newsletter - Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures

NEWSLETTER
Every day at Johns Hopkins, our deeply talented faculty, staff and
students develop innovations with the potential to benefit people
all over the world—from as far away as India to right here in our
own backyard in Baltimore. Our mission at FastForward and
Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures is to enable these amazing
technologies to come to life and—in the process—to build a
robust ecosystem that supports even more innovation.
Fiscal year 2015 was a busy one for Johns Hopkins researchers,
physicians and employees, who submitted a staggering 500
invention disclosures to the Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures
office—more than a 10 percent increase from last year. This
ISSUE #4
JULY 2015
significant number reflects the innovative ecosystem within Johns
Hopkins and lays the groundwork for potential products, services
and know-how to benefit the public.
In this issue of the Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures
Newsletter, we highlight recent events and a few technologies
and collaborations that demonstrate the true range of the
innovative work being done at Johns Hopkins. From a plan for
Baltimore’s first commercial hydroponic farm, to an international
collaboration for drug discovery, to a medical device company
with applications for the military and the developing world, read
on to learn more about the exciting things happening here.
Social Innovation Lab Supports
Innovations to Help Baltimore
IN THIS ISSUE
P2
Hopkins BME/CBID Design Day 2015
P4
App to Teach Sight-Reading
P7
HealthCare Collaborate
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
2015 DreamIt Health Baltimore (P3)
Novel Drug Delivery System (P5)
Hopkins-MedImmune Collaboration (P5)
Hopkins-Bayer Collaboration (P7)
FastForward News (P10)
AND MORE
Members of the 2015 Social Innovation Lab cohort
A
plan to build Baltimore’s first
commercial hydroponic farm;
a digital platform for Baltimore
residents to call attention to neighborhood
issues; a tool to help Internet novices,
especially the elderly, stay connected with
their communities and families—what do
these have in common?
All were developed by participants of The
Johns Hopkins University’s Social Innovation Lab, an early-stage incubator for
innovative nonprofits and mission-driven
companies whose technologies address
pressing social issues in Baltimore and
beyond. The program, which just completed
its fourth year, held its annual Impact and
Innovation Forum Demo Day on April 27.
This year’s cohort of emerging social enterprises addressed challenges in the areas of
medicine, food, community and technology.
“The Social Innovation Lab is a place where
positive ideas for making Baltimore and
the world a better place can take root and
grow,” says Christy Wyskiel, senior advisor
to the president of The Johns Hopkins
University.
“Now more than ever, we know we need to
address the challenges we face right here in
our own backyard, and many in this year’s
Social Innovation Lab cohort are tackling
these issues head on,” Wyskiel says.
Continued on page 9
JOHNS HOPKINS TECHNOLOGY VENTURES NEWSLETTER
Students Present Med-Tech, Global Health Solutions
at Johns Hopkins BME/CBID Design Day 2015
Participants in the 2015 BME/CBID Design Day include students from the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering
M
ore than 100 Johns Hopkins students spent the past year developing medical technology and global
health innovations that address some of
today’s most pressing health care issues. Their
products included a spirometer, SpiroSense,
that helps diagnose respiratory conditions
of patients in developing countries, and a
device, DrinkSync, for measuring hydration in
patients suffering from chronic ailments.
The 21 teams—eight graduate and 13 undergraduate—presented their innovations at
the sixth annual Johns Hopkins Biomedical
Engineering Design Day on May 5.
“Design Day 2015 was a very special one for
us,” says Youseph Yazdi, assistant professor of
biomedical engineering at The Johns Hopkins
University and executive director of the Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design
(CBID). “We dedicated fundraising during the
day to maternity clinics in Nepal who host our
CBID students each year and who are dealing
with the aftermath of the recent earthquake,”
he adds.
This past year, some students designed
medical technologies for the U.S. market,
while others created global health products
for use in developing countries. For technologies to be used in the U.S., teams worked
with Johns Hopkins clinicians who acted as
advisors, while teams working on devices
for developing countries were assisted by
corporate sponsors and nonprofits, such as
Jhpiego, an international health organization
|2
affiliated with The Johns Hopkins University.
