medication can help people battling addiction stay in treatment, said CEO Sebastian Seiguer.