Ryan McBride wrote:

Pilates is famous for shaping up peoples’ buttocks, tummies, and thighs. But what can the popularity of this fitness phenomenon and the market for health products do for investment portfolios? Cambridge, MA-based Lighter Living, which operates a health and fitness website that features Pilates expert and company founder Marjolein Brugman, has raised $3 million in an equity round of financing, according to an SEC filing.

Brugman, who appears to have pioneered an aerobic version of Pilates called AeroPilates, is listed in the regulatory filing as an executive and director of Lighter Living. There’s also a big name in venture investing involved with the firm: Michael Greeley, a founder and general partner of Boston-based venture firm Flybridge Capital Partners, who is listed as a director of Lighter Living. Neither Brugman nor Greeley was immediately available for comment this morning, but a spokeswoman for Flybridge confirmed that the firm is backing the company.

At first glance Lighter Living—which sells fitness and wellness products and offers health tips and insights from Brugman on its website—doesn’t seem like a typical bet for Greeley. However, he’s always told me that he is interested in businesses in which healthcare and information technology intersect. Previously, his interest in healthcare and IT has been manifest in investments he has led for Flybridge in companies such as Bedford, MA-based MicroCHIPS, a developer of micro-devices for medical uses, and business software firm BlueTarp Financial, of Portland, ME.

Yet Lighter Living does address a huge market demand for products that help people look and feel youthful, and there is an emerging trend of interest in this market among venture capitalists. Polaris Venture Partners is backing Cambridge, MA-based Living Proof, a provider of hair-care products based on advances in polymer science at MIT and other research institutions. Investments in the likes of Living Proof and Lighter Living could provide a boost for both consumers’ looks and venture portfolios’ outlooks.

Flybridge’s investment in Lighter Living is “building on [Brugman's] success in the healthy living market,” said Kate Castle, a spokeswoman for the venture firm. She said that Brugman has sold more than $500 million in healthy living products on the TV shopping channel QVC over the past 12 years.

Lighter Living is planning an official launch in 2010, Castle said.

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Dealmakers appear to be getting their business done before the week of Thanksgiving—because we’ve seen a decent stream of deal closings involving Boston-area life sciences and tech companies over the past week or so.

—Framingham, MA-based Punchbowl Software, which operates the party planning website MyPunchbowl.com, said it acquired technology assets of a group vacation website called I’m In. Punchbowl founder and CEO Matt Douglas provided details on why the transaction made sense for his startup.

—After months of operating quietly, seed-stage venture fund Founder Collective officially debuted last week. Eric Paley, a managing partner and co-founder of the firm, told us why he and other software entrepreneurs came together to form the new venture outfit, which has offices in Cambridge, MA and New York City. Here’s a hint: They were a bit frustrated with the status quo in the venture industry.

—Fate Therapeutics, the San Diego-based biotech startup focused on developing techniques that make stem cell research practical for the pharmaceutical industry, reeled in $30 million in a Series B round of venture financing. Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led the new round of investment in Fate, which was founded by top academics at Harvard University, Stanford University, The Scripps Research Institute, and the University of Washington.

—ImmunoGen (NASDAQ:IMGN), a Waltham, MA-based biotech firm, reported this week that the firm sold a second license to its technology—which is for linking targeted antibodies to cell-killing molecules—to industry giant Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN) for $1 million upfront, plus potential milestone payments.

—Corindus, a Natick, MA-based startup developing a robotic system for implanting vascular stents, collected $5.3 million of a planned $10 million in venture dollars, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

—Cambridge -based Ligon Discovery found $1 million in a seed round of financing from incTANK Ventures, with plans to validate its small molecule microarray system for drug discovery that was developed at Harvard. The company was founded by folks from Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

—We spotted Angus Davis, a co-founder of Microsoft’s voice-based Internet search subsidiary Tellme Networks, at Polaris Venture Partners’ Dogpatch Labs recently and wondered what he was up to. It looks like he’s been working on a new Providence, RI-based startup called Swipely, which quietly swept up a cool $1 million from First Round Capital.

