198th Edition – April 12, 2016

Two key supporters of Baltimore health startups are putting resources into a new accelerator.

The partnership between Johns Hopkins Tech Ventures and the Abell Foundation that earned support from Village Capital is set to develop a new health-focused startup accelerator in Baltimore.

A University of Maryland, College Park startup that makes high-nutrient coffee captured the top prize on Thursday night in Kevin Plank’s annual Cupid’s Cup entrepreneurship contest.

MEDICAL technology company BD Diagnostics is sponsoring the Manufacturing Business of the Year Award 2016 – for the third year running.

The Roborough-based firm was named Plymouth’s top manufacturer at the 2013 Herald Business Awards and has since then supported the category.

PathSensors, Inc., a leading biotechnology and environmental testing company, has relocated to the Columbus Center in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The company now occupies over 4,000 square feet of laboratory, office, and manufacturing space. The new facilities represent a space increase of more than double over the University of Maryland BioPark, where the company was previously located.

Montgomery County Department of Economic Development and Maryland Technology Development Corporation are collaborating to assist Montgomery County life sciences companies to make progress toward commercialization.

With this collaboration, Montgomery County companies selected for TEDCO’s Life Sciences Investment Fund will become automatically eligible to receive a financial supplement of $25,000 from DED’s Life Sciences IMPACT Grant Program.

GSK will be hosting a career fair at the GSK US R&D Centre at 14200 Shady Grove Road, Rockville, MD 20850.

On Thursday, April 14, 2016 from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM senior leaders and recruiters will be on site at GSK Rockville, MD to get to know you and your career aspirations.

GSK is proud to be an employer that seeks to attract and retain the most talented individuals and encourage you to visit their event portal to create your profile in order to connect with them at this event.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: REGN) and MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca (LSE: AZN, SSE: AZN, NYSE: AZN), today announced that they have entered into a licensing agreement under which Regeneron will use MedImmune’s pyrrolobenzodiazepine (PBD)-based warhead and linker technology to produce antibody- drug conjugates (ADCs) as potential cancer treatments.

Ted Leonsis is teaming up with Georgetown University to start the Leonsis Family Entrepreneurship Prize, seeded with a $1 million cash gift. Who can compete? Georgetown students and recent alumni with great business ideas.

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.

Startup founders will have another tool for raising early stage capital starting next month. On May 16, the SEC is allowing companies to use crowdfunding to raise money.

The greater Washington region has an accelerator problem and we have to fix it if we want to grow the next generation of technology businesses.

A business accelerator is a term used to describe a broad range of business models that share characteristics: assisting a founder form a new businesses through mentorship, partnership connections, access to related expertise (for example, how to set up a limited liability company or a sales team) and access to investors.

Nearly 40% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, with about 1.7 million of those cases expected in 2016 in the United States (according to the National Cancer Institute). These patients are hoping for better treatments and, hopefully someday, cures. They could also be valuable resources, helping experts develop better therapies, if only staff at research centers like Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston could study their unique cases. Even patients with the same diagnosis, such as breast cancer, have different genetic makeups, both in their healthy cells and in their tumors. These differences provide clues to new genetic factors that may cause the disease, why some patients respond especially well to certain treatments, why some tumors are so resistant to treatment, and how people of different ages or ethnicities are affected.

More and more, pharma companies are making real bets in digital health, and reorganizing their businesses to put some power behind those efforts. The space is, in some ways, quieter than it was this time last year, but there’s reason to believe that quiet is a calm before a storm of activity, driven more by pharma’s tendency to keep early-stage projects close to the chest than by a lack of activity. The executives we spoke to for this report talked about initiatives with real potential for broad commercialization.

By now, we all know the varied challenges created by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — device tax introduction, reimbursement contraction, provider and payer consolidation, and pricing compression, just to name a few. But several years ago, the ACA’s potential impact was only speculation. We were looking into our educated crystal balls, but we didn’t have the data to see what trends would develop, or what those trends could lead to in the coming decade. Now, part of that picture is starting to take shape.

The United States ranks 1st in how its domestic policies support worldwide life sciences innovation, according to an analysis released today by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a global technology policy think tank. Released on World Health Day, the findings come in a new report assessing 56 countries—which together comprise close to 90 percent of the world’s economy—on the extent to which their scientific research, drug pricing, and intellectual property policies contribute to global biopharmaceutical innovation.

The United States ranks 1st in how its domestic policies support worldwide life sciences innovation, according to an analysis released today by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a global technology policy think tank. Released on World Health Day, the findings come in a new report assessing 56 countries—which together comprise close to 90 percent of the world’s economy—on the extent to which their scientific research, drug pricing, and intellectual property policies contribute to global biopharmaceutical innovation.

U.S. R&D investment currently accounts for 2.7% of GDP, according to the newest R&D Funding Report put out by AAAS. While the United States still invests the most dollars into R&D globally, there has been a huge uptick in investments among Asian countries. China aims to invest 2.5% of its GDP in R&D by 2020 and is also expected to catch the U.S. in real dollars invested in R&D by 2020 as well.

Eight seed accelerators — 500 Startups, Alchemist, Amplify LA, Angelpad, Chicago New Venture Challenge, MuckerLab, Techstars and Y Combinator — landed the coveted top spots in the 2016 annual Seed Accelerator Rankings announced today at South by Southwest (SXSW) by entrepreneurship and management experts from Rice University, MIT and the University of Richmond.

Group urges state support of next phase of pharmaceutical industry’s focus and growth

More often than not, when talk in New Jersey turns to the pharmaceutical industry tones turn serious and the discussion centers around whether pharma will continue to support the state’s economy in the way it has for more than a century.

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.

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.