Facing record-high volatility and market uncertainty, one biotech is scheduled for the week ahead.

Formed by New Enterprise Associate's orphan drug accelerator Cydan, genetic disorder biotech Imara (IMRA) plans to raise $76 million at a $301 million market cap. The Boston-based company's sole candidate IMR-687 is a once-a-day therapy targeting sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia by inhibiting PDE9. It is expected to begin a Phase 2b trial in the 1H20. While there is significant unmet medical need for both disorders, it is a crowded space, with three products approved in 2019. Recent biotech IPOs have held their ground in the market sell off, though Imara is significantly smaller, later stage than most of them, and its narrow-pipeline peers traded down the past month.

As a startup advisor and investor, I’ve met many aspiring entrepreneurs, and I often get asked the question, “I have a great idea for a startup – do you agree that it real potential?” They don’t know that most experts agree the person is more important than the idea, yet I’ve never been asked, “I have a great idea for a startup – do you agree that I have real potential as an entrepreneur?”

IT appears the dust has not settled after two weeks of political impasse. While there’s euphoria on the side of the “victors”, the “vanquished” claims democracy is dead. But as a country, we need to move past this quickly.

The new Government must find ways to strive for the betterment of the rakyat and the growth of the country. I’m sure citizens like you and me want the Government to focus on putting the economy back on track. We have enough ugly politics that negates the nation’s economic growth.

Image: Rohiman Haroon

As part of the government-wide effort to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in U.S. communities, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has updated a broad agency announcement (BAA) to focus specifically on products to diagnose, prevent or treat coronavirus infections.

The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), issued the BAA, BAA-18-100-SOL-00003-Amendment 13, to solicit proposals for advanced development and licensure of COVID-19 diagnostics, vaccines, or medicines such as therapeutics or antivirals.

Bloomberg recently released its annual Richest Places index, revealing the wealthiest towns in the US.

The index ranks the wealthiest communities in the US by average household income. This year, to crack the top 100, a neighborhood needed, at minimum, an average household income upwards of $220,000. The top 20, listed below, each had an average household income over $300,000.

Image: A home in Atherton, California. Melia Robinson/Business Insider

Alexandria, which has proudly supported the Navy SEAL Foundation in its mission to provide immediate and ongoing support and assistance to the Naval Special Warfare community and their families since 2010, joined patriots, partners, colleagues and friends to celebrate the Navy SEAL Foundation's 20th anniversary

In my work with you as an entrepreneur or small business owner, I find that most understand the need try out new business models and product innovations, but trust their intuition rather than running a disciplined business experiment first. The result is that you often take a big financial hit, and lose key customers, before you realize that the change didn’t work. There is a better way.

A major venture capital firm says companies should "brace for turbulence” as the novel coronavirus rocks the global economy, sounding the warning in a note released Thursday.

Sequoia Capital, which has funded some of the country’s most recognizable businesses — including Instagram, Apple, and Google — sent the memo to the heads of companies in its portfolio, suggesting founders and CEOs should "question every assumption" about their businesses.

Sometime this fall, the number of people who have spit in a tube and sent their DNA to the largest consumer DNA testing companies, like Ancestry and 23andMe, is likely to top 20 million. The list by now is certain to include some of your classmates and neighbors. If you are just tuning in, this figure will seem huge. And you might wonder: how did we get here?

The answer is little by little. The number of people getting DNA reports has been doubling, roughly, every year since 2010. The figures are now growing by a million each month, and the DNA repositories are so big that they’re enabling surprising new applications. Consumers are receiving scientific predictions about whether they’ll go bald or get cancer. Investigators this year started using consumer DNA data to capture criminals. 

Image: PERSONALIZED MEDICINE COALITION

SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the bank of the world's most innovative companies and their investors, today released its 2020 Women in US Technology Leadership Report. The report reveals that the gender parity gap persists for women in US tech leadership, with 42% of startups having at least one woman in an executive position and 40% have at least one woman on the board of directors. The survey also found that 30% of US startups have a program in place to increase women in leadership roles.  

The UCP government will offer fast-track visa processing to U.S. graduates who commit to launching a startup venture in Alberta, part of its attempt to find new ways to support the province’s technology sector after cancelling a suite of tax credits last fall.