—Jealous? Highland Capital Partners, the Lexington, MA-based venture powerhouse, closed its eighth fund, worth a whopping …Next Page »

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Natick, MA-based Corindus has corralled $5.3 million of a proposed $10 million round of equity financing, according to an SEC filing. The firm is developing a robotic system that helps surgeons control the position of guidewires in veins in procedures to implant vascular stents, according to the firm’s LinkedIn profile. A call to company CEO David Handler was not immediately returned today, and it’s not stated in the SEC filing who participated in the financing. Prior to this financing, the firm raised $12.8 million in a Series B financing in spring 2008, according to a story I wrote about the deal for Mass High Tech.

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Ligon Discovery reported today on its website that it has raised $1 milllion in seed financing from incTANK Ventures. The Cambridge, MA-based startup says it uses a small molecule microarray system developed at Harvard University to discover drugs, and the drug-discovery technology has already been put to work at the Broad Institute. The company founders include Benjamin Ebert of Harvard Medical School, Angela Koehler of the Broad Institute, and company CEO Patrick Kleyn, who was previously director of scientific planning at the Broad. As part of the financing, IncTank Ventures general partner Christian Bailey is joining the board of directors at Ligon, according to the company.

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Braemar Energy Ventures, a venture firm focused on investments in the cleantech sector, has named Jiong Ma a partner of the firm, according to a Mass High Tech report. She was previously a principal at the firm, which has offices in Boston and New York City, according to its website. Braemar’s portfolio includes such Boston-area cleantech companies as A123 Systems (NASDAQ:AONE), EnerNOC (Nasdaq:ENOC), and Verenium (NASDAQ:VRNM).

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Managing a venture fund is hugely different from running a startup. Eric Paley told me that last year at this time his primary responsibility was at dental imaging firm Brontes Technologies, the MIT spin-off that he co-founded and where he had served as general manager after its sale to technology giant 3M (NYSE:MMM) in 2006. Nowadays, as managing partner and co-founder of new seed fund Founder Collective, his much broader focus includes meetings with a whopping 30 entrepreneurs a week, he said.

Early this month Paley’s firm had an official launch after closing a first fund of about $40 million to invest in seed-stage startups, even though reports about the firm surfaced in June after its initial SEC filings became public knowledge. The firm is made up of a group of successful entrepreneurs who have been backing each other’s startups for ages before coming together as Founder Collective. David Frankel, the firm’s other managing partner along with Paley, was a seed investor in Brontes as well as partner Chris Dixon’s startups SiteAdvisor and Hunch, for example. Their experience as entrepreneurs who have raised venture capital and reached successful exits, along with their compelling investment strategy, could help them succeed in the struggling venture industry.

Founder Collective, which has offices in Cambridge, MA, and New York (where Frankel is based), is taking a much different tack than many funds have taken over the past decade. Paley says that the vast majority of funds closed over the past 10 years have been more than $100 million, while most of the funds were less than that in the previous decade. But the big knock on the venture industry is that it’s done a poor job of returning capital and returns commensurate with their risk profile to their limited partner investors. And large funds often aim to invest big amounts of capital ($10 million or more) in their portfolio companies, even when companies don’t really need that much money, Paley says. Founder Collective’s first fund is a lean $40 million or so, and that money is intended to be invested in capital-efficient businesses that aren’t taking on more investment capital than is needed to achieve their goals. Indeed, we’re seeing this movement toward smallish investments in lean teams, at least in software/tech, all around the country.

Another big downside of a startup raising more venture capital than it requires to execute its plan is the dilution of ownership for the entrepreneurs who founded the company. “We really created the fund out of frustration that there wasn’t a really good answer for the capital-efficient business in the early days to achieve major milestones and increase the value of the company before giving so much of it away to investors,” Paley said.

There are no banker-turned-venture capitalists at Paley’s shop. Many of the partners maintain operational roles at startups they’ve co-founded. Dixon, a founder of Web security firm SiteAdvisor (acquired by McAfee), is full-time CEO of his firm Hunch that provides an online decision-making tool. Also, Micah Rosenbloom, who co-founded Brontes with Paley, is now the general manager of the Brontes business for 3M. (Here’s a full list of the the Founder team on the firm’s website.)

