Howard County is teaming up with Johns Hopkins University to launch a new accelerator geared toward commercial technology.

The new accelerator, called the Accelerator for the Commercialization of Technology, will help bring to market technology developed at the massive Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel. Howard County Executive Ken Ulman plans to formally announce the new partnership between the laboratory and the Howard County Economic Development Authority at an event Thursday.

The Office of Technology Transfer (OTT), Office of the Director (OD), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), invites industry organizations (including corporations, partnerships, limited partnerships, and industrial development organizations); public and private foundations and nonprofit organizations to solicit research proposals from scientists across the NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP) for multiple focused research projects under a the NIH Cooperative Research And Development Agreement (CRADA) Program. This CRADA Program is an extension of collaboration opportunities solicited by NIH or developed on a one-on-one basis. As such, it is consistent with PHS Technology Transfer policy and the public health mission of the NIH. These collaboration opportunities are structured under the authority of 15 U.S.C. 3710a—Cooperative Research and Development Agreements. Note that the CRADA mechanism does not permit the transfer of funds from the NIH to a collaborator but does permit the collaborator to provide funding to the NIH researcher.

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield has jumped head-first into the deep waters of mobile health. The health insurance giant has selected Cognizant, a mobile communication company, to provide a platform for getting mobile apps to its 3.3 million members.

Cognizant will help CareFirst offer its members “quick, secure and convenient ways” to manage their health coverage, access information about physicians and claims, and get information about benefits anytime, on any device, according to Cognizant officials in a news release.

Rockville-based Emergent BioSolutions Inc. on Friday announced the appointment of Barry Labinger, a well-known former executive at Human Genome Sciences Inc., to head its biosciences division.

Labinger served as HGS’ chief commercial officer from 2005 until last year, when GlaxoSmithKline plc snapped up the Rockville drug-maker for $3.6 billion. Glaxo made a clean sweep of Human Genome executives, including CEO Tom Watkins, shortly after.

Thursday, August 22, 2013 10:00 am

This webinar, hosted by GUIRR, will present a new resource, the Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) Available Technologies tool. The tool provides a free, one-stop shop to locate licensing opportunities for a particular technology anywhere within the FLC’s nationwide system of federal labs and research centers. Fully equipped with Google’s advanced search capabilities, the FLC Available Technologies tool yields user-friendly results that can be saved, printed, or downloaded as a PDF with active hyperlinks that directly link to the featured technology.

Industry and academic representatives who would like to find out more about how this tool can reduce the time, effort, and guesswork needed to find federal laboratory inventions available to transfer are encouraged to participate.

Through the Advanced Studies in Technology Transfer program, students will simultaneously gain the necessary knowledge and build professional networks with respected practitioners of the field. Our objective is to serve not only the needs of scientists and engineers who wish to pursue this non-traditional career, but also those of professionals who seek additional training.

View available courses in the Advanced Studies in Technology Transfer program.

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The relatively new field of Technology Transfer can trace its origins and rapid growth to the economic developments and legislation of the early 1980s, a time when the US was looking to enhance its global competitiveness. While countries like Germany and Japan were exceptionally good at translating the ideas that originated from academic labs into useful products, US academic research results were by and large relegated to mere publications in scholarly journals. Concerned about the non-use of this potential goldmine of ideas, the US lawmakers passed a series of legislation in the early 1980s culminating in the famous Bayh-Dole Act. This Act has shifted the onus of commercialization from a central granting agency to the numerous grantees that receive the research funds, and the grantees have taken very enthusiastically to this shift. The Economist has lauded this Bill as the most inspired piece of legislation in the last half century.

In the middle of 2003, Marc LaForce was having trouble sleeping. As the director of the Meningitis Vaccine Project (MVP), he was missing a vital piece of a difficult puzzle. The MVP sought to commercialize a vaccine that would help prevent Africa’s devastating epidemics of meningococcal meningitis, a bacterial infection of the brain and spinal cord. The largest documented outbreak, in 1996, sickened 250,000 people in Africa and caused 25,000 deaths. In 2002, a single West African country (Burkina Faso) had 13,000 meningitis cases and at least 1,500 deaths.

To succeed, the MVP needed a vaccine production method with two essential qualities: very effective and very affordable. But in mid-2003, that search hit a dead end. “All projects have their ups and downs,” says LaForce, M.D. “We were in the downest of downs.”

This week, FDA issued final guidance on incorporating and integrating radio frequency wireless technology into medical devices, Bloomberg BNA reports.

In a blog post on Tuesday, FDA Senior Policy Adviser Bakul Patel wrote, “Our goal is to help industry develop a range of innovative, safe and effective medical devices that incorporate wireless technology, which can, in turn, help reduce health care costs, enhance quality and benefit patients and providers alike” (Weixel, Bloomberg BNA, 8/14).