July 2018

Galen Robotics, a Johns Hopkins University spinout, was chosen from five finalists as the company with the most commercial potential by judges at the 3^rd Annual Crab Trap Competition. This year’s judges included industry leaders Amgen’s Bethany Mancilla, AstraZeneca’s Shaun Grady, Blu Venture’s Dr. Paul Silber, J.P. Morgan’sJohn T. Rubin, New Enterprise Associates’ Sara Nayeem, Roche’s Robert Silverman, and Sands Capital Ventures’ Stephen Zachary. They were impressed with a presentation by Lead Hardware Engineer, Yunus Sevimli, on Galen Robotics’ low-cost, compact, and intuitive to use novel microsurgical robotic platform designed to assist surgeons with minimally-invasive applications in otolaryngology, neurosurgery and similar critical fields. Galen Robotics is the third Johns Hopkins University spinout to win this competition following  LifeSprout (2017) and Sonavex (2016).

Strong presentations also were made by the other finalists–AlgometRx, Cellth Systems, Renalert, and Reveragen Biopharma—whose technologies originated at Children’s National Medical Center, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University.

TEDCO plans to provide funding and business-building programming to entrepreneurs from groups who are often overlooked by investors through a new fund that will begin this fall.

The Greater Washington Partnership, an alliance of local CEOs, is launching a formal collaboration program with a swath of regional universities — part of an effort to spur the development of more tech-focused workers.

One piece of good news can make all the difference. In the fight against antibiotic-resistant infections, a decades-old approach based on bacteria-slaying viruses called phages has been sidelined by technical hurdles, dogged by regulatory confusion, and largely ignored by drug developers in the West. But 2 years ago, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), used phages to knock out an infection that nearly killed a colleague. Propelled by that success and a handful of others since, UCSD is now launching a clinical center to refine phage treatments and help companies bring them to market.

QIAGEN N.V. (NYSE: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) today introduced seamless next-generation sequencing (NGS) solutions for a wide range of hereditary diseases on the GeneReader NGS System, the complete Sample to Insight NGS solution for any lab worldwide.

Two Rockville employers are among the top workplaces in the region, according to The Washington Post’s newest ranking.

Johns Hopkins University is again the top NIH grant recipient in Greater Baltimore in 2017, with a total grant value of $651.8 million last year.

The university also led all U.S. universities in research and development expenditures for the 38th consecutive year in fiscal year 2016, spending $2.4 billion on various research projects.

Leslie Weber was inducted in June as chair of the board of directors of the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce. Weber is director of the Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus and director of government and community affairs for Johns Hopkins in Montgomery County. She long has been involved with the Chamber: She has held leadership positions on the board and received the Chairman’s Award in 2016.

gel-e Inc., announces the 510(k) clearance of gel-e FLEX by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the over-the-counter (OTC) use of its first flowable hemostat.

This new clearance expands the Company’s label that now includes the use of gels and bandages in the local management of bleeding, such as lacerations and minor bleeding. These products are specifically designed to create rapid hemostasis through easy-to-use applications for professional healthcare providers, parents, coaches, adult caregivers and even patients themselves. gel-e FLEX also complements the Company’s already FDA cleared vascular closure device, Vascular gel-e®, as it can be worn home by patients to manage any residual bleeding from an out-patient diagnostic or interventional procedure, see http://www.gel-e.co/products.html.

CosmosID a bioinformatics provider and NGS service laboratory announced that the company’s cloud-based bioinformatics platform for microbiome analysis has received the highest score in the strain-level microbial profiling category of the Mosaic Community Challenge and for strain-level microbial identification in the precisionFDA Pathogen Detection Challenge.