414th Edition – July 14, 2020

BHI’s own Rich Bendis will Moderate.

Join us for a lively discussion between our region’s top innovators and connectors to hear about their efforts to help grow the innovation ecosystem and the pipeline of successful startups across the BioHealth Capital Region.

On this webinar, you will learn how you can take advantage of the many resources available throughout the region that will help your company go to market AND increase the opportunity to find success in the process.

Fueling an Innovation Ecosystem for Startups to Thrive

Click here for more information and to register.

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CHICAGO (Reuters) – The U.S. government has awarded Novavax Inc $1.6 billion to cover testing and manufacturing of a potential vaccine for the novel coronavirus in the United States, with the aim of delivering 100 million doses by January.

The award announced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is the biggest yet from “Operation Warp Speed,” the White House initiative aimed at accelerating access to vaccines and treatments to fight COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.

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NEW YORK and GAITHERSBURG, Md. and NEW ORLEANS and LAFAYETTE, La., July 08, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Mount Sinai Health System, Emergent BioSolutions (NYSE: EBS), and ImmunoTek Bio Centers today announced that they will collaborate to develop, manufacture, and conduct clinical trials to evaluate Emergent’s COVID-19 hyperimmune globulin product, COVID-HIG, including a post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) study on health care providers at high risk of COVID-19 infection and other high-risk populations, with $34.6 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Defense (JPEO-CBRND).

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ROCKVILLE, Md., July 8, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — REGENXBIO Inc. (Nasdaq: RGNX), a leading clinical-stage biotechnology company seeking to improve lives through the curative potential of gene therapy based on its proprietary NAV® Technology Platform, today announced that it has completed dosing of three patients in Cohort 2 of the Company’s Phase I/II study of RGX-121 for the treatment of Mucopolysaccharidosis Type II (MPS II) and reported encouraging data under a single-patient investigator-initiated Investigational New Drug (IND) application for RGX-111 for the treatment of Mucopolysaccharidosis Type I (MPS I) conducted at CHOC Children’s.

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VIENNA, AUSTRIA and GAITHERSBURG, MD, July 8, 2020 APEIRON Biologics AG (“APEIRON”), a private biotechnology company specializing in the discovery, development and commercialization of novel immunotherapies for cancer and respiratory diseases, and MaxCyte, Inc., a global cell-based therapies and life sciences company, today announces the signing of a clinical and commercial licensing agreement.

APEIRON Biologics will obtain non-exclusive clinical and commercial rights to use MaxCyte’s Flow Electroporation® technology and ExPERT™ platform for the advancement of APN401, a siRNA-based cell therapy currently in clinical development for various solid tumors. In return, MaxCyte will receive undisclosed development and approval milestones and sales-based payments in addition to other licensing fees.

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ROCKVILLE, Md., July 13, 2020 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — ROCKVILLE, Md., July 13, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — ExeGi Pharma LLC, a U.S.-based company focused on developing and commercializing products targeting the human microbiome, including live biotherapeutic products (LBPs), announced today the results of a 70-patient clinical trial evaluating a new biologic drug candidate in hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The study was conducted in a hospital setting in Rome and published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Medicine. It compared outcomes of patients who received standard drug treatments alone or standard treatments combined with an oral bacteriotherapy.

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PASADENA, Calif., July 6, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (“Alexandria” or the “Company”) (NYSE: ARE) today announced the pricing of its upsized public offering of 6,000,000 shares of the Company’s common stock at a price of $160.50 per share in connection with the forward sale agreements escribed below. The Company also granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 900,000 additional shares. The offering is expected to close on or about July 9, 2020, subject to customary closing conditions.

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While COVID-19 has thrown the world into an uproar, there’s been a slim silver lining for Maryland. Thanks to a robust group of biohealth and life science organizations, Montgomery County has a unique opportunity to help people nationwide — and worldwide — in the fight against the disease.

As a resident, you may not realize just how much Montgomery County does to help in biohealth across the country.

To start, there is the National Institutes of Health, which hardly needs an introduction, what with its many contributions to medicine throughout the world for more than a century. Just in April, the NIH launched the Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines partnership to coordinate — and hopefully accelerate — research on a vaccine.

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GSK and Medicago today announced a collaboration to develop and evaluate a COVID-19 candidate vaccine combining Medicago’s recombinant Coronavirus Virus-Like Particles (CoVLP) with GSK’s pandemic adjuvant system. CoVLPs mimic the structure of the virus responsible for COVID-19 disease, allowing them to be recognised by the immune system. Use of an adjuvant can be of particular importance in a pandemic situation as it may boost the immune response and reduce the amount of antigen required per dose, allowing more vaccine doses to be produced and therefore contributing to protect more people.

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BALTIMORE, July 10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Johns Hopkins University filed suit in federal court Friday in an effort to stop a Trump administration rule change that would severely impact nearly 5,000 international students at the university. The decision to abruptly rescind accommodations for online learning during the COVID pandemic is unlawful and fails to consider the many complexities of meeting our educational mission while also protecting the health of our community.

The suit was filed in the Federal District Court for Washington, D.C., which has significant expertise in handling challenges against unlawful action by the federal government, and it joins other litigation related to the new rule filed by Harvard, MIT and the University of California. Johns Hopkins’ plans for a hybrid, online/in-person model for some of its divisions presents the broadest array of issues for the courts to consider.

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(CNN) – If the year 2020 is good for anything, it’s the lesson that during a crisis, anyone who builds a better mousetrap will find the world beating a path to his door.

A humble team at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland reminded the world of late poet Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase when they created a real time tracking map of coronavirus cases and deaths.

And the world came to their door. They report that the site, plus downloads of its data, hosts three to five billion interactions daily. By their measurement, interactions include uses of the public dashboard and requests from a separate website for the underlying data used by news outlets and others who design their own maps and graphics.

Image: Civil engineering professor Lauren Gardner, of the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, is the lead behind the dashboard project.

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Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and several senior House lawmakers recently announced a plan to impose price controls and seize patents on any COVID-19 vaccines and treatments in development. They vowed to strike down any emergency stimulus packages excluding such measures.

Those efforts aren’t just misguided — they pose a threat to the health of Americans. If lawmakers succeed, they would dismantle the innovation ecosystem that has enabled U.S. pharmaceutical firms to move with remarkable speed to develop COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.

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Asafe, effective vaccine is the ultimate tool needed to end the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Biomedical researchers are making progress every day towards such a vaccine, whether it’s devising innovative technologies or figuring out ways to speed human testing. In fact, just this week, NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) established a new clinical trials network that will enroll tens of thousands of volunteers in large-scale clinical trials testing a variety of investigational COVID-19 vaccines.

Image: DR. FRANCIS COLLINS Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – https://www.govexec.com

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Hopkins has the highest percentage of international students of any Maryland college.

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Providence Ventures was founded in 2014 and manages $300 million of venture capital in two funds.

The company is affiliated with Providence, a 51-hospital health system that has more than 800 clinics in five states. The fund makes direct investments in healthcare companies with the goal of improving outcomes and convenience while lowering costs.

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