Global health students traveled to places as
This year’s graduate teams developed the
following products:
• An assistive device for non-image-guided
central venous access
• CardiON: a home monitoring system for
heart failure management
• DrinkSync: a hydration status monitor for
chronic patients
• A neonatal vital signs monitoring system
• Renalert: a real-time monitor for acute
kidney injury
• Rural Health Kiosk: a system for providing
primary care to rural India
• A training system for vaginal examination
and fetal head assessment
• Tremtex: neurostimulation devices for
the management of Parkinson’s disease
symptoms
far away as Nepal and India for research and
development.
The undergraduate teams developed:
• A laparoscopic fascia closure device
• A novel assistive device for lower limb
prostheses
• A novel stem cell delivery device
• A novel technology to mitigate scissoring
gait in cystic fibrosis patients
• A novel tracheal stent
• A self-contained uterine contraction
monitor for low-resource clinical settings
• A surgical tool to reduce complications
associated with spinal revision surgery
• An early screening tool for preterm labor
• Pranapulse: a deskilled EKG for lowresource clinical settings
• Regulaire: a closed-loop oxygen
controller for premature infants
• SpiroSense: a deskilled spirometer for
low-resource settings
• TenoSlice: a novel tool to harvest tendons
• The CITT Kit: a kit of deskilling
contraceptive implantation and removal
procedures
ISSUE #4 | JULY 2015
Health IT Entrepreneurs Showcase Startups at Capstone Event
Co-Sponsored by Johns Hopkins
advisor to the president at The Johns Hopkins University. “New health care information
technology companies need the right tools
to begin their path to success, and DreamIt
Health provides those tools. We are proud to
co-sponsor this world-class accelerator that
brings promising companies to Baltimore.”
The six DreamIt Health Baltimore 2015 startups
were:
• Baton (of Baltimore), a mobile app that
ensures the seamless transition of patient
care between hospital teams to avoid
preventable medical errors
Opening remarks at the 2015 DreamIt Health Baltimore Demo Day event
A
fter weeks of intense work, the six
teams were ready. Some participants had moved to Baltimore from
hundreds of miles away, many had lost track
of the number of all-nighters they’d pulled,
and all were excited about their ideas to use
21st-century technology to solve a variety of
health care issues.
The six startup teams formed the cohort for
this year’s DreamIt Health Baltimore 2015
accelerator program, a four-month intensive
boot camp for health information technology
entrepreneurs co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins. On May 13, “Demo Day,” the startups
presented their health care solutions and future plans to an audience of industry leaders,
possible investors and potential customers.
“Demo Day represents the culmination of four
months of hard work and determination,”
says Jason Hardebeck, managing director of
DreamIt Health Baltimore.
• Coaching: Each team was assigned a
mentor and top-tier legal and accounting
representation.
• Curriculum: Teams had access to
curricula, such as Founders 101, designed
to educate and motivate; a weekly
speaker series; and office hours with
industry, government, investor, academic
and other experienced leaders.
• Connections: Teams received
introductions to potential funders,
partners and customers.
• Community: Teams worked in a
collaborative space with access to a
network of peers and other previous
DreamIt companies.
• Challenge: Teams experienced a sense of
urgency demanded by the limited fourmonth time frame of the program.
• Capital: Teams received up to $50,000 and
in-kind software and Web hosting services.
“Every one of these companies has validated
key business assumptions and developed
viable strategies to move from concept to
market,” Hardebeck adds. “I can’t wait to
watch these entrepreneurs ignite the second
stage of their rocketships.”
This year’s cohort was also co-sponsored
by the University of Maryland, the Maryland
Department of Business and Economic Development, the Economic Alliance of Greater
Baltimore, the Abell Foundation and BioHealth
Innovation.
