Scientific excellence is an integral part of any pharmaceutical company’s success. By paying attention to staff training and development at all levels, it is possible to embed vital life-long skills and behaviours into the scientists and professionals responsible for discovering and developing new medicines to treat patients.
MedImmune is the global biologics R&D arm of AstraZeneca and is committed to scientific innovation and medical progress. Our state-of-the-art facilities at Granta Park are home to over 550 members of the 2,500-strong global MedImmune team. To support its ambitions to help save lives and improve people’s health, MedImmune works hard to ensure that all employees, across all functions, are given the training they need to excel in their roles and work alongside their colleagues. MedImmune’s Cambridge site is therefore very pleased that it has recently been awarded Gold Standard Status for Training in Life Sciences by Cogent, the organisation responsible for skills in the life sciences sector and connected to government policies in this area.
Emergent BioSolutions Inc. – Product Pipeline Review – 2014 is a new market research publication announced by Reportstack. This report provides an overview of the Emergent BioSolutions Inc.’s pharmaceutical research and development focus.
This report provides comprehensive information on the current therapeutic developmental pipeline of Emergent BioSolutions Inc.’s, complete with comparative analysis at various stages, therapeutics assessment by drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type. It also reviews latest updates, and featured news and press releases, along with special features on late-stage and discontinued projects.
GSK and Save the Children have announced the second annual $1 million Healthcare Innovation Award, which was established to identify and reward innovations in healthcare that have proven successful in reducing child deaths in developing countries.
Organizations from across the developing world can nominate examples of innovative healthcare approaches they have discovered or implemented. These approaches must have resulted in tangible improvements to under-5 child survival rates, be sustainable and have the potential to be scaled-up and replicated. Special attention will be given to work that aims to increase the quality of, or access to, healthcare for newborns.
Johns Hopkins University is one of eight Baltimore universities and hospitals that today joined Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to sign a pledge to work together to grow and revitalize the city and to help solve some of its most pressing challenges.
The Baltimore City Anchor Plan targets four priority areas—public safety, local hiring, local purchasing, and quality of life in the city. In a memo introducing the plan, Rawlings-Blake said that the signing institutions, which are among the city’s largest employers, are integral to her goals of attracting new families to Baltimore and increasing jobs and investment.
The BioMaryland Center is pairing up with a French life science organization to support a business venture between two companies.
BioMaryland and Medicen Paris Region will each invest $200,000 in a commercialization project between Opticul Diagnostics in Rockville and the French company Diafir. Each company will also put $200,000 toward the project for a total investment of $800,000.
The University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Maryland Psychiatric Research Center (MPRC), a research center in the School’s Department of Psychiatry, was awarded a $10.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish a Silvio O. Conte Neuroscience Research Center that will examine the causes of schizophrenia and search for possible new treatments. Schizophrenia is a devastating psychiatric disease, affecting one percent of people worldwide. Although its roots have been traced to abnormal early brain development, the cause remains a mystery, and current treatments are limited.
The five-year NIH grant*, one of only two awarded this year nationwide, will enable researchers to conduct breakthrough research, combining laboratory and clinical studies of a key chemical called kynurenic acid, a major breakdown product of the amino acid tryptophan. Kynurenic acid levels are increased in the brain of individuals with schizophrenia, and appear to contribute especially to the cognitive abnormalities, which are core symptoms of the disease and a major reason for the inability of people with the disorder to lead productive and fulfilling lives.
The A. James Clark School of Engineering and the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech), an international leader in technology entrepreneurship education and venture creation, seeks a teaching faculty member to join its award-winning team.
Leveraging their experiences in technology entrepreneurship, the faculty member will teach approximately five courses per year, with an emphasis on undergraduates. Key topics may include customer discovery, marketing strategy, new product design and development, design for manufacturing, industrial design, concurrent engineering, and/or market development and commercialization.
The lecturer will be expected to use innovative teaching approaches to include collaborative learning, project based learning, flipped classroom, online learning, and civic engagement. This person will play an active role in collaborating with student entrepreneurs to launch new ventures.
Whenever Baltimore-area companies sell themselves to out-of-state firms, economists and local leaders alike bemoan the loss. Another headquarters gone. Fewer corporate decision-makers here. Possible job cuts.
But Silicon Valley’s deals for two Columbia firms — the planned Micros Systems acquisition, announced last week, and Sourcefire last year — strike local entrepreneurs in an entirely different way.
