News Archive

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.”

More than 60 companies showed off their health data applications at Datapalooza IV this week and Krishna Yeshwant, a partner at Google Ventures, was the MC for a demo session on Tuesday afternoon.

As one of the presenters was fighting with his PowerPoint demonstration and the projection system, Yeshwant answered a few questions about opportunities for healthcare startups with the search company’s investment group. He said that the outlook has changed for healthcare IT startups now that Obamacare is here to stay.

San Francisco digital health accelerator Rock Health is kicking off its fifth program next week, and it has some unique startups in the mix.

Bound to be the most talked about is Augmedix, which is developing a healthcare app for Google Glass. Co-founders Ian Shakil and Pelu Tran haven’t said much about exactly what kind of app they’re working on, but it apparently will leverage Glass’s augmented reality and voice activation to help doctors keep their focus on patients. Augmedix has already raised $55,000 from 32 Upstart backers.

The Chinese Biopharmaceutical Association, USA (CBA) will host the 18th Annual Conference at the University of Maryland Shady Grove Conference Center on Saturday, June 15th, 2013. The theme of this year’s conference is “Global Partnership in Biopharmaceutics and Translational Medicine;” it will address the critical importance of establishing worldwide collaboration to capture the great opportunity for the advancement of modern medicine and biopharmaceuticals.  

The Conference

The Conference includes five sessions:  

• Drug Discovery: New Strategies and Platforms
• Translational Genomics and anti-cancer therapy
• Opportunities in New high tech parks in China
• Regulatory Compliances in Biopharmaceuticals
• Collaborative Opportunities and Partnership for U.S.-China Biopharmaceuticals.

Baltimore ranks No. 4 on a new NerdWallet list of the best cities for recent college grads to live in.

The report from the financial literacy and consumer advocacy website is based on the median cost of rent, “walkability” of cities, number of young people, bars, and of course, unemployment rates.