During the 16 weeks leading up to Demo Day,
the startup teams were provided with:
“Technology is dramatically changing the world
of health care,” says Christy Wyskiel, senior
• Decisive Health Systems (of San Francisco),
an online information and communication
portal dedicated to helping doctors and
their patients come together to make
better, more informed decisions about
patient care
• InsightMedi (of Spain), a photosharing
network for health care professionals
designed to enhance education and enable
curbside consultations on a large scale
• Nomful (of Chicago), an app democratizing
personalized nutrition support so that
everyone can have access to a network of
expert nutrition coaches
• Redox (of Madison, Wisconsin), which
enables software developers to rapidly
integrate with installed legacy health
information technology systems through a
modern application programming interface
• Sisu Global Health (of Grand Rapids,
Michigan), which develops medical devices
for the most challenging environments
and markets; its first product enabled
autotransfusion of hemorrhaging patients
in the field with military and developing
world applications
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JOHNS HOPKINS TECHNOLOGY VENTURES NEWSLETTER
Peabody Professors Develop App to Teach Sight-Reading to Music Students
Ken Johansen and Travis Hardaway display their app, ReadAhead
T
he ability to sight-read—to play an unfamiliar piece of music
from start to finish, without stopping—is an important skill for
any pianist. Yet many piano students find it a difficult skill to
master—even students at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins
University, one of the world’s pre-eminent music schools.
Recognizing this need, Peabody Institute music theory professors
Travis Hardaway and Ken Johansen developed an app to help students
learn to sight-read.
“Many Peabody Institute students are expert performers, but some
of them sight-read at a lower level than what one might expect,”
Hardaway says.
Hardaway and Johansen worked with other Johns Hopkins researchers, including Peter Dziedzic, a software engineer and research data
systems manager for the Department of Neurology in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Charles Limb, an associate professor of otolaryngology–head and neck surgery at the Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine, who studies the neuroscience of music,
in structuring the app’s learning modules. Eye-tracking studies helped
shed light on how the eye reads music across a page.
The app, called Read Ahead, displays piano music on a tablet but takes
away the measures of the music, one by one, forcing a student to read
the music ahead of where he or she is playing. The app also contains
warmup exercises that train the eyes to look for patterns, the mind
to increase short-term memory and the hands to find notes without
looking at the keyboard.
Johansen and Hardaway tested the app with piano students in the
Baltimore area, and they found that it is best for students 10 years old
|4
and up working five to 10 minutes a day on the exercises.
Read Ahead has six levels, with three sublevels and hundreds of exercises at each level. It’s designed primarily for use on tablets, although
some of its features will work on smartphones. Johns Hopkins startup
BST Medical Solutions helped develop the app’s cross-platform functionality.
The Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures (JHTV) office helped
Hardaway and Johansen turn Read Ahead into a viable product by assisting with applications for patents and Maryland Innovation Initiative
grants. Hardaway and Johansen formed a company, Anacrusis LLC,
and received funding from all three phases of the Maryland program.
“JHTV really helped us work through the whole process. They were a
huge advocate for us,” Johansen says.
The JHTV office also encouraged Hardaway and Johansen to apply for
participation in the DC I-Corps program, which teaches entrepreneurs
how to develop ideas into successful products.
The I-Corps program “beat customer discovery into us,” Johansen
says, requiring them to interview music teachers to make sure they
were developing something teachers could use. Hardaway and Johansen are also developing a teachers’ portal that will allow teachers to
check on student progress.
“Teachers all say that sight-reading is extremely important,” Johansen
says, “but they don’t always have time to work it into a piano lesson.”
To download a free trial of the app, visit Anacrusis’ website at
anacrusisllc.com
ISSUE #4 | JULY 2015
Johns Hopkins Team Develops Novel Drug Delivery System
it. Kala Pharmaceuticals, a startup co-founded by Hanes, is developing these coated
nanoparticles.