The investment philosophy at Founder is to back startups led by committed entrepreneurs. And though Paley said the firm has no stated limits on sectors or geographic areas in which it invests, the firm will most likely invest, as it has done so far, in …Next Page »

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Swipely, a Providence, RI-based startup that was quietly launched earlier this year, has raised $875,000 of a planned $1 million equity financing, according to an SEC document filed last week. Angus Davis—a co-founder of the voice-based Internet search and services provider Tellme Networks, which was sold to Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and became a subsidiary of the Redmond, WA-based software giant in 2007—is listed as an executive and director of the startup. Davis told Mass High Tech in a story this morning that First Round Capital, of Philadelphia and San Francisco, led the financing in Swipely. He declined to describte to MHT, or when reached by phone this afternoon, what his startup is doing.

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Even more bad news from Genzyme (NASDAQ:GENZ). Following the news on Friday about new contamination found in treatments made at the Cambridge, MA-based biotech firm’s Allston, MA, plant, the company says today the FDA informed it that the agency won’t approve its application to market Pompe disease drug alglucosidase alfa (Lumizyme) made in large-scale batches until it addresses deficiencies at the facility.

Genzyme, which already has approval to make the drug in smaller bioreactors, said that it plans to request a meeting with the FDA to discuss what needs to be done to garner approval of the product made in larger containers. Meantime, the firm is making the drug in smaller batches under the name Myozyme. Genzyme plans to hold a conference call at 12 pm ET to discuss the FDA’s response.

The FDA is forcing Genzyme to get an additional approval of alglucosidase alfa—an enzyme replacement therapy for patients with rare lysosomal storage disorder—made in larger bioreactors because slight changes in manufacturing process such as the batch size can have an impact on the finished product. Back in April 2006, the treatment was the first of its kind approved for Pompe disease in the U.S., and it’s been one of Genzyme’s fastest-growing sellers. The company says that it needs approval of the treatment made in 4,000-liter batches at a factory in Belgium to meet global demand for the treatment. And this isn’t the only Genzyme drug in short supply. The company has experienced shortages of its top sellers, Cerezyme and Fabrazyme, after a viral contamination struck its Allston factory in June.

“We have made significant progress in bringing the Allston plant back in operation, and we will continue to work closely with the FDA to resolve these issues,” said Henri Termeer, Genzyme’s chairman and CEO, in a statement.

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Cambridge,MA-based biotech Alkermes said this morning that its long-acting naltrexone injection (Vivitrol) was more effective in treating opioid drug dependence than placebo in a Phase III clinical trial. The 250-patient clinical trial compared urine samples of patients who took the firm’s once-per-month injection of naltrexone versus those who took placebo over the last 20 weeks of a 24-week treatment period. Alkermes (NASDAQ:ALKS) said that it plans to file an application with the FDA for approval of its drug for treating opioid dependence in the first half of 2010. The FDA approved the drug for treating alcohol dependence in 2006.

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Robots have already found limited work in healthcare by assisting surgeons with operations and physical therapists with rehabilitating patients, among other jobs. So why can’t robots keep an eye on seniors and give them their medications?

Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) made headlines last month with the announcement of its recently created healthcare division, which is being headed by veteran software entrepreneur Tod Loofbourrow. The company’s ambitious plan is to develop a robot to help seniors live independently in their homes—something that no other company has accomplished. To learn more, I headed over to the firm’s headquarters last week.

The 7-year-old in me hoped to show up at iRobot and find the “medical droid” from Star Wars. But I knew not to expect to see such a humanoid robot, so I wasn’t disappointed when Loofbourrow told me that there were no healthcare robots to show me. Yet at one point during our interview, he flipped open his laptop and showed me a conceptual video of one of the company’s robots rolling over to an elderly person’s bedside and placing a bottle of pills on a side table. He said the video was intended to illustrate the company’s long-term vision for a healthcare robot, but the robot depicted was not a prototype of what the firm plans to market initially.

