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Washington, D.C., is known for its cut-throat politics and its power players.

What many do not know is that D.C. is now a hub for business innovation.

Nevro Corp., a medical device company focused on improving pain relief in patients suffering from debilitating chronic pain, today announced it has completed a $48 million Series C financing round. The round was led by new investor Novo Ventures, joined by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Covidien Ventures. Existing investors participating in this financing round included Accuitive Medical Ventures (AMV), Bay City Capital, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation (JJDC), Mayo Clinic, MPM Capital, and Three Arch Partners.

“We are excited to welcome premier investors Novo Ventures, NEA, and Covidien Ventures who share Nevro’s vision to be a leader in neuromodulation through continuous innovation”

Personal Genome Diagnostics Inc. (PGDx), a pioneer in conducting patient-specific analyses aimed at identifying genomic alterations in tumors, today announced a number of developments that will support its expanding business.  The company licensed exclusive rights to Digital Karyotyping (DK), an important genome-mapping technology developed by the company’s founders at Johns Hopkins University.  PGDx also announced that it is expanding into new facilities and has made a number of key hires, including Genzyme Oncology executive Antony Newton as Chief Commercial Officer.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has submitted its albiglutide once-weekly injection for type 2 diabetes to European regulators.

If approved the biologic treatment, which was submitted for US approval in January, will be marketed as Eperzan.

Albiglutide is, along with lupus treatment Benlysta and heart disease drug darapladib, one of a trio of drugs GSK has developed with Human Genome Sciences.

Personalized medicine — the ability to tailor therapies to patients’ individual genetic characteristics — has long been the holy grail of the life sciences industry. The effort has produced a string of recent successes, including a host of drugs targeted to people with specific genetic profiles, the European approval of the world’s first gene therapy treatment, and a much-heralded leukemia treatment pioneered at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) that uses tweaked versions of patients’ own cells to eliminate their cancer. While these advances are certainly exciting for patients, they raise a host of ethical, legal and financial challenges that people working in the field will need to address before personalized medicine can become a thriving business.

The challenges are so great, contends Wharton health care management professor Ezekiel J. Emanuel, that claims of a renaissance in medicine brought on by individualized approaches often seem hyperbolic. “Before we buy into this, we need to remember that almost every evaluation of what drives health care costs up points to new technologies,” says Emanuel, who is also a professor of medical ethics and health policy at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. “We need to be skeptical. We need to see the data before people buy into the idea that personalized medicine is going to produce cost savings and be so much better for the system.”

The University of Maryland, College Park has cracked the top 100 global reputation ranking by a publication based in the United Kingdom, The Washington Post reported.

Times Higher Education shows that UMd. is in a group ranked 91-100, in a class with Monash University in Australia, Lund in Sweden, Bristol in the U.K., the Free University of Berlin and Texas A&M. The rankings were based on surveys of academics around the world. Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, ranked No. 19, the highest from the local region. Harvard University was ranked No. 1.

NANOMEDICINES: CHARTING A ROADMAP TO COMMERCIALIZATION

On 6-7 March 2013, the Nanomedicines Alliance will be holding a Industry Symposium: Charting a Road to Commercialization. The Symposium will address:

• desigining nanomedicines
• preclinical pharmacology
• chemistry, manufacturing & controls
• toxicology/ADME and
• clinical studies

through podium presentations, breakouts sessions and poster sessions.