D
rugs that must pass through
protective layers of mucus to deliver
treatment to organs of the body
are often not very effective, because the
mucus—a sticky, meshlike material—prevents
the drug from ever reaching its intended target.
But hope is on the horizon in the form of a
novel drug delivery system developed over
the past 15 years by a research team led by
Justin Hanes, director of the Center for Nanomedicine at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns
Hopkins.
Hanes’s system packages drugs into nanoparticles small enough to penetrate a mucus layer through tiny openings in the sticky mesh,
and it gives those nanoparticles a minimally
adhesive coating that enables them to slide
through the mesh without getting stuck to
To develop the nonadhesive coating for the
nanoparticles, Hanes and his team studied
mucus-penetrating viruses, such as the Norwalk and human papilloma viruses. By 2007,
Hanes says, they had developed a coating
that could make a nanoparticle pass through
mucus “almost as if the mucus was water.”
A few years later, Hanes and his team joined
Peter McDonnell, director of the Wilmer Eye
Institute, and McDonnell’s team to apply the
technology to developing drugs that treat
conditions of the eye.
In clinical trials that took place this past winter, Kala Pharmaceuticals tested how well the
system could deliver drugs prescribed to treat
dry eye and post-cataract surgery pain. To
reach their target, such drugs must penetrate the protective mucus layer that covers
the eye. According to Hanes, the trials were a
success.
The coated nanoparticles—called mucus-penetrating particles, or MPPs—have wide-ranging implications, with potential use for drug
delivery to many different organs, since mucus is prevalent throughout the human body
as a barrier to infection, Hanes says.
The coating helps ensure a drug’s effectiveness and reduce dosage levels. “Even with
less drug and a less frequent application of
the drug, you can still get just as good—or
better—effects,” because the drug isn’t being
caught in the mucus, Hanes says.
In developing the MPPs, Hanes and his
co-workers went against prevailing theory
that particles large enough to carry drugs
would be caught in the mucus rather than
pass through it.
Now, with several patents protecting its
system, Kala Pharmaceuticals is set to
dominate the field of mucus-penetrating
drug delivery.
Johns Hopkins-MedImmune Collaboration Seeks
to Stop Rheumatoid Arthritis Before It Happens
Felipe Andrade, associate professor of
medicine in the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine
T
ypical treatments for rheumatoid
arthritis target symptoms of the
disease—namely, the inflammation
that results when a patient’s immune system
attacks his or her body, particularly the joints.
But Felipe Andrade, associate professor of
medicine in the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine, believes the field of
medicine can do better. He’s looking for a way
to halt a process called citrullination, which
turns one type of protein into another that, in
patients with rheumatoid arthritis, is attacked
by the immune system, causing inflammation.
If citrullination of these proteins could be
stopped in these patients, “it would be like
putting out the fire before it happens,”
Andrade says.
Andrade and his team of Johns Hopkins
researchers and students—including Erika
Darrah, assistant professor of medicine— are
working with a team of researchers from
MedImmune to find a way to control or stop
citrullination from causing inflammation.
They’re in their second year of a three-year
collaboration, and they’re hoping to get closer
to developing a therapy or drug that could
bring some relief to patients with rheumatoid
arthritis.
“We’re not yet at the drug development
stage, but we’re trying to find therapeutic
opportunities based on what we’re studying,”
Andrade says.
They know that patients with rheumatoid
arthritis have a specific type of antibody—
directed against peptidyl arginine deiminase
(PAD) 4—that increases the activity of
the enzyme responsible for starting the
citrullination process. They want to figure
out how that happens and how to stop PAD4
from causing citrullination, explains Andrade,
the leader for Johns Hopkins’s part of the
collaboration.
The collaboration is an equal partnership.
Together, researchers from MedImmune
and Johns Hopkins analyze data and make
suggestions on next steps.
It’s also a unique opportunity for Johns
Hopkins researchers. The drug development
industry approaches research with the goal
of developing novel therapies—a goal that
sometimes gets lost in the academic realm,
Andrade explains.