The senior citizen in the video, however, represented the first demographic iRobot aims to serve with a healthcare robot. There could be tremendous value in a robot that could help seniors live at home and avoid nursing homes, Loofbourrow explained, noting that the average nursing home in Massachusetts costs about $10,000 a month. Supporting patient care in the home may also help seniors avoid costly hospitalizations, which are a major factor in the whopping $2.4 trillion annual healthcare bill in the U.S. But the U.S. healthcare system hasn’t fully embraced using telemedicine—let alone robots—to enable patients to receive care in their homes.

Nevertheless, the leadership of iRobot decided that the time is right to launch a healthcare division, Loofbourrow said. The company has been interested in how its robots could be used to help patients for more than a decade. Indeed, company chairman and CEO Colin Angle told me back in 2006 that a robot for home healthcare was about three years from the market. And two years ago I spotted a concept robot the company developed called “CiCi” at a medical technology conference; an MIT robotics engineer told me for this Mass High Tech story that the stationary robot had two-way audio and remote-monitoring capabilities. Healthcare could eventually become a major business for iRobot, which already has succeeded in introducing robots like the Roomba for the household market and the PackBot for the military market.

“The company sees an opportunity to really transform a market,” Loofbourrow said. “So I’m here to build a very big business and a third leg of the stool for iRobot.”

Loofbourrow’s fascination with robotics dates back at least as far as his teenage years. As the Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner reported in his blog post last month, Loofbourrow was16 years old when he wrote a book called “How to Build a Computer-Controlled Robot” in the late-1970s. He explained that when he was a child, his father was an engineer at Bell Labs and their basement was filled with circuit boards and other parts for building robots. The robot he built around a single-board microprocessor featured voice recognition and ultrasonic navigation, he said.

The Harvard University graduate was most recently founder and CEO of Waltham, MA-based Authoria, a provider of talent management software that Loofbourrow grew into a $40 million annual business with more than 300 employees in the U.S., Europe, and India. He sold the company in 2008 to White Plains, NY-based Bedford Funding for …Next Page »

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Here’s an iPhone application that could actually help people save lives. Zoll Medical, a maker of cardiac defibrillators and other products for the critical care market, says this morning that it has released a CPR training app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

This isn’t the first iPhone app of this sort that I’ve seen—but it’s certainly the most advanced. Chelmsford, MA-based Zoll’s (NASDAQ:ZOLL) “PocketCPR” training app gives users visual and audio instructions on proper CPR technique, and the software makes use of the accelerometer built into iPhones to measure the rate of a person’s hand movements when he or she is performing simulated compressions on manikins. The app is selling for $5.99. (For free, iPhone users can download an app called iCPR, but it doesn’t make use of the accelerometer to provide real-time feedback on how well the user is performing CPR.)

There are way too many iPhone apps for us to cover each individual launch, but the CPR training apps are an important category because they address a major health problem. The American Heart Association estimates that about 294,851 Americans per year receive emergency medical treatment for heart attacks, and multiple sources estimate that there are more than 300,000 deaths from cardiac arrest in the U.S. each year. According to Zoll, 70 percent of people who suffer sudden cardiac arrest when they are with family members or acquaintances. It’s too bad most Americans aren’t properly trained to perform the potentially lifesaving measure.

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There’s new a dynamic at work in Big Pharma’s acquisitions of biotech companies in Boston and elsewhere. Drug companies don’t only want to buy biotech firms to enhance their R&D pipelines, they want to bring the innovators behind the biotechs into the fold—and often give them prominent roles in the parent company. (This is a change from the past practice of pharma buyers gutting biotechs post-acquisition.) So last week, we conducted exclusive video interviews with two biotech executives whose firms have been recently acquired by large pharmaceutical companies and who reflect the new era—Deborah Dunsire, CEO of Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company, and Christoph Westphal, CEO of Sirtris, a GSK company.

Both were brought into the Big Pharma fold last year (Dunsire became an employee of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company after the Japanese drug giant acquired Millennium for a whopping $8.8 billion last May, and Westaphal joined the ranks of GlaxoSmithKline in June 2008, when the British pharma powerhouse bought Sirtris for $720 million.) And both were given roles on the front lines of product innovation at their respective companies. So we asked both Dunsire and Westphal about what they think are the most exciting new therapeutic platforms in their industries, and what big drug-makers need to do to maintain their edge.

