News Archive

Cydan, LLC, an orphan drug accelerator that identifies and de-risks programs with therapeutic and commercial potential, today announced that the company has expanded its initial round of financing, bringing its total financing raised to $26 million. Cydan launched in April 2013 with a $16 million financing from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Pfizer Venture Investments and Alexandria Venture Investments. New investors Lundbeckfond Ventures and Bay City Capital led the $10 million expansion of this round of financing and were joined by Cydan’s previous investors NEA and Alexandria Venture Investments. In conjunction with this investment, Lundbeckfond Ventures Managing Partner Mette Kirstine Agger, MBA and Bay City Capital Investment Partner and Managing Director Carl Goldfischer, M.D., are joining Cydan’s Board of Directors.

Sequencing the human genome seemed like a discovery so important that it couldn’t be overhyped—we had, after all, transcribed the blueprint for human life—but biotech executives somehow managed the trick. William Haseltine, the founder of Human Genome Sciences, predicted in 2000 that he would halve the time and money required to bring a drug to market. Randy Scott of Incyte Genomics claimed that, “In 10 years, we will understand the molecular basis for most human diseases.”

Not quite. The cost of bringing a drug to market has increased dramatically, quibbles about accounting methods notwithstanding. The process still takes more than a decade. We already had a thorough understanding of diseases linked to single genetic sequences, such as Huntington’s and cystic fibrosis, but if anything, exploring the genome has taught us how complicated the relationship between genes and diseases really is. Last year, for example, researchers in Canada linked 71 genetic regions to inflammatory bowel disease, bringing the total to 163 and counting.

An early-stage investment fund founded by Revolution has raised $200 million in commitments, blowing past its $150 million goal. The new fund, Revolution Ventures, will invest in technology firms, mostly under $10 million in revenue, that are seeking to disrupt traditional industries.

“We are doing the things that we’ve been doing for the last decade,” Revolution co-founder Steve Case said. “Trying to find early-stage companies that are using technology to disrupt traditional industries, create new business models and have all kinds of different aspects that we find interesting.”

As the Managing Director at a tech accelerator, I face a dilemma. I need to fund the most talented people, because they’ll be most likely to build great companies. But I also need to find the hidden gems.  I’m the sort of person who’s always looking for the best deals.  Let me tell you, great deals almost always come from unexpected sources.

Here’s the problem: If I look for talent in the same places everyone else does — at Stanford, Harvard, and MIT — I’ll have to fight crowds of investors and even other accelerators who are trying to do the same thing I am. I don’t like lines, and I hate waiting, so I don’t go with the crowd. I try to create value where others don’t recognize it.

Emergent Biosolutions, the maker of the only FDA-licensed anthrax vaccine, is expanding its footprint in Montgomery County, with a little bit of financial help from the state and county. Emergent is taking 50,000-square feet (the precise number was reported by the Washington Business Journal earlier this month) at 400 Professional Dr., a 129,360-square foot, five-story building here, owned by Corporate Office Properties Trust. It will be moving 112 of its current employees to the building in early 2015. Emergent plans to purchase building, which is adjacent to its current research and development facility located at 300 Professional Dr.

What is interesting about the deal is the rare glimpse it reveals about the type of state and county incentives available for such transactions: the State of Maryland contributed $2 million, Montgomery County $750,000 and the City of Gaithersburg $250,000.

These days, having a strategic investor or partner has become almost a matter of survival for healthcare startups.

Corporate investing and partnering has really taken off over the last few years as pharma and medical device companies have opened their doors and wallets to find innovation outside of their four walls.

Anyone can have a great business idea, and now students don’t have to be enrolled in the business school to get help making their ideas a success.

This semester, the business school’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship expanded its Innovation Fridays program to reach students of all majors. The program, which used to be advertised only to business school students, gives student entrepreneurs free consultations with successful business owners to get advice for starting their own small businesses, promoting social causes or creating new technology.

Earlier this year Sun Yat-sen University, a well-regarded institution in Guangzhou in the Guangdong province of China, announced that the university and affiliated hospitals were entering into a novel collaboration with Johns Hopkins Medicine. The agreement would see Hopkins faculty working bilaterally with Sun Yat-sen’s medical faculty both in China and at Hopkins in order to help the university become a world-class biomedical research institute. The deal has significant implications for U.S. hospitals because, facing declining revenues, international collaborations like these offer a new path for growth.

It was the 30th major, revenue-producing, international healthcare collaboration for Johns Hopkins Medicine, with several more currently under negotiation — when the rest of the world combined has perhaps a few dozen similar partnerships. One reason Hopkins is outpacing others is because it created an agile satellite unit – Johns Hopkins Medicine International (JHI) – within the much larger parent organization solely dedicated to these projects.

Bureaucracy is one of the dirty words in business. Nobody wants to publicly admit their company is bogged down with too many layers of management, or needs a dozen committees to sign off on every little decision. For a couple years now, I’ve been hearing entrepreneurs complain about suffocating bureaucracy in pharma.

So I started asking people to name names by answering this question:

GL-2045 is Gliknik’s Lead Recombinant Stradomer™ Designed to Improve on Pooled Human Intravenous Immunoglobulin

Gliknik Inc., a privately held biopharmaceutical company, today announced that it has entered into an exclusive worldwide licensing agreement with Pfizer Inc. for GL-2045, Gliknik’s recombinant stradomer™, a drug candidate that is designed to replace and improve on pooled human intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG). GL-2045 has shown promising results in a broad range of preclinical tests and is being developed as a potential treatment for a wide variety of autoimmune diseases, including those in which IVIG is clinically used.

“GL-2045 is the first of several innovative drug candidates Gliknik is advancing for people with autoimmune diseases and cancer,” said Gliknik CEO David S. Block. “We selected Pfizer as our partner to progress GL-2045 from among several interested and capable parties because of its exceptional development, manufacturing and commercial capabilities.”