In last week’s provincial budget, the Alberta government said it will create a specialized Startup Visa Stream that will offer fast-track processing with a bridge to permanent residency to qualified graduates of top U.S. universities, if they commit to launching a startup enterprise in the province. Similar fast-track opportunities will be offered to foreign nationals who have graduated from Alberta’s post-secondary institutions under a new Foreign Graduate Entrepreneur Program.

Image: Economic Development, Trade and Tourism Minister Tanya Fir. JIM WELLS / POSTMEDIA, FILE

The Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division (NSWC PCD) currently holds 75 patents with another 23 pending, but the Command is looking to add more to the portfolio.

 “Patents are an important indicator of technological creativity and progress made by the Navy and they also enhance the technical reputation of NSWC PCD,” said Jim Shepherd, the NSWC PCD Legal Counsel and Patent Attorney. “There are also benefits to our employees when they apply for a patent.”

Image: https://www.navsea.navy.mil/

Bloomberg has released the 2020 edition of its yearly “Innovation Index,” ranking the world's 60 most innovative economies worldwide, and the United States has dropped to 9th place overall.

Though it occupied the no. 9 spot, the U.S. actually ranks first in both patent activity and high-tech density. This shouldn't come as a big surprise given that the Big Five tech companies – Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (parent company of Google), Facebook, and Amazon – all call the US home. The country has the highest overall density of tech companies in the world. Each of the Big Five has a significant influence on their own in the patent market and there is an ever-expanding ecosystem of both startups and established companies whose products and patents depend on at least one of the Big Five, whether it is for hardware support or cloud-based computing services.

Image: https://www.designnews.com

Business success is all about having the best team, yet the average entrepreneur has little prior experience with hiring people and building top-notch teams. It’s no wonder that 45 percent of startups fail in the first five years, and an even smaller percentage ever see a return for their years of effort. Most new entrepreneurs assume their passion will attract and motivate the right team members.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Armed with some data from our friends at CrunchBase, I broke down the largest US startup funding rounds from February 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

The latest stats on Harvard's website show only an 11% acceptance rate for its prestigious MBA program. Those are intimidating odds for the roughly 10,000 students who apply to Harvard Business School each year.

Harvard was ranked No. 1 in the world for business and management studies in 2020 by higher-education analysts at Quacquarelli Symonds and topped the Financial Times' 2020 global ranking of MBA programs — so, basically, it's very prestigious, and competitive.

Hundreds of people across Norway are currently in quarantine at their homes, as the country fights to restrain the spread of coronavirus infections. At least 33 people in Norway have been confirmed as having coronavirus as of Wednesday afternoon. None of the individuals are reported to be seriously ill.

With at least 5 cases connected to the ophthalmology department at the Ullevål campus of Oslo University Hospital, as many as 280 staff from the hospital have been told to quarantine themselves at home, news agency NTB reported on Tuesday.

Image: AFP

Following is a transcript of the video.

Dr. Stephen Morse: "Wearing a mask will protect me from the virus." The problem is that people who wear these masks usually don't wear them properly.

Dr. Syra Madad: "The coronavirus came from bat soup." (Morse sighs) That is absolutely not correct.

Morse: "The coronavirus was deliberately created or released."

Madad: Giving humans a little bit too much credit here.

Hi, I'm Dr. Syra Madad. I am the senior director of New York City Health + Hospitals' System-wide Special Pathogens Program.

Morse: And I'm Dr. Stephen Morse, professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. We're here to debunk myths about the coronavirus.

Beneath all the reporting on fatally flawed airplane design, serial ten-figure operating losses from big name startups, and Russian-linked presidential election information hackings, there lies an organizational leadership truth from the debacles at Boeing, WeWork, and Facebook: Be wary of giving the CEO job and the board chair job to one person.

Metro Monitor 2020 tracks the inclusive economic growth performance of the 192 largest U.S. metro areas, which together are home to 77% of the nation’s population and contribute 85% of the nation’s GDP. This year’s edition of the Metro Monitor analyzes two time periods: from 2008 to 2018, which indicates how metro areas have fared since the onset of the Great Recession; and from 2017 to 2018, the latest year of data available across all indicators.