And support from industry gives academic
researchers the chance to work on something
that, Andrade says, might not otherwise be
supported in any other way.Read more about
this year’s mentors on the Johns Hopkins
Technology Ventures website at ventures.jhu.
edu/mentors-in-residence.
|5
JOHNS HOPKINS TECHNOLOGY VENTURES NEWSLETTER
Johns Hopkins Biologists, IOCB Chemists Team Up for Drug Discovery
J
ohns Hopkins has proven expertise
in biological discovery and medicine,
while the Institute of Organic Chemistry
and Biochemistry (IOCB) in Prague, Czech Republic, employs more than 650 chemists and
biochemists. Put them together and you’ve
got a team perfectly positioned to make great
strides in small-molecule drug discovery.
The JHDD program began as the Johns
Hopkins Brain Science Institute’s NeuroTranslational Drug Discovery Program, which
focused on the development of neuroscience
discoveries. Earlier this year, the program’s
team was tasked by the School of Medicine
with aiding development of discoveries in all
therapeutic areas, not just the brain.
This past spring, the Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery (JHDD) program and the IOCB formalized a translational collaboration to join forces
for drug discovery. The effort will be led by
Barbara Slusher, JHDD director and founder
and president of the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium, an international collaborative
network of more than 100 university-led drug
discovery centers and programs.
But scaling up in scope required a corresponding scaling up in size, and while Johns
Hopkins has plenty of biologists and specialists in the field of medicine, it doesn’t have
as many chemists. The IOCB is selectively
focused on chemistry and has a history of
successful drug translation, including its discovery of tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, one
of the most successful antiretroviral drugs on
the market, Slusher says.
JHDD is the largest integrated drug discovery
program on campus, responsible for translating basic science discoveries at Johns
Hopkins into novel small-molecule drug
therapies. Included in Slusher’s drug discovery
team are medicinal chemists, assay developers, pharmacologists, toxicologists and drug
metabolism experts.
|6
The Johns Hopkins-IOCB collaboration,
therefore, is “a strategic marriage between
their expertise and capacity and ours,”
Slusher says. “This gives us the ability to
pursue more ideas than we could on our
own,” and it puts the collaboration’s medicinal
chemistry capacity on par with that of big
pharmaceutical companies.
The two institutions have been working
together on various projects for some years—
several joint patents have been filed—so the
formal collaboration is a natural extension of
the existing relationship.
In drug discovery, biologists identify conditions of the body that could benefit from a
drug, and chemists develop drugs to target
that condition. Biologists then test the drugs
to see if the drugs inhibit the condition or not.
“Drug discovery is very much a team sport,”
Slusher says.
At JHDD, every week starts with a team meeting between the two institutions. “We bring
biological target ideas, assays and expertise
in drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics.
They bring medicinal chemistry expertise,
and we work as a team, communicating back
and forth along the path of drug discovery,”
Slusher explains.
The agreement will run for five years, after
which it will be renewable.
ISSUE #4 | JULY 2015
Johns Hopkins, Bayer HealthCare Collaborate to Develop Ophthalmic Therapies
Attendees at the Johns Hopkins – Bayer HealthCare collaboration kick-off event
T
he Johns Hopkins University and Bayer HealthCare entered
into a five-year collaboration agreement on June 15 to jointly
develop new ophthalmic therapies targeting retinal diseases.
The goal of the strategic research alliance is to accelerate the
translation of innovative approaches from the laboratory to the clinic,
ultimately offering patients new treatment options for several retinal
diseases.
Under the agreement, researchers at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns
Hopkins and Bayer HealthCare will jointly conduct research activities
evaluating new targets and disease mechanisms, drug delivery
technologies, and biomarkers for back-of-the-eye diseases with high
unmet medical need.
Both parties will contribute personnel and infrastructure to address
important scientific questions. Bayer HealthCare will have an option for
the exclusive use of the collaboration results.
