Intrexon Corporation (NYSE: XON), a leader in synthetic biology, announced today that it has entered into its first Exclusive Channel Collaboration (ECC) with a startup backed by an investment fund sponsored by Harvest Capital Strategies, LLC. The fund is believed to be the world’s first fund dedicated to the inventions and discoveries of a single company. The collaboration with the startup entity, Thrive Agrobiotics, Inc., will seek to utilize Intrexon’s ActoBiotics® platform to express nutritive proteins for improving the overall growth and feed efficiency in piglets, thereby expanding the application of this innovative biologic delivery platform to animals.
Circulomics today announced a $1.5 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to create nucleic acid extraction products based on its Nanobind technology.
The firm said in a statement that it would use the grant to develop Nanobind technologies for automated and microvolume clinical sample preparation. It is building a pipeline of chemistries to extract DNA and RNA from sample types including cultured cells, blood, and other fluids, and from pathogens.
Patient engagement company GetWellNetwork is taking a crack at re-envisioning healthcare with the introduction of the Interactive Care Model for nursing, a five-phase plan to create patient-centric care delivery systems.
“This new model rethinks care delivery and includes measurement of a person’s capacity to engage in his/her health,” representatives of Bethesda, Maryland-based GetWellNetwork’s O’Neil Center wrote in an article published in the October issue of the Journal of Nursing Administration. The O’Neil Center is tasked with supporting “integration of patient and family engagement into healthcare delivery across the care continuum,” according to GetWellNetwork.
Novavax, Inc., (Nasdaq:NVAX) a clinical-stage vaccine company focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of recombinant nanoparticle vaccines and adjuvants, today announced it has been awarded a grant of up to $89 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support development of the RSV F Vaccine Phase 3 clinical trial in pregnant women, planned to initiate during the first quarter of 2016. This grant will also support regulatory licensing efforts, providing a path to WHO prequalification. Upon licensure, Novavax has agreed to make the RSV F Vaccine affordable and accessible to people in the developing world.
“Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the leading cause of pneumonia in infants, and currently there are no affordable approaches to protecting children in the developing world from this viral disease,” said Dr. Keith Klugman, Director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Pneumonia Program. “Maternal immunization may provide protective antibodies to infants during the first few months of life, and we hope this vaccine will protect infants from this disease to help them live healthy, productive lives.”
The UMD BioPark-based PathSensors, Inc. has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The award will fund the development of a multi-sample testing platform for rapid, facile identification of plant pathogens including the bacterium Ralstonia solanacearum and the widespread water mold Phytophthora. The new instrument will enhance the capabilities of the company’s CANARY® biosensors, enabling high throughput analysis of liquid and plant samples.
The award comes on the heels of a successful pilot program for screening plant imports at US Plant Inspection Stations. As part of an ongoing Material Transfer and Research Agreement with the USDA and MIT-Lincoln Laboratory, the originators of CANARY® technology, the PathSensors technology was used to analyze geranium cuttings, from countries not in the APHIS pre-clearance program, entering the US via Linden, NJ and Atlanta, GA for the select agent Ralstonia solanacearum. The bacterium, the most dangerous strain of which is endemic to Europe but has not reached the US, accounts for over $1 billion annually in economic losses to crops such as potatoes and tomatoes.
Immunomic Therapeutics, a biotechnology company developing a new type of vaccine based on Johns Hopkins research, has reached a $300 million deal licensing its technology to Japanese company Astellas Pharma.
Astellas will be able to use Immunomic’s vaccine design to develop products that treat or prevent allergic diseases under the deal. Immunomic will receive an up-front $300 million payment and then 10 percent royalties on sales Astellas gets using the technology. It also retains the rights to use its vaccine methods on other types of diseases, including cancer.
