Tests on a drug with the potential to stop Alzheimer’s in its tracks are being funded by raffles, pensioners’ donations and a sponsored walk – because the research team cannot find money for pre-clinical safety tests any other way.

Over the years, Microsoft has opened more than 100 Innovation Centers around the world to engage with startups, raise technological skill levels, and boost innovation. In the US, the company opened its first in 2014 in Miami, which was followed by a second one in Atlanta a year later. But Microsoft has just announced that the company is teaming with venture capital fund SeventySix Capital, innovation hub University City Science Center, and real estate investment and development company Wexford Science & Technology to open a new MIC in Philadelphia this summer.

Dan Gilbert -- the Cleveland Cavaliers owner and founder of Quicken Loans -- and Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington will be among the judges at Thursday’s Cupid's Cup entrepreneurship competition.

The chief executive officer of the state's orthopedics initiative says a new accelerator will support the "lifeblood" of the industry. Sheryl Conley says the AcceLinx Medical Device Business Accelerator from Warsaw-based OrthoWorx will provide entrepreneurs with in-house and industry partner expertise, assist with access to capital and offer working space. Conley says concepts in the orthopedics industry can take more than six years to hit the market.

Thursday, April 28th from 5 - 7 PM

BioBuzz hosts a FREE event for like-minded professionals and students to gather and network, reconnect with past coworkers, build stronger relationships and share conversations in a welcoming atmosphere.

The Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO) announced today that 17 companies have received over $1.7 million in funding from the organization’s Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF) and Cyber Security Investment Fund (CIF)in the last six months. The funding will be used to advance the companies’ technology and product commercialization efforts.

With college football season in full swing, it’s easy to get caught up rating your alma mater by tallying up the win and loss columns. Between BCS rankings and March Madness, we seem to be constantly ranking our universities on achievements in athletics. Maybe we should also rank our favorite institutions of higher learning based on how they contribute to the nation’s economic growth. After all, the core aim of universities across the country is to increase the intellectual capital of society.

A friend of mine asked me to share my opinion on where the current presidential candidates stand on entrepreneurship. It struck me that despite the 24/7 political coverage, there is surprisingly little information to be had on this topic.

May 11, 2016 5:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.

The MITRE Corporation McLean Campus, MITRE 2 7515 Colshire Drive McLean, VA 22102

Please join us at the MITRE Corporation on the evening of May 11, 2016, for an event that will bring together cyber technology providers, entrepreneurs, investment companies, and others interested in hearing about the latest in available cyber technologies and products.

Reasons to attend:

• Discover emerging technologies that could be game changers
• Hear pitches and get demos on innovative technologies from MITRE and other regional companies
• Learn about U.S. government's need in the cyber domain Network with individuals, investors and companies impacting the region's technology ecosystem 

Eight small and mid-sized Montgomery County companies have been awarded ExportMD grants by the Maryland Department of Commerce to help promote their products and services in the global marketplace. The state awarded a total of 16 grants and the lion’s share went to local businesses. The companies receiving grants are: American General Supplies; Care Systems, Inc.; MagBio Genomics; Molecular Transfer, Inc.; Patton Electronics Co.; PW Communications; Rife International, LLC; and Washington Laboratories.

The Washington-based start-up incubator known as 1776 has received a $7.2 million investment from Steve and Jean Case and others to help the for-profit consultant find and grow more small businesses throughout the world.

Leading the investment in 1776 is the Pepper Group, a technology investment firm based in Australia. Several unnamed investors also participated.

I stand, a cyborg micronaut, in front of the biggest human heart any person has ever seen.

It is Arch Obler huge, a flesh pump the size of a skyscraper, but I manipulate it with god-like facility, rotating it in midair with my hands and bisecting it with just a flick of the finger. Through ventricles and thundering aorta I dive, floating through heart chambers so enormous, they become corpuscle cathedrals.

Ramani Duraiswami is the first person to admit that you have to try his technology to truly understand what it is.

The Alexandria Center for Life Science currently houses some of the most ambitious biotech startups in New York, not to mention some outposts for pharma companies like Roche and Pfizer. Not bad for something that, as Alexandria Real Estate Equities CEO Joel Marcus said, “was a contaminated laundry site” just a short time ago.

Nearly six years after developing the first self-replicating life form with a chemically created genome, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla have cut that bacterium's genome nearly in half. The result is a creature with a smaller genome than has ever been found in nature.

Best Pharma Brands, a global study, identifies the biopharma companies that are addressing healthcare professionals’ (HCPs), payers’, and policy makers’ needs. The study examines what value means to HCPs and illustrates the influence the corporate brand has in conveying that value. It reveals how leading companies are beginning to deliver on what matters to HCPs.

Johns Hopkins Medicine has performed the nation's first liver and kidney transplants from a donor infected with HIV to recipients also infected with the virus, a triumph for one of the transplant surgeons, who fought for six years for federal approval of the life-saving surgery.

As part of the Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program (Kids First), the NIH invites applications to use whole genome sequencing at a Kids First-supported sequencing center to elucidate the genetic contribution to childhood cancers, and to investigate the genetic etiology of structural birth defects.  These data will become part of the Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Data Resource (Kids First Data Resource) for the pediatric research community.