Maryland has a new strategy for growing biotechnology business: Roll out the welcome mat for international companies.
International bio companies looking to break into the American market must first get approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA regulates medical devices and drugs. The approval process can be complicated even for American companies that are somewhat familiar with the agency.
Today, Under Armour (NYSE:UA), the global leader in sports performance and innovation, announced plans for the 2014 Under Armour Future Show: The Connected Fitness Innovation Challenge, which asks innovators to submit concepts for the next generation of game-changing digital experiences, through apps and wearable technology, while utilizing the MapMyFitness software. Finalists will present their concepts to the Brand’s executive team in October, 2014 at Under Armour’s global headquarters in Baltimore, MD for a chance to win the Grand Prize of $50,000. Winners may then be eligible for an additional investment of up to $150,000. Innovators can now submit their ideas and innovations at idea.underarmour.com for consideration.
Entering its fourth year, Under Armour’s Future Show rewards the Brand’s innovation-inspired consumer base, incentivizing them to design new products that align with the Brand’s forward-thinking vision. The 2014 Future Show will identify the most creative minds in engineering and software development who can implement wearable, wireless and embedded apparel-based technology addressing one or more of the following needs: fitness assessment and training, readiness and recovery, sleep analysis or other novel usages that will help make athletes better.
Cyber entrepreneur Mike Binko is launching a second Innovation Sandbox to give exposure to small startup companies.
The program will connect health care, medical and life science organizations with small vendors that are interested in working with the health care sector, said Binko, CEO of cloud services provider Kloudtrack.
Kyushu University and the University System of Maryland exchanged memorandums of understanding on Tuesday to work together on cybersecurity education and research. It will be the first cooperation between a Japanese and U.S. university in the area of cybersecurity.
Setsuo Arikawa, the president of Kyushu University, visited Maryland to sign the memorandums with William Kirwan, the chancellor of the University System of Maryland, to create a partnership with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Johns Hopkins University affiliate Jhpiego has been awarded a five-year, $500 million contract to lead a federal global health program.
The Baltimore nonprofit organization will lead the Maternal and Child Survival Program, which targets preventable maternal and child deaths in 24 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East that have the highest mother and child death rates. The award is from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
ATCC, the premier global biological materials resource and standards organization, has licensed technology from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and partnered with Thermo Fisher Scientific to bring a rapid and cost-effective PCR-based method of monitoring HIV drug resistance to resource-limited countries. The ATCC® HIV-1 Drug Resistance Genotyping Kit was optimized for off-the-shelf detection, sequencing, and genotyping of HIV-1 genomic mutations more commonly observed in resource-limited countries, and was attuned to sample collection methods most often employed in developing countries, including dried blood spots. Together, with ongoing CDC programs to train scientists in geographically dispersed regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia, this collaboration serves to advance applied public health initiatives to understand the growing problem of HIV drug resistance and, ultimately, improve patient outcomes.
One of the most difficult aspects of supporting resource-limited countries with temperature-sensitive reagents is being able to supply materials under stable conditions. This challenge was addressed by ATCC’s long-standing history and expertise in global cold-chain distribution of biological materials routinely used in research to further advances in human health. “Researchers around the globe rely on ATCC as the leader in the production and distribution of reagents for diseases that impact the world, such as influenza, tuberculosis, and malaria,” said Dr. Ted Mullins, Program Manager for ATCC Biological Services. “The release of these kits to World Health Organization designated and CDC-supported PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) genotyping labs for the surveillance of drug resistance in HIV patients demonstrates yet another facet of our commitment to improving global health.”
A few years ago, the Maryland legislature appointed a panel to assess the way it was funding higher education. As part of its scope, the panel evaluated the funding needs of the state’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), paying particular attention to the research infrastructure needs at Morgan State University, which in 2005 had received the coveted Carnegie designation of “Doctoral Research University” without any additional infusion of state resources. It achieved this designation because it annually awarded the requisite number of doctoral degrees and received sufficient external federal research funding to qualify.
The state’s study found that unlike the University System of Maryland research campuses in College Park and Baltimore city and county, Morgan lacked most of the infrastructure components typically found at campuses with a research university label. Morgan’s faculty has much higher than average teaching loads, and its research laboratory space and equipment were inadequate. The study concluded that an investment in Morgan’s research platform would be required to allow it to adequately compete with research campuses with better developed infrastructures. But while state investment in capital facilities at Morgan has improved, its investment in enhancing Morgan’s research mission has not.
