Luke Timmerman
Luke is an award-winning journalist specializing in life sciences. Before joining Xconomy, he was the U.S. biotechnology reporter for Bloomberg News, based in San Francisco. There, he led coverage of major medical meetings and broke news about the industry’s top companies. His stories appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and International Herald Tribune. Before that, his passionate coverage of biotechnology won many awards for The Seattle Times.
While at the Times, Luke was the lead reporter on an investigation of doctors who leaked confidential information about clinical trials to investors. The story won the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award, the Sigma Delta Chi prize from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers award, an honorable mention Gerald Loeb Award, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in public service. At Xconomy, he was honored in 2012 as a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award, and received a SABEW award for biotech columns.
Luke holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2005-2006, he was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. In his spare time, Luke enjoys running, mountaineering, and fantasy baseball. Having grown up in Wisconsin, he is, naturally, a lifelong fan of the Green Bay Packers and the Wisconsin Badgers.
Recent posts
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Developing the latest breakthrough drug just doesn’t pay these days as much as creating the hot new web app does.
Private life sciences companies in Silicon Valley that got financing in the... Read more »
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Plenty of places in the world are messed up, but Europe has been near the top of the list lately. If all the horrible scenarios play out, this will be the... Read more »
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OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals decided it needed to spend more money on the final stage of clinical trials for its prostate cancer drug, so today it went out and raised a lot more cash.
The... Read more »
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Merck made big news in San Diego yesterday when it said it is committing $90 million over seven years to a new nonprofit drug discovery shop led by chemist Peter Schultz.... Read more »
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Groove Biopharma, one of the edgy biotech startups at Seattle’s Accelerator, could have easily raised $20 million based on the scientific goals it reached last year. That almost certainly would have... Read more »
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[Update: 3/29/12 2:10 pm PT] Seattle has a lot of biotech talent, but not every major field of research is strong here, and I’d say it’s mostly an oncology, immunology,... Read more »
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Shire, the Dublin-based pharmaceutical company with operations in the Boston area, is paying $100 million upfront for a little San Francisco company seeking to help patients get rid of excessive amounts of... Read more »
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Leroy Hood‘s fledgling institute for personalized medicine struck its first big partnership with an academic medical center two years ago. Now it’s branching out to include some Northwest hospitals that... Read more »
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The pharmaceutical giant Merck bet big once before that San Diego would be a source for innovative new drugs, and now it’s doing it again.
Whitehouse Station, NJ-based Merck (NYSE: MRK) is... Read more »
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I’m no expert on video games, having only recently discovered the time-wasting phenomenon Angry Birds on my iPad. Like a lot of people, my general impression is that excessive use of video... Read more »
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Money may be the key fuel that drives biomedical research, but even if you’ve got money, it’s hard to get very far without good tissue samples. Now a group at Seattle Children’s... Read more »
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Omeros was battered a year ago when its lead drug candidate failed in the final stage of clinical trials, but today it is bouncing back as its second product in line passed... Read more »
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Everyone who has tried to discover new drugs has heard the one about looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack. At Seattle Genetics, they’ve already found one of the needles... Read more »
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There’s no shortage of ways to network in the San Francisco Bay Area’s biotech industry if your interest is in science, dealmaking, patents, finance, or some other specialty. But there was... Read more »
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There’s been a lot of talk in biotech lately about the need for reforms at the FDA, to make it run faster and more predictably. One idea is taking shape in... Read more »
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There’s some aggressive jockeying going on in the prostate cancer market, and today Vancouver, BC and Bothell, WA-based OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals made some moves that it hopes will keep its lead horse... Read more »
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[Updated: 11:20 am PT] Johnson & Johnson just delivered some encouraging news for prostate cancer patients that could end up being a boon for one of its competitors (San Francisco-based... Read more »
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We’re a little more than three weeks away from one of the biggest Seattle life sciences events of the year. Folks have been asking me about it lately, so I figure it’s time... Read more »
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Biogen Idec took heat for years from shareholders who accused it of bumbling in the R&D department. But a little over a year ago, the Weston, MA-based biotech company (NASDAQ: BIIB) brought... Read more »
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Seattle-based Oncothyreon saw its shares plummet today amid speculation among investors that its experimental lung cancer vaccine isn’t going to work.
Oncothyreon (NASDAQ: ONTY) shares fell 3.14 a share, or 37 percent,... Read more »