Not to give too much away, but both pointed to different technologies or platforms poised to transform their industries. Dunsire answered the second question with why she things Big Pharma is going to get smaller—and how that could be good for innovation. Westphal good-naturedly riffed on a comparison between the challenges faced by pharma and by journalism.

Both these interviews took place at last week’s Xconomy Forum: Pharma’s Bet on Boston Innovation in Cambridge, MA, where Dunsire and Westphal gave keynote addresses. But before you watch the videos, here’s my disclaimer: I’m a writer, so please remember that when you’re listening to the stammering interviewer (me) who is (thankfully) off camera. Also, give ample credit to the man behind the video camera, our own Richard Freierman, whose job title at Xconomy is business manager (but who obviously does much more than make sure the lights stay on.) Finally, please forgive all the background noise with Dunsire’s video. While we spoke with Westphal before the event got going, the party was in full swing (as you can hear) when we caught up with the Millennium CEO.

Deborah Dunsire

Christoph Westphal

Please let us know what you think about these videos, and how we could make such interviews better in the future.

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Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge, MA-based developer of RNA-interference drugs, said today that it sees a new business opportunity in using its gene-silencing technology to increase the output of biomanufacturing processes. The company, which has already successfully licensed its RNAi technology for drugs, is looking to make additional money from its science by licensing it for manufacturing many types of biotech drugs.

The company (NASDAQ:ALNY) is presenting data today at its R&D day in New York that support the use of RNAi to silence certain genes in Chinese hamster ovary cells, which are used in biomanufacturing. Alnylam’s data show that the RNAi technology improved the viability of the cells by 40 to 60 percent, compared with untreated cells. The firm used RNAi to switch off certain genes that control metabolism in the cells, as well as genes involved in a cellular self-destruct mechanism.

An internal group at the company called Alnylam Biotherapeutics is advancing the application of RNAi technology in biomanufacturing. The firm, which plans to retain ownership of this use of the technology, says it could improve the production of existing biotech drugs, new biologics, and copies of biological treatments, known as “biosimilars” or “biogenerics.”

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Dossia is nearly three years from launching to provide electronic personal health records for major U.S. employers. And though the vision to provide employees of self-insured companies with a secure and portable electronic record of their health information is still alive, so far one company is offering the records to its workers.

The Cambridge, MA-based organization, which operates as a nonprofit, had a well-publicized launch in December 2006 and the support of founding members Applied Materials, BP America, Intel, Pitney Bowes, and Wal-Mart. The hope was, and still is, that the personal electronic records would lower healthcare costs and improve health of users. But only one of the 10 major U.S. employers that have pledged to support the development of Dossia’s health records system, Wal-Mart, has actually adopted the technology for its workers and their dependents.

Dossia has recently solidified its leadership team recently as it takes steps to drive further adoption of the personal health record system, which is based on the Indivo personal health platform (PHP) developed at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Colin Evans, Dossia’s president and CEO, was put on the payroll last month, having previously served the nonprofit outfit while technically an employee of the digital health group of computer chip giant Intel. Evans’ former Intel colleague, Steve Munini, the chief operating officer of Dossia, has also transitioned from Intel’s to Dossia’s payroll.

Evans said last week that he expects Intel, where the idea for Dossia originated, to open the personal health record system to its employees in early 2010. A total of four other founding employers will be ready to deploy the system within the next three months, he says. “My major goal is to get everybody from the founder group to get implemented,” Evans said. There are now only tens of thousands of users of the Dossia record system today, most of them employees of Wal-Mart, which deployed the system for its workers in fall 2008, he said.

Why haven’t the other corporate members adopted the technology? “They really want to see Wal-Mart …Next Page »

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Sanofi-Aventis (NYSE: SNY) hosted a large event at its R&D site in Cambridge, MA, yesterday to make its pitch for why Boston-area biotech companies should want to form partnerships with the French drug giant. It was an impressive show of force by the company, which has historically kept a lower profile in local biotech circles than some of its Big Pharma competitors.

