News Archive

React Labs, an early stage company commercializing a comprehensive mobile technology platform for real-time polling, has been awarded $100,000 in funding from the Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII), company officials announce today.

Founded by University of Maryland Professor Philip Resnik, who holds joint appointments in the Department of Linguistics and at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), React Labs offers a mobile application that allows a very large numbers of participants to register their moment-by-moment reactions to live and televised events, providing a highly engaging user experience and producing rich, detailed data for analysis.

Maryland was recently named the top state in the nation for entrepreneurship and innovation. The state has the second highest concentration of STEM employment and adds STEM jobs faster than all but five other states.

With Maryland’s commitment to growth in science, technology, engineering and math, UMBC continues to develop and expand its professional programs to meet the needs of the state’s STEM-centric workforce.

The board of GenVec Inc. has voted to liquidate and dissolve the struggling Gaithersburg biotech, it announced Tuesday in a securities filing.

The move follows a string of setbacks for GenVec, which three years ago saw its lead pancreatic cancer drug candidate, TNFerade, fail in late-stage trials. In 2011, longtime CEO Paul Fischer announced his retirement from the company.

It’s tough to move the needle on a multi-billion-dollar venture fund. That’s one reason New Enterprise Associates, which has managed mega-funds about as long as anyone in the business, makes a habit of taking large stakes in portfolio companies.

That strategy can pay off well in the event of a big exit – which is what happened last week with the IPO of data analysis provider Tableau Software. NEA, a backer in all of Tableau’s venture funding rounds, was the largest shareholder at the time of the offering. And as Tableau shares soared post-debut, NEA’s stake did as well. The firm sold 1 million shares in the offering for $31 million, and its remaining 18.6 million shares were worth more than $900 million as of last week.

QIAGEN N.V. (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) and SIP Biotech Development Co., Ltd. (BioBAY) today announced the opening of QIAGEN (Suzhou) Translational Medicine Center, a translational medicine R&D Corporation which aims to accelerate the discovery and validation of biomarkers, and to create companion diagnostics for the Chinese market. QIAGEN (Suzhou) is a joint venture of QIAGEN and BioBAY, the innovative life sciences cluster in Suzhou Industrial Park near Shanghai. The companies announced the launch of QIAGEN (Suzhou) today in an opening ceremony on the BioBAY campus, which currently hosts more than 330 companies and research groups.

QIAGEN (Suzhou) will provide services and consulting with state-of-the-art QIAGEN molecular technologies for international and Chinese pharmaceutical companies, as well as research institutes to enable translational medicine, the multidisciplinary process of advancing discoveries from laboratory bench to the patient’s bedside. The center will work with partners located at BioBAY and elsewhere in China to provide fully integrated biomarker solutions to accelerate drug development, as well as to commercialize companion diagnostics. The four key service sections include biobanking, pharmacogenetics, next generation sequencing (NGS) and pharmacogenomics. This innovative alliance builds on QIAGEN’s leading global position in Personalized Healthcare, using genomic information to produce individualized treatment decisions for patients. QIAGEN (Suzhou) is expected to grow to about 50 employees within three years.

Purpose

The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and participating Institutes invite grant applications for research on the development of safe, real-time, non-invasive (or minimally invasive), in vivo methods to assess the development and function of the human placenta.

Background

The placenta is essential for the maintenance of pregnancy. The prominent function of the placenta is in the transfer of nutrients, gases and waste products between the mother and fetus. It is effectively the lung, gut, and kidney of the fetus. Abnormalities of placental development and function are known to underlie many major pathologies of pregnancy including spontaneous preterm birth, fetal growth restriction, and preeclampsia. Most information on placental biology is obtained studying placental tissue obtained from pathological pregnancies, such as a preterm deliveries occurring predominately in the third trimester, or from term deliveries in which placental development has already crested.  Hence, there is a paucity of information obtained earlier in gestation, a period of time when many of the pregnancy pathologies are believed to have their origins, as well as very limited information gleaned throughout gestation from normal pregnancies. The development of real-time, non-invasive (or minimally invasive) methods to assess the development and functionality of the placenta in vivo throughout gestation would serve as valuable research tools to enhance our understanding of placental biology and rooted pathologies. The development of these tools could lead to the identification of markers and predictors of pregnancy outcome, and provide a future foundation for better pregnancy monitoring in the clinical setting.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has entered into a collaborative agreement with Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) to evaluate the efficacy and safety of the company’s portfolio of clinical stage antibacterial assets for treating hospital and biothreat infections. 

The contract is unique in that it is the first in which BARDA has taken a portfolio approach to funding drug development with industry.

Poor maternal, infant, and child health as well as inadequate coverage of family planning remain significant global health problems facing low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) today. Despite a 47% reduction since 1990, nearly 300,000 women still die annually from causes directly related to pregnancy. The majority of these deaths are attributed to preventable obstetric complications prior to, during, and following delivery, with developing countries carrying the vast majority (99%) of the burden. Additionally, although mortality for children under five years of age has decreased from 12 million annually at the beginning of the last century (in 1900), to 6.9 million annually in 2011, the burden of these deaths now falls primarily in LMICs, with most of these deaths also due to preventable causes. In these same countries mobile phone coverage and access has become nearly ubiquitous, with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) estimating in 2013 that the number of mobile phone subscriptions (6.8 billion) is nearly equal to the human population of 7.1 billion. The opportunity this represents is one that has not been lost on the global health community.