OpGen, Inc. an early-stage commercial molecular testing and bioinformatics company, today announced that new data from a study with its Acuitas [(R)] Resistome Test were presented on October 10 as an oral abstract at IDWeek 2015 by Michael Lin, M.D., M.P.H., an infectious disease physician and assistant professor of medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. The conference was held October 7 to 11 in San Diego. Dr. Lin and fellow researchers demonstrated how an Acuitas Resistome-based surveillance system can identify potential outbreaks to improve infection control, underscoring the need for healthcare facilities to implement use of molecular-based surveillance systems to detect potential outbreaks that may be caused by multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs). The research was conducted under the support of the CDC Prevention Epicenters Program and affiliated with the REALM project, a multi-hospital voluntary surveillance network for monitoring multidrug-resistant organisms among Chicago hospital intensive care units and long-term acute care hospitals.
CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield will award $3 million to nonprofits or government organizations to develop new programs using telemedicine to improve health care access in the Maryland, Northern Virginia and D.C.
CareFirst’s request for proposals is looking for innovative programs that can address gaps in access to telemedicine services. The money will be awarded to programs over the next three years.
The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), the premier global advocate for product development and management professionals, announced today that it has awarded the 2015 Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) Award to BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) (NYSE: BDX).
BD’s focus on innovation has provided a framework to integrate the business, make acquisitions and coordinate actions vertically, from the top through operating levels of the company.
MedImmune is the newest member of the Human Vaccines Project, which will help to accelerate the research and development of vaccines and immunotherapies for infectious disease and cancer.
Incubated at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), the Human Vaccines Project is an ambitious new public-private partnership seeking to transform the future of global disease prevention and treatment by solving the primary scientific obstacles impeding the research and development of new vaccines and immunotherapies. Endorsed by 35 leading vaccine scientists, the Project brings together top academic research centers, and government, non-profit and industry research and development efforts into a global consortium.
A $300 million worldwide licensing agreement announced last week between Immunomic Therapeutics and Astellas Pharma to develop treatment for a wide range of allergic diseases, including peanut allergies, is the largest deal ever to come out of Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, the patent, licensing, and technology commercialization arm of the university.
The agreement, first announced Thursday night, centers on the LAMP-vax technology, which was originally developed by Thomas August, Drew Pardoll, and others at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and licensed in 2006 to Immunomic Therapeutics, a biotech company based in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
In a move that takes concierge medicine to a whole new level, human genome pioneer J. Craig Venter on Tuesday unveiled a venture that combines whole genome sequencing with advanced clinical technologies to provide comprehensive health exams for self-paying customers.
The venture, called Health Nucleus, was formed as part of Human Longevity Inc., also known as HLI, the company Venter founded 19 months ago (with an initial $70 million in venture funding) to provide whole genome sequencing and other diagnostic services.
The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) today named six public research institutions as finalists for its third annual Innovation & Economic Prosperity (IEP) University Awards. The winners will be announced on November 17 at the association’s annual meeting in Indianapolis. The finalists — Auburn University, Clemson University, Ohio University, University of Illinois, University of Maryland, and University of Minnesota — are competing for four different awards that recognize different components of economic engagement. The award categories include talent, innovation, place, and connections.
DNA doesn’t just coil in the iconic double helix immortalized in every high school biology textbook. It also loops into a menagerie of fantastical shapes, new research finds.
By revealing the hidden shape of DNA, the new insights could provide a more detailed look at the workings of drugs such as chemotherapeutic agents, which interact with DNA.
Nominations are now being accepted for the 2016 FLC awards. One of the most coveted honors in the technology transfer field, the FLC awards have been presented to over 200 federal laboratories since their inception in 1984. To reflect the diversity in scope and number of technology transfer efforts undertaken by federal laboratories and their partners, seven categories of awards will be presented.
Attracting mid- to large-sized medical device companies through established innovation hubs is the biggest key to growing Baltimore into a major medical device technology sector, according to a report released today by the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech).
“Baltimore already has many of the pieces in place to support innovation hubs and a thriving medical device community,” said Martha Connolly, director of Mtech Baltimore. “This study is important because we believe Baltimore is well-positioned to be a leading center for medical devices. The expertise of the University System of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University in engineering and medicine provide great capabilities for this sector.”
