Veracyte has been gaining momentum the past few months with a new molecular diagnostic for thyroid cancer, and today it’s taking another step ahead by forming an alliance with Genzyme, the maker of a common drug for treating the disease.

South San Francisco-based Veracyte said today that it has formed a global co-promotion deal with Genzyme, the Cambridge, MA-based unit of Sanofi, in which the bigger company will start marketing Veracyte’s Afirma test. Financial terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed.

Veracyte, which was featured here in November, has been selling a gene expression test over the past year to help doctors determine when a lump in the thyroid gland is benign, or potentially malignant. Almost 500,000 suspicious thyroid lumps get biopsied in pathology labs every year, and about 20 to 30 percent of those tests offer “inconclusive” results. Fearing the worst, many of those patients go on to have surgery to remove their thyroid glands at a cost of about $12,000 to $16,000 apiece, plus a lifetime of thyroid hormone medications.

Veracyte’s proposition to doctors is that by doing a standard fine-needle biopsy test, and paying $3,500 for Veracyte to perform its Afirma gene expression analysis, they can rule out malignancies early in the game. That is supposed to cut down on unnecessary surgeries, and save insurers some money. Earlier this month, a Medicare contractor that covers 40 million people said it has agreed to cover the test.

Genzyme has long had interest in the thyroid cancer field, through its marketing of thyrotropin alfa (Thyrogen). “Together, our products offer patients and physicians a powerful personalized medicine solution for the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid cancer, addressing an unmet need in the community and improving patient outcomes,” said Genzyme’s head of rare diseases, Rogerio Vivaldi, in a statement.

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Chris Viehbacher has seen plenty of ideas come and go from people trying to shake up the pharma R&D model. No matter how much people have tried to fix things, it still takes a notorious amount of time, money, and risk to create new drugs.

Now, as the CEO of Paris-based Sanofi (NYSE: SNY), Viehbacher is blowing up the traditional R&D model at a huge, 110,000-employee company. Last year’s big strategic move was the acquisition of Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme, which gave Sanofi a lot more biotech products and expertise. Since then, Sanofi has done what a lot of other pharma companies have done—made cutbacks on its own internal research. And now the company is setting aside an increasing percentage of its $6.5 billion-a-year R&D budget for bets on collaborators doing edgy scientific work in universities and at biotech companies.

I sat down to interview Viehbacher last week at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, where we talked about the Sanofi R&D plan, and how the company can help support biomedical innovation more broadly outside its corporate walls. Here are excerpts from the interview, edited for length and clarity.

On Sanofi’s outreach strategy with U.S. researchers, particularly in the Boston area following the Genzyme acquisition:

One of the main rationales for doing the Genzyme deal was to have a strong presence in research in the U.S., and clearly the first choice is Cambridge. Our vision for research is one of open collaboration. How companies do research is evolving, and certainly we are evolving. Traditionally, we’ve had big research centers, and we are trying to get a lot more balance between internal research and external research. Right now, it’s about a 70/30 ratio between internal to external. My objective is to bring that to about a 50/50 balance.

That fits with a number of trends in research. First, there’s a lot of funding for new ideas drying up as venture capital is leaving biotech. Second, is that as we look for innovation, we look for where people are doing basic science experiments that are defining causes of diseases. What you are seeing is that a number of people in the value chain of research are specializing. Not everybody is trying to do everything.

In Cambridge, you’ve got all those things. Being the No. 1 life sciences employer in Boston is great, but we didn’t want to just do the same thing we did everywhere else, having everybody inside our walls. So we created this concept of a hub. There’s a core, with a lot of competencies that a big organization can bring, but the idea of a hub is that we can manage the relationships we have with everybody from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to Harvard to MIT to the Joslin Diabetes Center to some of the biotechs we work with. And we put our own oncology research team in Cambridge. There’s a whole ecosystem in Boston, and we feel integrated and at the center of it.

