Business

Law firm Baker Donelson is spearheading an innovative use of empty office space by donating an entire floor at 100 Light Street in Downtown Baltimore for use as a small business incubator. Baker Donelson is partnering with Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program for the incubator, which will be called The Light of Baltimore. The incubator will support 30 small businesses and already 26 companies are confirmed inside the space. The influx of new companies downtown is especially valuable as more and more businesses pivot to remote work or, like Baker Donelson, downsize their space.

An Owings Mills medical device company, IZI Medical Products, will now have new owners from across the pond after a $153.5 million deal. IZI Medical will be a standalone subsidiary within Halma plc, a British conglomerate involved in several “life-saving technology” sectors, from smoke detectors to medical devices. The deal with Halma, a company with a market capitalization over $8 billion, closed on Sept. 30. Halma is not the first firm outside of Maryland to acquire the 90-person medical device company. IZI was acquired by Illinois radiation company Landauer Inc. in 2011, before becoming a portfolio company of private equity firm Shore Capital Partners in 2016.

The Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, struggling to recover from economic hardship brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, made several cuts to staff and student services ahead of the fall semester in an effort to become financially sound again. While many public colleges and universities in Maryland have rebounded and are poised to even exceed pre-pandemic enrollment and revenue numbers, the recovery at MICA hasn’t been as strong as expected, president Samuel Hoi told The Baltimore Banner. Total enrollment for degree-earners, once typically about 2,100, has leveled at about 1,900, Hoi said.

BayFirst Financial Corp. will close three Maryland loan production offices as the company moves to shut down its nationwide residential mortgage lending business. As a result, 20 employees will be laid off, according to a public filing on Maryland’s Work Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) log, which says the layoffs will be effective Nov. 25. The St. Petersburg, Florida-based bank announced in September that it would shutter its residential mortgage lending business after a cool-off in the housing market that began at the start of the year.

Montgomery County’s growing life sciences industry is getting a boost from collaborative efforts between businesses, higher education institutions, nonprofits and government agencies. Life sciences is a top industry in the county. The Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation (MCEDC) reports the county’s more than 300 bio companies attracted nearly $8 billion in investments in 2020. At the end of July 2022, Indeed’s job search site listed nearly 750 biotechnology job openings in the…

A University of Maryland, Baltimore County professor hopes to rapidly speed up the drug approval process, making it easier for drugs to get to market and help patients. In August, Chengpeng Chen earned a five-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a new way to model how drugs will impact human organs, starting with the liver. The device would shorten the time it takes to get U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval by providing a more accurate view of how drugs impact the human body than current testing methods.

A Baltimore firm has acquired a vacant parcel in Largo next to Metro with plans to develop a multifamily building, bringing the area one step closer to the mixed-used downtown Prince George’s has envisioned, and incentivized with tax perks, to take shape there. An affiliate of Klein Enterprises, a developer and real estate services company, bought the vacant 5.1-acre lot at 9420 Grand Blvd., adjacent to the Largo Town Center Metro Station, from an affiliate of D.C.-based PNGS Management Co. The $13 million deal closed Sept. 14, according to property records.

The Northeastern Maryland Technology Council has added attorney Kaitlin Corey to its board of directors as board secretary and member of its four-person executive committee. Corey is a partner at Goodell, DeVries, Leech & Dann, LLP, Baltimore, with a focus on protecting intellectual property including copyrights and trademarks, false advertising, and negotiating business transactions and agreements.