Potential medical breakthroughs now being developed in Maryland, the fourth largest biopharma cluster in the U.S., will be the focus of the BioMaryland booth at BIO International 2014 at the San Diego Convention Center this week. The innovations range from a surgical tool that can speed and enable heart operations for patients who currently are not candidates for traditional open heart surgery to a simple diagnostic test to reduce the spread of malaria.
The following companies will be presenting their work and research at BIO International on Tuesday:
Niall O’Donnell fancies himself an archaeologist of the pharmaceutical persuasion. His firm, RiverVest Ventures, is scoping out the failed and forgotten drugs of big pharma, building companies to repurpose these benched meds for new indications.
The aim is to find drugs that have passed for safety in clinical trials, but may have shown limited efficacy in the initial disease they aimed to treat.
After stepping up their R&D spending last year, biotechnology companies worldwide must deploy that capital to create more value from their research, EY concluded in this year’s 28th annual edition of its industry report, released Tuesday at the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO)’s 2014 International Convention in San Diego.
Beyond Borders: Unlocking Value focused on three strategies for creating more value—“Adaptive” clinical trials that allow biotechs to tweak their hypotheses and shift R&D spending based on clinical data; “Precision medicine” that identifies patient subgroups most likely to benefit from a new therapy; and cross-industry collaborations during precompetitive phases, spearheaded by big pharma.
May 18 was a glorious Sunday in the Boston area. Tens of thousands of families and friends descended on one of the nation’s best-known education corridors to celebrate the class of 2014. My husband and I were among the happy crowds joined by my family from Shanghai for our son Andrew’s graduation from Tufts University.
We fully immersed ourselves in the joy of gathering, cheering, listening, reflecting and photo snapping—including some selfies. Our weekend of celebration culminated with Andrew’s commencement speech on behalf of the Sociology Department. In a mother’s unbiased opinion, his 5-minute speech was brilliant, perceptive, and entertaining, an affirmation of the value of his college education in shaping his outlook on self and the society. Surrounded by family, I cheered and laughed as I listened to him. It was a moment of pure joy and pride that no other accomplishments of my own could possibly match.
BIO BizLink is an online platform that connects life sciences companies with an unparalleled community of pre-clinical and clinical R&D service vendors
BIO BizLink is a portal to an unparalleled community of R&D vendors – including pre-clinical and clinical Contract Research Organizations (CROs), Contract Manufacturing Organizations (CMOs), and regulatory consultants – and a platform to take the administrative hassle out of RFP, vendor, and project management.
User on the platform can explore the community to find specific services and expertise; review company profiles and key personnel; start conversations about prior experiences; invite vendors to submit proposals; and execute confidentiality agreements. BIO BizLink was developed and launched as a cooperative effort among BIO, its State and Regional Affiliates and OnDeckBiotech.
Healthbox, a leading business accelerator focused on healthcare technology and technology-enabled companies, today confirmed it is taking its accelerator program to Salt Lake City this August. Through partnerships with innovative organizations Intermountain Healthcare and HealthEquity, in addition to Zion’s Bank and BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), Healthbox is sourcing companies, regardless of development stage, that meet the needs of a rapidly changing healthcare industry. The companies selected for the 16-week program will have unique access to Healthbox strategic partners, gaining an understanding of the key challenges plaguing these organizations and how to adapt their solutions to truly solve these challenges.
“We are thrilled to expand to Salt Lake City and build relationships with the local community. Utah has one of the fastest growing economies, and we believe there is a large opportunity to elevate the recognition of the area’s talented healthcare entrepreneurs,” says Nina Nashif, founder and CEO of Healthbox. “As Healthbox continues to grow, it is important that we commit to communities with both strong local health economies and an interest in advancing innovation.”
Reston-based New Atlantic Ventures joined a handful of other venture investors in backing Truveris, a New York startup whose cloud-based platform helps drive down the cost to companies of providing prescription drug benefits.
NAV Fund, an existing investor, joined New Leaf Venture Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners and First Round in Truveris’ $12.75 million Series C round, which was led by Canaan Partners.
BioHealth Innovation (BHI) is a regionally-oriented, private-public partnership functioning as an innovation intermediary focused on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Maryland.
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