Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
Armed with some data from our friends at CrunchBase, I broke down the largest US startup funding rounds from April 2020. I have included some additional information such as industry, company description, round type, founders, and total equity funding raised to further the analysis.
Image: https://www.alleywatch.com
Since the enactment of the CARES Act, the Small Business Administration and U.S. Department of the Treasury have continually updated the rules governing the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) through formal rulemaking and less formal guidance. Join a team of Venable Financial Services and Corporate partners for a discussion around guidance for preparing for an audit (and potential investigation). Our discussion will include best practices for documenting decision making, what we can expect from the SBA going forward, and how best to manage an audit and address any potential investigation.
As the COVID-19 crisis rages, public life in many countries is grinding to a halt. The human toll is enormous, with the patient caseload and deaths increasing exponentially worldwide. On the economic side, the coronavirus has forced many businesses to cease or slow down operations.
Automotive OEMs and players within the mobility industry are among the hardest hit. Over the long term, COVID-19 could have a lasting impact on mobility as it drives change in the macroeconomic environment, regulatory trends, technology, and consumer behaviors. The trends may vary by region, however, so responses and outcomes for mobility players will differ by location.
(HVAMMSTANGI, Iceland) — Winter storms isolated the northern village of Hvammstangi from the rest of Iceland. Then spring brought the coronavirus, isolating villagers from each other. Now, as summer approaches, residents hope life is getting back to some kind of normal.
High schools, hair salons, dentists and other businesses across Iceland are reopening Monday after six weeks of lockdown, after this North Atlantic nation managed to tame its coronavirus outbreak.
The world struggled to understand how COVID-19 spread during the pandemic’s first four months, but genetic sequences of the coronavirus reported by laboratories tell the real story—when the virus arrived in each place and where it came from. The sequences, which advance from left to right in the graphic, show that the virus jumped from an animal to humans in China, humans transmitted it to one another within China, then people traveling from there spread it globally person to person. The virus had not mutated significantly as of March 31, 2020; human contact created the pandemic, not a wildly evolving pathogen. Mapping the spread also substantiates actions that could have best mitigated it: faster, wider testing in China; earlier, stricter global travel bans and isolation of infected people; and more immediate social distancing worldwide.
Image: Credit: Martin Krzywinski
Emergent Biosolutions CEO Robert Kramer told CNBC Monday it is uncertain that a coronavirus vaccine can be available by the end of the year to fulfill President Donald Trump’s wishes.
The specialty biopharmaceutical company is collaborating with drug giant Johnson & Johnson on a Covid-19 vaccine candidate, which Johnson & Johnson hopes will receive emergency use authorization in 2021.
“Nobody can guarantee anything,” Kramer said in a “Mad Money” interview with Jim Cramer. “We’re here, as well as all of our partners and collaborators, doing everything we can to make sure that a vaccine and treatments are available as soon as possible.”
Image: https://www.cnbc.com
Beth Blauer and Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, two key members of the Johns Hopkins team that is tracking every confirmed coronavirus case, tell Brian Stelter how they do it, what the numbers do and don't reveal, and why people can have confidence in the data, even though it is incomplete. With regards to the death toll, "we may see that the true number is actually larger than what's been reported," Nuzzo says, "not the other way around."
Image: https://www.cnn.com
The true cost of the Covid-19 pandemic is nearly impossible to quantify. The human toll, surpassing the Vietnam War last week at 60,000 deaths, is difficult to comprehend. The number of people who have lost their livelihoods, at 30 million, is as yet incomplete, as many face long waits to file for unemployment. And we still don’t know the long-term effects on the economy or how the crisis will end, as experts warn that the novel coronavirus may well return in the fall.
He joins BioTalk host Rich Bendis to discuss their recent successes in funding, research, and their growth in the BioHealth Capital Region
Dr. William Hearl is the founder of Immunomic Therapeutics, Inc. and is an experienced and successful life science businessman and entrepreneur. Dr. Hearl is adept at brokering mutually beneficial partnerships and identifying non-traditional collaborations and investment opportunities.
The advent of the commercial development of LAMP technology came from discussions between Dr. Hearl and Dr. Tom August at Johns Hopkins University. Based on their mutual vision of the value of LAMP, ITI emerged and began operations in 2006. Dr. Hearl’s extensive experience in intellectual property management and business development led to the reward of a sub-license of the LAMP technology to Geron Corporation within 30 days of initiating operations and subsequent license agreements, valued at over $300 million, in 2015 with Japan-based Astellas for next generation allergy vaccines based on the LAMP platform.