“There is a critical need for new therapies that treat a variety of serious
diseases of the eye,” says Peter McDonnell, director of the Wilmer
Eye Institute and professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine. “Additional research will allow us the
opportunity to make significant advances in this area.”
The collaboration aims to discover and develop innovative drugs for
the treatment of serious back-of-the-eye diseases that affect many
people worldwide, such as:
• Age-related macular degeneration
• Diabetic macular edema
• Geographic atrophy
• Stargardt’s disease
• Retinal vein occlusion
“The Wilmer Eye Institute’s deep understanding of eye disease
biology and patient care and Bayer’s expertise in drug discovery and
development in ophthalmology complement each other perfectly,”
says Professor Andreas Busch, head of global drug discovery at Bayer
HealthCare and a member of Bayer HealthCare’s executive committee.
“We are pleased to partner with this renowned institute, which is
among the leading scientific and clinical institutions in ophthalmology
worldwide.”
Work on projects that are a part of this exciting collaboration will begin
later this summer.
|7
JOHNS HOPKINS TECHNOLOGY VENTURES NEWSLETTER
Johns Hopkins Team Wins Entrepreneurs’ Choice Award
at Venture Capital Competition
Johns Hopkins’ team had only one week
to gear up for the Global VCIC mid-Atlantic
regional final after winning The Johns Hopkins
University’s internal VCIC competition, but they
pulled it off.
From left to right: Christopher Bailey, Tim Xu, Sean Grant,
Kimi Yang, Ali Afshar
J
ohns Hopkins works not only to foster
startups whose products have the
potential to improve the well-being of
people all over the world, but also to produce
savvy investors with business acumen and a
strong sense of market dynamics.
Earlier this year, a team of Johns Hopkins
University graduate student investors-intraining won the Entrepreneurs’ Choice award
at the 2015 mid-Atlantic regional final of the
Global Venture Capital Investment Competition
(VCIC), during which judges evaluate the
competencies of teams of student venture
capitalists.
Global VCIC takes place among graduate
students at more than 70 business schools
around the world. Teams of student venture
capitalists participate by competing in one of
12 regional finals held during the winter on
three continents to qualify for the Global VCIC
competition held in the spring. Throughout
the rounds of the competition, students act as
venture capitalists, evaluating real start-ups
and interacting with entrepreneurs. Actual
venture capitalists judge how well the student
venture capital teams evaluate the startups,
according to VCIC’s website.
At this year’s Global VCIC mid-Atlantic regional
final, hosted by Georgetown University’s
McDonough School of Business on Jan. 30, the
Johns Hopkins University team of Ali Afshar,
Christopher Bailey, Sean Grant, Tim Xu and
|8
Kimi Yang ranked third in the meeting and
negotiations category in addition to winning
the Entrepreneurs’ Choice award. The team
was the first Johns Hopkins University VCIC
team to win that award. At VCIC competitions,
Entrepreneurs’ Choice award winners are
selected by entrepreneurs representing the
startups evaluated by the student venture
capital teams. For their Entrepreneurs’ Choice
award, the Johns Hopkins University team
received a recognition plaque, which now
hangs at The Johns Hopkins University Carey
Business School.
A week before the regional final, The Johns
Hopkins University hosted an internal
VCIC competition to determine a winner
to represent the university at that regional
competition. The winning team of Afshar,
Bailey, Grant, Xu and Yang competed against
13 other self-formed, multidisciplinary teams
of Johns Hopkins University graduate student
venture capitalists.
This internal competition was organized by
The Johns Hopkins University’s Innovation
Factory, a student-led organization promoting
entrepreneurship and innovation, and was
judged by nine venture capitalists from across
the country. The teams each evaluated four
startups affiliated with Johns Hopkins—
Quantified Care (specializing in medical
technology), Proscia (bioinformatics), Urban
Pastoral Collective (hydroponics) and Full
Society (payment applications).