The top brass from Sanofi were there at the firm’s Cambridge Research Center in Kendall Square. Sanofi CEO Chris Viehbacher outlined the global drug-maker’s plans to form stronger ties with biotech firms in Boston and around the world as part of a broader strategy to build a more sustainable business. Viehbacher also confirmed that Sanofi plans to form a venture capital unit to invest in biotech companies and further efforts to access innovation from outside of the company.

Sanofi, like many other Big Pharma companies, is looking outside of its organization to biotech firms for what Viehbacher called the “right brain activity” that leads to creativity and innovation. Sanofi’s shift toward more external product development efforts includes a partnership deal with Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, announced last month, focused on the Cambridge, MA-based biotech’s experimental antibody drug for cancer. There’s a good reason for this: the large and expensive internal R&D organizations of Big Pharma companies like Sanofi haven’t been productive enough. Over the next several years Sanofi is facing patent expirations on some of its biggest sellers, such as anti-clotting drug clopidogrel bisulfate (Plavix) and the sleeping pill zolpidem (Ambien).

“We all know there is a patent cliff in this industry, and it goes from 2012 to 2014,” Viehbacher said. “But my goal isn’t just to fill a sales gap,” it’s to build a sustainable business. (Viehbacher spoke to Xconomy at length in June about his strategy for building sustainable business at Sanofi.)

Sanofi has been in Massachusetts for more than a decade, but the company has been less active in partnering with biotechs in the state than other Big Pharma outfits. The company conducts a wide variety of genomic research at its Cambridge Research Center on Albany Street, and last year the firm expanded its presence in the state with its acquisition of British vaccine developer Acambis, which has operations in Cambridge and Canton, MA. This year the company has formed alliances with …Next Page »

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We spotted three New England startups today that have recently filed papers with the SEC to report new rounds of equity financing. Other than their common geographic ties to region, it’s tough to see any relationship among these firms. But here’s a brief synopsis of the deals and what each company does:

—Waltham, MA-based Affectiva reports it has raised $1.7 million of a planned $2 million round of equity financing. This spinout of the MIT Media Lab is developing a biosensor, called the “Q,” that is designed to “measure and communicate emotional arousal” of the person wearing it, according to the firm’s website. The company says that it grew out of a collaboration at MIT to find ways to help people with varying degrees of autism. Rosalind Picard, the director of the Affective Computing Research Group at MIT, is listed as a director and executive of the company. (These filings don’t list investors in the companies.)

—Meanwhile, Westford, MA-based Aylus Networks, previously backed by Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners, reported raising $5.7 million out of a planned round of about $9.3 million. The company, formed in 2005 by wireless entrepreneur Shamim Naqvi, seeks to enable rich data communications such as video telephony, video blogging, video sharing, and social networking for mobile operators.

—Have you found yourself willing to shell out gobs of cash on your pet’s drugs? I have, and I’m sure many other people have, too. Putney, a Portland, ME-based provider of specialty drugs for the veterinary market, reports that it has raised $6.6 million of a proposed $6.8 million round of equity financing. The company—which was founded in 2006 by pharmaceutical entrepreneur and CEO Jean Hoffman—says that it plans to double the size of its staff, revenues, deals, and more in 2010. (I’ve got a guess as to how the new capital will be spent.)

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PureTech Ventures says it has swelled its ranks with another Big Pharma veteran. John LaMattina, former president of global research and development at Pfizer, has joined the Boston-based venture firm as senior partner. PureTech has also promoted previous firm associates Eric Elenko and Steve Muniz to partner.

LaMattina—who retired from New York-based Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) in December 2007 after 30 years with the company—adds deep drug-development experience to PureTech. He’s even written a book on the topic of Pharma research and development called “Drug Truths: Dispelling the Myths About Pharma R&D.” His experience could have a major impact at PureTech, where partners and advisors use their experience to identify medical needs and then found companies to address those needs. (Many of our readers also know PureTech as the founding venture firm behind Follica, the developer of therapies to re-grow hair and treat baldness.)

PureTech has been known to recruit from the ranks of Big Pharma to lead its ventures or advise the firm on big opportunities in healthcare. For example, the firm previously recruited Eliot Forster, the former head of European R&D at Pfizer, to be CEO of its Cambridge, MA-based portfolio company Solace Pharmaceuticals. And PureTech’s own team includes Frank Douglas, another senior partner, who is the former chief scientific officer of drug giant Aventis (now Sanofi-Aventis). LaMattina, in fact, told me in an e-mail that one of the first things that caught his attention about PureTech was its track record in recruiting talented pharmaceutical executives.