College kids always close out the party, and Baltimore Innovation Week was no different.
Students and other members of the Johns Hopkins community worked all weekend on MedHacks. The student-run event marked the debut of the healthcare-focused hackathon, and drew more than 400 participants on more than 25 teams.
Every startup is built on a number of assumptions and undoubtedly some of them will be incorrect. At Dreamit, I’m always stressing the importance of accurately identifying those assumptions and de-risking them as early in the process as possible.
A simple example I like to use involves the e-commerce shoe company Zappos. One of the key assumptions Zappos was built on is the idea that people are willing to buy shoes online. From our 2015 perspective that sounds glaringly obvious but in 1999 that wasn’t the case. The founders tested the market early on and determined there was a demand for the service. It would’ve been a waste of energy and resources to develop the idea if that base assumption had turned out to be wrong.
Blackstone Group LP agreed to buy BioMed Realty Trust Inc, a supplier of office space to healthcare companies, in a deal valued at $8 billion, adding to the private equity firm’s huge real estate portfolio.
BioMed’s shares were up 8.6 percent at $23.45 in premarket trading, just shy of the offer price of $23.75.
Health care remains one of the few services that require people to have a face-to-face interaction to obtain access. But more and more consumers are questioning that reality, and change is on the way. In January 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a new provider reimbursement code for non–face-to-face health care services for patients who have chronic medical conditions. A new CMS code may seem like a tiny matter, but this one emblemizes a larger shift toward delivering health services independently of time and place, enabled by technologies such as smartphones, sensors, and wireless health-monitoring devices — what we in the field call telemedicine.
Madison healthcare IT startup Redox won a prestigious award at a national healthcare technology conference this week.
Redox, which helps app developers get access to electronic health records and health systems manage their connections to the cloud, beat out nearly 100 startups to win a pitch competition at Health 2.0, a leading healthcare technology conference in San Francisco.
Disruption is coming for the big, regulated industries that were once investment no-nos: education, energy, healthcare and the sciences. And that’s good news for Baltimore.
At least two big trends are causing a flood of interest in these more complicated sectors.
Boston Scientific BSX, +1.51% this week announced the start of the Boston Scientific Connected Patient Challenge, an open innovation contest designed to encourage advancements in the use of remote patient monitoring to enhance patient care. Until January 5, 2016, clinicians, engineers, designers and entrepreneurs can submit their ideas and collaborate on solutions through Medstro’s social networking site (www.Medstro.com).
The Boston Scientific Connected Patient Challenge is seeking submissions designed to improve patient care and/or drive down the cost of health care through the use of remote patient monitoring technologies such as wearable, implantable or ubiquitous sensors, with a preference for innovations in the management of the flow of data and the decision making process. Finalists will be honored at a live event in Cambridge, MA where they will present their ideas to the Challenge sponsors, fellow participants and a live audience. Up to $25,000 of services in kind may be divided among Challenge winners to further develop or pilot their ideas.
If you end up near the Baltimore Convention Center this week, you may notice crowds of people carrying black and teal tote bags. The American Society of Human Genetics is meeting there through Saturday, bringing 8,000 researchers, clinicians and ethicists from more than 60 countries to the city.
We are thrilled to bring our annual meeting back to Baltimore (our most visited venue), where research of all kinds has a long history and still thrives today. Last year, Baltimore institutions including Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland Medical School received more than $800 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — providing a beacon of hope not just for the residents of Baltimore but the entire world. Thanks to funding from NIH, the National Science Foundation and other federal science agencies, Hopkins is ranked number one among all U.S. institutions for research and development expenditures — and has been for 35 straight years.
GE Ventures (NYSE:GE) and health innovation company StartUp Health said they plan to expand their partnership to invest and support startups in the healthcare innovation sector.
The expansion will allow the partners to accept 10 new qualified companies into their “StartUp Health Academy” program. The 2 companies originally launched their startup focused partnership program in 2013 with 15 consumer health companies.
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