“The fact that our team won the
Entrepreneurs’ Choice award shows what a
multidisciplinary Johns Hopkins University
team can accomplish in short order,” says Jim
Liew, assistant professor of entrepreneurial
finance at the Carey Business School and
one of the participating judges. “I was
extremely impressed by their enthusiasm,
professionalism and intensity.”
ISSUE #4 | JULY 2015
Johns Hopkins Faculty Members and Researchers Present
Continued from page 1
For example, the Neighborhood Watch app,
developed in the lab this year by undergraduate students Elana Stroud, a computer
science major, and Camilla Dohlman, a public
health studies major, aims to provide Baltimore residents with a way to bring attention
to issues plaguing their communities. App users might, for example, propose ways in which
to revitalize a vacant lot, says Darius Graham,
the lab’s director.
The students behind Urban Pastoral, another
project this year, hope to create the first commercial-scale, urban hydroponic farm to supply Baltimore schools with fresh produce and
Baltimore residents with green jobs, Graham
says. In the process, the students hope to find
ways to reduce the environmental impact of
large-scale industrial farming, eliminate the
need for pesticide use, increase the ability to
buy locally and provide job opportunities in
the Baltimore community.
This year’s cohort of emerging social ventures
included:
• Urban Pastoral (Julie Buisson and Mark
Verdecia, graduate students at Carey Business School, and J. Reidy, who earned his
master’s degree in business administration
in 2015 from Carey): Building Baltimore’s
first commercial-scale, urban hydroponic
farm.
• Aezon (Neil Rens, Tatiana Rypinski, Ned
Samson and Ryan Walter, undergraduate students at the Whiting School of
Engineering, and team): Creating a device
and companion smartphone app to test
for multiple illnesses and conditions, from
sleep apnea to diabetes, without the assistance of a physician.
• Mustard Seed Pillow (Anwesha Majumder,
a graduate student at Bloomberg School
of Public Health): Redesigning a centuries-old pillow to support proper infant
skull development.
• RetinEye (Whiting School of Engineering
graduate students Aaron Chang, Hanh
Le and Allie Sibole and undergraduate
student Monica Rex): Pairing traditional
ophthalmic lenses with a smartphone app
using new image technology to support
low-cost glaucoma screenings where traditional screening machines aren’t easily
accessible.
• ShapeU (Seal-Bin Han, Jordan Matelsky
and Richard Shi, undergraduate students
at the Whiting School of Engineering):
Harnessing the power of teamwork and
social networking to help individuals exercise more and meet their health goals.
• Wodagro (Justin Falcone, an archaeology undergraduate student at the Zanvyl
Krieger School of Arts & Sciences): Developing a new type of green roof that aims
to be more lightweight, energy-efficient
and affordable than traditional green roof
designs.
• WalkThrough (Rome Chopra, a finance
graduate student at Carey Business
School): Helping Internet novices, especially the elderly, stay connected with their
communities and families via a digital tool
that helps conduct basic functions such as
email, online banking and social media.
• Neighborhood Watch App (Elana Stroud, a
computer science undergraduate student
at the Whiting School of Engineering,
and Camilla Dohlman, a public health
studies undergraduate student at the
Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts & Sciences):
Providing a digital platform for Baltimore
residents to bring attention to issues in
their neighborhoods.
• White River Medical Fellowship (Kevin
Burns, a resident in the General Preventive
Medicine Residency at the Bloomberg
School of Public Health): Creating a pathway for new doctors to work and learn in
hospitals serving rural and Native American communities.
NEW JHTV Inventor Portal
Got an invention?
Submitting your invention disclosure is now easier
than ever. Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures’ new
user-friendly, simplified electronic portal includes
fewer questions and forms, making invention
disclosures less complex and time-consuming.
Anyone with a JHED identification account can access
the portal.
For questions or support, contact Tina Preston at
410-516-4561.
|9
JOHNS HOPKINS TECHNOLOGY VENTURES NEWSLETTER
NEWS
FastForward East to Quadruple in Size, Fuel Baltimore Tech Boom
Official groundbreaking for 1812 Ashland Ave.