“I was impressed by [PureTech’s] non-traditional model,” LaMattina told me. “Rather than wait for start-ups to come to them for funding, PureTech looks to key areas of medical need where they would like to invest, seeks out experts in that field, and does extensive research into where the next key breakthrough can be made.” (He noted that his early impression of the firm was also helped by the fact that this friend and former Pfizer colleague, Jeff Ives, is the CEO of PureTech portfolio company Satori Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge. He also mentioned Forster.)

Daphne Zohar, founder and managing partner of PureTech, said in a statement that LaMattina brings to the firm both his large network of industry and scientific contacts and his expertise in translating innovative technologies into products.

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[Updated and corrected---8:30 pm ET on 11/05/09]Marlboro, MA-based Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ:ESLR) said it will move its solar panel production from Massachusetts to China—dealing a blow to the clean technology economy in the commonwealth.

Evergreen plans to begin migrating the manufacturing of solar panels out of its Devens, MA, plant to a facility under construction in Wuhan, China, in mid-2010, the company announced in an earnings statement on Wednesday. A lull in demand for solar cells globally and other factors have caused the price of solar panels like the ones that Evergreen makes to plunge by more than 30 percent since mid-2008, when its Devens production facility opened, the firm said. However, the company said it does plan to continue producing its silicon wafers and cells in Devens. It will also produce the silicon wafers in China beginning next year.

An Evergreen spokesman was not immediately available for comment this afternoon, and it was unclear how relocating panel production would impact its work force in Massachusetts.

Manufacturing in China is intended to reduce overall production costs, and Evergreen said it is receiving a $33 million loan from Chinese government to help cover the expenses of moving into a new plant that the company will lease from a contract manufacturing firm called Jiawei Solar. Evergreen’s move may sting some Massachusetts politicians and taxpayers; the state committed $23 million in grants to the firm, behind considerable support from Gov. Deval Patrick and his administration, to support its manufacturing in Devens. And Ian Bowles, the state’s secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said in a statement about two years ago when construction of the Devens plant began that “we are breaking ground not only on a factory, but on the commonwealth’s clean energy future.”

Evergreen said it will manufacture its “String Ribbon” wafers at the facility it is building and will own in China, and that the wafers will then be sent to the the plant that its partner Jiawei Solar is building to convert the wafers into solar cells, which are used to make solar panels. The worldwide solar panel market has taken a beating over the past year or so due to reduced government spending or subsidies for the products in Spain and Germany, both of which are big solar panel users, as well as lower-than-projected demand in other countries such as the U.S., according to a recent report by Lux Research, which has an office in Boston. [Editor's note: the above paragraph was corrected to say that Evergreen, not its Chinese manufacturing partner, will build and own the facility where its silicon wafers will be produced in China. There are also added details from the company about the overall production process.]

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It was an inspiring afternoon yesterday at Xconomy’s latest event, “Pharma’s Bet on Boston Innovation,” in Cambridge, MA. Local industry pioneers such as Millennium CEO Deborah Dunsire and Sirtris CEO Christoph Westphal talked about how game-changing technologies and sound business strategies have attracted big pharmaceutical outfits to invest in their respective companies.

Our speakers also offered insightful perspectives from within their organizations, including AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Novartis, and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Boston-based Enlight Biosciences used our venue to break the news about its recent partnership with healthcare powerhouse Abbott Laboratories. One corporate venture investor from a pharma company likened the returns of her fund to “pocket lint” relative to the revenue of the overall company, but said the corporate venture unit is important to the company’s ability to access innovative science. And Westphal even speculated that our own Luke Timmerman is a “SIRT1 over-expresser” because his genes help him stay thin despite his high-calorie diet. (Laugh if you want, but Sirtris’ deep understanding of genes, like SIRT1, that control aging and cellular metabolism helped the Cambridge, MA-based biotech get sold to Glaxo for $720 million in June 2008.)