Johns Hopkins is setting its sights on an end to cancer with its new Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

When someone with a high fever walks into a rural African clinic, diagnosis could be murky. The symptoms could be those of dengue, Ebola, West Nile disease, malaria or flu, and blood work results from distant labs, if available, often takes days. Now a handful of researchers are separately working on inexpensive, paper-based diagnostic tests that accurately pinpoint the cause of a disease in minutes and could speed up treatment and prevent its spread. The lack of funds and commercial partners however, means most might languish in labs.

Johns Hopkins is launching an immunotherapy center for cancer research with a $125 million gift from longtime Hopkins donors Michael R. Bloomberg and Sidney Kimmel, along with other donors.

GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals Ltd is looking at launching two or three combination vaccines in India in the near future, to address a host of paediatric disease. The company is also organising programmes to spread awareness about the need of vaccination among public.

Gaithersburg cell modification technology firm MaxCyte Inc. is expected to go public on the London Stock Exchange Tuesday morning.

MaxCyte, which will trade under the ticker symbol MXCT, is seeking to raise between $14 million and $15 million, said CEO and President Doug Doerfler.

The cybersecurity industry is predicted to double by 2020 and the DC metro area is the center of cybersecurity innovation in the US. Therefore it should be no surprise that the premiere accelerator for information security startups and entrepreneurs calls this area home. The accelerator is Mach37 and they’ve just announced their most recent cohort.

Physician entrepreneurs or wannapreneurs ask a lot of questions about the processes of biomedical and clinical innovation and entrepreneurship. Given their lack of training in medical school, it comes as no surprise and most have to get the information on their own.  Maybe these answers to your FAQs will help:

There is an element of synchronicity associated with blogging at this time on my work and career path at the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration (EDA). On March 28th, I will celebrate 28 years with the Philadelphia Regional Office of EDA so in some ways, I AM living history here at DOC, part of the EDA institutional knowledge base. EDA is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2016 and I am proud to carry the torch cheerleading for and at EDA, a DOC program that has invested and leveraged billions of dollars in its role as the only federal agency focused exclusively on economic development.

Are you a local engineering firm, technology-based company, or biohealth startup? Are you a STEM-based business in the Tri-State area? The Federal Laboratory Consortium is coming to Hagerstown on April 12, 2016 to share the latest technologies and research capabilities of the federal labs. NIST, NSA, NASA, NIH, & USDA will all be at Hagerstown Community College for the Small Business Forum from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Connect with representatives from each lab and discover how you can benefit from working with their lab.

Maryland universities have ramped up efforts in recent years to help students and faculty turn their discoveries into growing businesses but lag far behind many colleges around the country in spinning off companies and pulling in millions of dollars in licensing revenue.

SPIRIT OF INNOVATION: “We spend a lot of effort in recruitment to find the right culture fit,” says Gorkem Sevinc, CTO of emocha Mobile Health. What’s more, the solutions developed by Sevinc and his team help patients with medication and care plan adherence, a task that can literally save lives. “This drives our team to go above and beyond,” he says.

Rexahn Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NYSE MKT: RNN) announced today that additional data supporting the Company’s novel, investigational anti-cancer therapeutic, Supinoxin™ (RX-5902), for the treatment of triple negative breast cancer, were presented at the 14th Annual Targeted Anticancer Therapeutics Congress (TAT 2016), held in Washington, DC March 21- 23, 2016.

Our mission: improve newborn survival and health in the developing world

We are developing cutting edge healthcare technologies for where they’re gravely needed and will have an incredible impact—vulnerable populations in low-resource countries. Annually, over 46 million newborns in developing countries around the world need interventions for complications that happen at or around birth, 600,000 in Uganda alone. Every Neopenda device has the potential to save the life of a newborn for less than $1, once it is produced at scale.

For the last several years, Martine Rothblatt has been positioning United Therapeutics to manufacture transplantable human organs. This week, the founder and CEO of the Maryland biotech cornerstone told the state's tech community to get ready for a new industry to sprout from the idea.

A Baltimore health startup is among the new class of companies entering Dreamit’s accelerator program.

Timonium-based Kermit was developed by a team that consulted for hospitals on the purchase of implantable medical devices for knees, hips and other body parts.

Join us on March 30th for an evening of networking around innovation and commercialization at the BioBuzz @ Relevant Health. Meet with the organizations fueling commercialization in Maryland - BHI & TEDCO - and mingle with the first cohort of companies in the regions newest BioHealth accelerator - Relevant Health.

DATE: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 (FINAL EVENT) TIME: 3:30-5:00PM

LOCATION: Montgomery County Department of Economic Development, 111 Rockville Pike, Suite 800, Rockville, MD 20850  

We would like to offer one of our best and brightest as our final speaker for the Tech Transfer Speakers Series.  Launching one successful company is challenging, but founding six or more is an art.  Plan to attend our final program on April 13 with one of our area's prolific entrepreneurs.  Specific points of interest and discussion will include:  fundraising, launching the idea, identifying a technology that will sell, working with tech transfer officers to license the technology, and the future of innovation investment in the United States, Asia and Europe.  Bring your best questions.  This will be an exciting conversation!