T
he May 15 groundbreaking ceremony for Johns Hopkins
Technology Ventures’ new FastForward East location at 1812
Ashland Ave. was about more than just the much-needed
additional space the new location will provide the innovation hub.
The ceremony represented the robust growth of the Johns Hopkins
innovation culture that is driving economic development in Baltimore,
and it signified Baltimore’s strong prospects for becoming a home for
tech-savvy companies, offering a wide range of new jobs to Baltimore
residents and cultivating a booming, technology-based economy.
As Baltimore’s movers and shakers gathered that Friday morning—
standing room only—under a fluttering white tent beneath a clear blue
sky next to the 1812 Ashland Ave. construction site, there were no
clouds—real or metaphorical—to dampen the speakers’ ardor.
“This new, larger space for our FastForward East innovation hub will help
meet demand in the market for affordable space so that startups will
start and stay here in Baltimore,” Christy Wyskiel, senior advisor to the
president of The Johns Hopkins University, said during the ceremony.
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Baltimore City Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake added that the mere
existence of waiting lists for desk and laboratory space at Johns Hopkins’
FastForward innovation hubs signified growth in Baltimore.
The new and larger innovation hub’s job creation potential was evident
throughout the ceremony, as the industrious hum of new construction
work rang out from the construction site, indicative of jobs already
created to construct the building.
“The cornerstone of a healthy community has got to be about jobs, and
the building we’re celebrating today is tied inextricably to job creation,”
said Ronald J. Daniels, president of The Johns Hopkins University, at the
ceremony.
The future FastForward East innovation hub will be across the street
from the current FastForward East, which occupies 6,000 square feet
in the Rangos Building at 855 N. Wolfe St. FastForward East opened
there in early 2015 to complement the original FastForward location
near the university’s Homewood campus, but it didn’t take long before
names started piling up on the waiting lists to which the mayor referred.
ISSUE #4 | JULY 2015
FastForward space always has been at a
premium.
The new seven-level, 165,000-squarefoot, $65.6 million building is scheduled for
completion by fall 2016. FastForward East will
occupy 25,000 square feet and will offer open,
communal spaces encouraging spontaneous
collaboration and impromptu cross-pollination
of ideas among FastForward innovators, to
include both early- and later-stage companies.
But even 25,000 square feet ultimately may
not be enough, if Baltimore continues along
such a fast-paced technological trajectory.
As Jamar Whitehead, a fourth-grade student
at Elmer A. Henderson: A Johns Hopkins
Partnership School in East Baltimore, noted in
his speech at the ceremony, “in a few years,
[Johns Hopkins] may need another one of
these buildings because my classmates and I
have some ideas of our own.”
Other speakers at the ceremony included
Ronald R. Peterson, president of The Johns
Hopkins Hospital and Health System and
executive vice president of Johns Hopkins
Medicine; Paul B. Rothman, dean of the
medical faculty of the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine and CEO of Johns Hopkins
Medicine; Sen. Nathaniel McFadden, a
representative of East Baltimore in Maryland’s
General Assembly; The Rev. LaReesa SmithHorn, pastor for East Baltimore’s Christ United
Methodist Church; Scott Levitan, development
director for Forest City – New East Baltimore
Partnership, the building’s developer; and
Raymond Skinner, president and CEO of East
Baltimore Development Inc., an organization
revitalizing the neighborhood.
About 100 Johns Hopkins employees—including many nurses—attended a Nurses Week happy hour at FastForward East (855 N. Wolfe St.,
Baltimore) on May 6 to celebrate nursing and to learn about some of the ways in which technology is revolutionizing the field. The event was hosted
by Microsoft, a sponsor of the FastForward accelerator program.
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Johns Hopkins University
Office of Technology Ventures
100 North Charles Street, 5th floor
Baltimore, MD 21201
Phone: 410.516.8300
Fax: 410.516.4411