A recurring theme throughout the day was that big pharmas and innovative biotechs need each other. Generally speaking, large pharmaceutical companies haven’t created enough innovative products over the past decade to justify their huge internal R&D budgets. But biotech has continued to push the envelope to transform risky science into drugs, providing a source of new products to fill pharmaceutical companies’ ailing R&D pipelines. We heard from executives from such local biotech firms as Aileron Therapeutics, Aveo Pharmaceuticals, Hydra Biosciences, and Enlight Biosciences about how relationships with pharma companies are bankrolling their drug-development activities. (Here’s a link to a list of all the speakers who were on the agenda yesterday.)

Our audience of life sciences innovators helped us pack the 16th-floor ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Cambridge. But for all of you who weren’t able to attend the forum, here are seven key insights from our speakers and panelists:

—Raise lots of money when you can. It’s true that the financing climate in 2004, when Sirtris launched, was completely different from the stingier one today. But Westphal—whose company raised $104 million in private financing before its $69 million IPO in May 2007—aggressively raised capital beginning with a $5 million seed round in August 2004. While raising funds for the seed financing, Westphal understood that there was competition among the venture investors such as Polaris Venture Partners (where he is a former general partner). “The VC guys were all mad because they thought they could do it themselves,” he said. Given the high interest from the venture community, Westphal quickly raised $11 million more from investors in September 2004—just a month after closing the seed round.

—Build it boldly, and pharma will come. Huw Nash, vice president of corporate development at Aileron, knows something about drawing interest from Big Pharma. His Cambridge-based company in June raised $40 million in a financing that included the venture units of Eli Lilly, Glaxo, Novartis, and Roche, as well as traditional venture and angel investors. A big part of the allure at Aileron is the company’s “stapled peptide” drugs that have the potential to home in on thousands of different molecular disease targets not reached by previous treatments. (Read Luke’s story about Aileron for a deeper explanation of its novel platform.) “This is the type of solution that [pharmaceutical firms] need to really open the door to a completely new growth opportunity,” said Nash.

—Pharmaceutical companies want to …Next Page »

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Konarka Technologies, the Lowell, MA-based developer of flexible materials that convert light into electricity, is showing how everyday items like handbags and umbrellas can be turned into power generators. But the eight-year-old firm will need to collect a lot more juice before it can become a commercial success.

The company—which has raised $150 million from private investors—has revealed at least five new partners or customers over the past year who are integrating the firm’s so-called “Power Plastic” into such products as handbags that store solar energy to recharge electronic devices and patio umbrellas that provide electricity for laptops and the like. The latest deal was an agreement revealed last week in which Enviromena Power Solutions, of the United Arab Emirates, is evaluating the materials for use in shade structures used in deserts. And last month the firm hit the one-year anniversary of the opening of its 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in New Bedford, MA. Yet many of the products into which its solar materials are being integrated remain in development, and actual production activities haven’t gone into full swing in New Bedford.

Konarka makes photovoltaic modules from organic polymers rather than silicon or other traditional semiconductors, putting it on the cutting edge of solar cell development. Its materials are unusual in the solar business because they’re not marketed for use in standard solar panels on roofs, which typically are made from cheaper, more efficient substances, such as polycrystalline silicon. The firm’s products, however, are lightweight and flexible enough to be used on the outer surfaces of products such as bags and canopies and umbrellas.

Still, the jury is out about whether the appeal of such products will be powerful enough to convert privately held Konarka into a profitable business. There’s a continuous effort at the company to make its organic photovoltaics more efficient at converting light into electricity and to make them last longer than the current shelf life of three to five years. Meantime, the company’s West Coast rival, El Monte, CA-based startup Solarmer Energy, says that it has developed the most efficient organic solar cells in the world. And industry reports indicate that multi-national corporations with deeper pockets than Konarka and Solarmer have entered the fray in developing organic photovoltaics.

“Long-shot is a very good word for” companies like Konarka and Solarmer, said Johanna Schmidtke, an analyst for Lux Research, which recently completed a report that described all the leading developers of organic photovoltaics (sometimes called OPVs) as long-shots for success. “Whether or not they succeed in the long term is still …Next Page »

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