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Investing in biotechnology is a riskier bet these days. The community of life sciences venture capital firms is contracting, despite scientific advances across many fields like genomics, immunology, and diagnostics. Many promising new enterprises fail to produce marketable drugs, and even successful therapies may struggle to gain markets in an environment of health care cost cutting.

That’s exactly why Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) chose to expand its programs that nurture very early stage biotechnology and device startups in the Bay area, J&J executives said as they opened the company’s California Innovation Center in Menlo Park, CA, this week.

Pathologists and clinical laboratory professionals who regularly analyze images will be interested in the findings of a research study designed to assess how the phenomenon called “inattentional blindness” among radiologists could cause them to possibly miss things hiding in plain sight.

‘Inattentional Blindness’ Occurs Even Among Highly-trained Radiologists

In a recent study, psychological scientists from Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital found that 83% of radiologists didn’t notice an image of a gorilla embedded in a computed tomography (CT) lung scan.

 University of Maryland (UM) Ventures and SilcsBio, LLC announced today that SilcsBio has obtained exclusive rights to a technology licensed from the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB). UM Ventures is an ambitious joint research commercialization effort of the UMB and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). SilcsBio is a supplier of computer-directed drug discovery software and services.

“The license, which we obtained from UMB, creates the core of our product line,” said Kelli Booth, SilcsBio’s Chief Operating Officer. “It’s great to have a university so supportive of our state’s start-up community.”

Health Tech Hatch, a site launched last fall as a crowdfunding site specifically for health startups, is joining forces with one of the biggest crowdfunding platforms on the web, Indiegogo.

From the beginning, the company planned to help health startups both crowdfund and beta test their products with patients and physicians. But now, founder and CEO Patricia Salber said Health Tech Hatch plans to focus more closely on the beta testing side, while working on the crowdfunding piece through Indiegogo.

Through collaboration between Johnson & Johnson Innovation and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), Janssen will create a 5,000-square-foot lab space within QB3’s 24,000-square-foot incubator space in San Francisco.

The company said that the new Bay Area incubator will use the San Diego model for its innovation space.

Governor Martin O’Malley today announced that Rachel King, co-founder and CEO of GlycoMimetics in Gaithersburg, has been named chair of the Maryland Life Sciences Advisory Board (LSAB). King will replace chair H. Thomas Watkins, former President and Chief Executive Officer of Human Genome Sciences, Inc., who has served on the Board since Governor O’Malley and the Maryland General Assembly created it in 2007. As chair, Watkins led the Board through a strategic planning process that, working closely with Governor O’Malley, resulted in BioMaryland 2020, a 10-year, $1.3 billion strategy for moving Maryland’s life sciences industry forward.

In a first-of-its-kind operation in the United States, a team of doctors at Duke University Hospital helped create a bioengineered blood vessel and transplanted it into the arm of a patient with end-stage kidney disease.  

The procedure, the first U.S. clinical trial to test the safety and effectiveness of the bioengineered blood vessel, is a milestone in the field of tissue engineering. The new vein is an off-the-shelf, human cell-based product with no biological properties that would cause organ rejection.  

NIH has reissued its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Omnibus Grant Solicitation announcement, which states that small businesses that are majority-owned by multiple venture capital operating companies are eligible to apply for (1) these SBIR grants and (2) any other NIH SBIR funding opportunities announced after January 28, 2013.  The NIH grant solicitation announcement can be found here.

With this re-issuance, small businesses that are majority-owned by multiple venture capital operating companies (VCOCs), hedge funds and/or private equity firms are now eligibleto apply to the NIH SBIR program and compete for up to 25% of NIH’s SBIR set-aside.

Healthcare providers are taking telemedicine to new heights, with the market seeing growth of a whopping 237 percent within a five-year period, according to a new Kalorama report.

Officials say the telemedicine patient monitoring market grew from $4.2 billion in 2007 to more than $10 billion in 2012. According to the report, the market itself is considered small- to moderate in size but makes up for it with its notable number of competitors and “increasing awareness of effectiveness.”