The Association of University Research Parks (AURP), a global nonprofit membership organization serving the university and institutional research parks community, today announced its BIO Health Caucus will take place June 3-4, 2020 in a digital environment. AURP’s BIO Health Caucus represents anchor life science institutions building communities of health innovations in the U.S and around the world.
Image: https://baltimore.citybizlist.com
On April 23, 2020, the Bayh-Dole 40 Coalition and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation co-hosted a video webinar on the critical role that public-private partnerships will play in combating COVID-19. Speakers detailed how these partnerships work, what risks they entail, why intellectual property protections are so important to biomedical innovation.
As the world anxiously awaits a coronavirus vaccine, a Maryland biotechnology company already has signed deals to do initial production of three candidates. If one of them works, the firm has a factory in place to manufacture hundreds of millions of doses a year.
Emergent BioSolutions of Gaithersburg has long been preparing for a global disease outbreak. The firm got started making a vaccine against anthrax, and since then has produced candidates for the Ebola and Zika viruses.
Image: Luis M. Branco, PhD Managing Director and Co-Founder
Why do a few entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, seem to come up with all the real innovations, while the majority of business leaders seem stuck in the rut of linear thinking? I have always wondered if innovation required some rare gene mutation, or whether I might be missing a simple formula for unlocking the ability in any intelligent business person to innovate.
Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com
TOPLINE Pharmaceutical and diagnostic company Roche said Sunday that its coronavirus antibody test was granted emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, and that it can churn out over 100 million of the kits by the end of this year, as governments search for ways to safely reopen communities and let people go back to work.
Image: A lab assistant holds a blood sample to be tested for COVID-19 antibodies. AP PHOTO/DAVID J. PHILLIP
Part of what inspires me and other founders to create new ventures is the thrill of the unknown, and the unpredictability of entrepreneurship. While entrepreneurs have been forced to navigate global economic crises before, such as the 2008 recession, the coronavirus pandemic has created a new magnitude of economic uncertainty across every industry. Small business owners, startup founders, and other entrepreneurs have been forced to make devastating decisions in order to try to salvage their companies.
It’s time to stop asking what the “new normal” will look like, because it’s already here. We need to accept that we live in the What’s Next Economy.
None of us has lived through an economy like the What’s Next Economy. It’s natural to react with disbelief or to deny its reality. There are days where the changes are so fast and so profound that it’s too much to take in. But those changes are why we can’t take comfort in the patterns of our past. It is a time to be inventive, open to change and proactive. Let’s look the What’s Next Economy squarely in the face and make a plan.
Image: The coronavirus pandemic has changed every facet of Greater Washington's economy. Now companies must start to think about the What's Next Economy. JONATHAN CAPRIEL
Emergent BioSolutions Inc.’s $135 million deal struck late last month to manufacture Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate isn’t just a big financial win for the company — it’s also a key geopolitical move in the race to defeat the virus.
According to The New York Times, the Department of Health and Human Services made sure Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) — which is headquartered in New Jersey but has its research based in the Netherlands — joined a manufacturing partnership with the Maryland-based biotech to ensure the earliest available large batches of the vaccine, if approved, are produced stateside.
Image: Gaithersburg's Emergent BioSolutions is a key company in the geopolitical race for create a Covid-19 vaccine because it can ensure vaccines can be made stateside. ESBEN_H
For regions shut down due to Covid-19 to safely begin to reopen, we need ways to keep R — the average number of additional people infected by each infected person — under one, the threshold below which epidemics contract and ultimately die out. Among the proposals for how we can do this in the United States, one calls for frequent population-wide testing to identify and isolate those who are infected. Others suggest that the country will be hard-pressed to get through this without either prolonging lockdowns or intermittently reinstating them whenever infections rise until we have enough testing and contact tracing to control the spread or enough people become immune through infection or vaccination.
Image: Illustration by Jason Schneider
An intriguing article noted that there is a “great big billionaire backlash” (Fortune, January 2020, page 7). It mentioned that an increasing proportion of the country thinks that billionaires should be “vilified,” and are the “root of all evil.” The article also adds that there is a political divide in the country. Republicans think that the situation is acceptable while Democrats think that billionaires are a “threat to democracy.”
The measures most of the world has put in place to mitigate the spread of the pandemic has shut down the global economy in a more abrupt fashion than we’ve ever seen.
Despite what many are saying, the idea of a V-shaped recovery is woefully optimistic. While parallels are consistently being drawn to past financial crises, these are simply not relevant to our current situation.
