Business

Five months after the Australian-based biopharmaceutical company Ellume opened its first U.S. location in Frederick, the facility is scaling up its production of at-home COVID-19 tests by starting to automate the manufacturing process. U.S. Rep. David Trone and U.S. Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin visited the sprawling campus along Executive Way on Tuesday afternoon for a tour of the company’s production capabilities and a town hall meeting with its employees. They were joined by Laurie Locascio, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST runs the Maryland Manufacturing Extension Partnership in Gaithersburg, which helps manufacturers in the state — like Ellume — operate more efficiently, grow and create more jobs.

Total Wine & More, a Bethesda-based company that is the nation’s largest independent wine retailer, has renewed its lease on its headquarters located at 6600 Rockledge Drive, the Maryland Department of Commerce announced Tuesday morning. The press release did not specify the duration of the lease, and a representative of Total Wine & More could not be reached for comment. In addition to renewing its lease, Total Wine is also expanding in Maryland. 

Reports of the end days of Eddie’s of Mount Vernon, it turns out, were greatly exaggerated. The popular midtown grocery on Tuesday was the scene of an epic retail drama that involved a diverse cast of characters including a team of city health inspectors, store owner Dennis Zorn, landlord Dennis Richter, Facebook patrons and City Councilman Eric Costello. The situation escalated and a city health department spokesman said Baltimore police were called to Eddie’s and took a report for verbal and physical assault.

Sinai Hospital is planning to build a new 125,000-square-foot cancer center to provide more treatment options to patients. Sinai is building the new facility to consolidate its outpatient cancer resources into one building at its Northwest Baltimore campus. The Sinai Hospital Cancer Center, designed by Wilmot Sanz of Rockville, is expected to be completed by 2025. “All the departments that will ultimately be in this building, are spread out throughout the whole campus right now,” said Rick Sasaki, a partner at Wilmot Sanz. “They want to bring all that together. So you can serve the patient a lot better, rather than having that patient traipse all around the hospital.”

Hood College’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program has been named No. 12 in the Washington metropolitan area and No. 9 in the state of Maryland by the Nursing Schools Almanac (NSA) in their 2022 yearly report. Hood recently announced an extended partnership with Frederick Health, which will establish dedicated space for the college’s department of nursing. The Hood nursing program has grown from 23 students during its inaugural semester in 2014 to having 149 nursing majors as of spring 2022, a growth of more than 500% over eight years. By the beginning of the fall 2022 semester, Hood expects to add 60 additional students to the program.

A new philanthropic project hopes to invest $100 million in 10 countries, mostly in Africa, by 2030 to support 200,000 community health workers, who serve as a critical bridge to treatment for people with limited access to medical care. The Skoll Foundation and The Johnson & Johnson Foundation announced Monday that they donated a total of $25 million to the initiative. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, which will oversee the project, matched the donations and hopes to raise an additional $50 million.