On joining Third Rock Ventures and Greylock Partners in a $125 million financing of a new startup called Warp Drive Bio:

The Warp Drive Bio project is interesting because it demonstrates where we want to go. It was certainly an unusual deal for Sanofi, because essentially what we’ve done is jointly fund a startup biotech company. It was very much on the basis of saying we want to work with (Harvard University chemical biologist) Greg Verdine. Someone like that isn’t going to come work for Big Pharma, but we liked the science he was doing. We have a strong interest and expertise in natural products, and he had a genomics screening tool.

We will contribute expertise. I don’t want to be a venture capitalist, or have a venture fund, like some other companies do. But I want to actually partner, where we bring some of what we know, and combine it with what Warp Drive has. The fact that we are trying to bring people from Sanofi into the collaboration, at such an early stage of research, is unusual. The single factor for success will be whether you can take a company like Warp Drive, with a handful of people, and make it work with an organization of 110,000 people without smothering it.

On how Sanofi hopes to change traditional university/industry collaboration templates:

We have some interesting partnerships with UCSF, in diabetes, brain trauma, and oncology. When you look at UCSF, we are trying to do true collaborations. Sometimes you look at academic collaborations and it’s essentially outsourcing a true piece of the research. That’s not … Next Page »

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On Thursday, Amicus Therapeutics CEO John Crowley will join the long procession of biotech executives making presentations at one of the industry’s most important gatherings, the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. But Crowley does have one claim to fame that makes him stand out from the crowd: He’s the only biotech CEO whose early career was portrayed in a glitzy Hollywood movie. And that film, Extraordinary Measures starring Harrison Ford, focused on one of the illnesses Amicus is tackling—Pompe disease, an enzyme-related muscle disorder that two of Crowley’s three children have. “That’s what got me into the biotech field,” Crowley (pictured at right) told Xconomy a few weeks before the JP Morgan event.

Like the others speaking at the event, Crowley will have a short 25 minutes to make his pitch to investors, Wall Street analysts, and fellow executives. His goal, in brief, is to build confidence in the company’s pipeline, which includes a drug that Amicus is testing in combination with alglucosidase alfa (Myozyme)—the Genzyme treatment for Pompe that Crowley famously helped develop and that his own children take.

Amicus’ investors will surely be looking for signs of hope. Shares of Amicus (NASDAQ: FOLD), which is based in Cranbury, NJ, dropped 43 percent to $3.44 in the nine months ended December 30. That was a time filled with “some measure of instability,” Crowley says, primarily because it took longer than expected for Amicus to enroll patients in a key clinical trial of a drug it’s developing for a second rare disease, called Fabry.

Before we delve into Amicus, though, let’s briefly review the Hollywood-worthy events leading up to Crowley’s tenure there. In 2000, Crowley, a Harvard-trained MBA, left a management position at New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb to help start Novazyme, an Oklahoma City-based company founded by a scientist working on a Pompe treatment. They sold Novazyme to Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme in 2001 for $137.5 million and Crowley became chief of Genzyme’s Pompe program. (If you’re not impressed yet, consider that Crowley is also a graduate of Notre Dame law school and a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve.)

Genzyme won approval for alglucosidase alfa in 2006. Crowley’s children, Meghan and Patrick, who were put on the drug in 2003 as part of a clinical trial, are still on it and doing well in the 9th and 8th grades, respectively, Crowley says. His family’s experience inspired a Wall Street Journal story, and later, a book called The Cure. Then Harrison Ford optioned the rights to the story, which led to the movie, starring Brendan Fraser as Crowley and Ford as a prickly (and fictional) scientist who worked on an enzyme treatment for Pompe.

What attracted Crowley to Amicus was the opportunity to make Genzyme’s treatment for Pompe—and drugs for related disorders—even more effective. Pompe and Fabry are among about 50 inherited, often fatal disorders that occur when the enzyme-making machinery in the body’s cells malfunction, causing them to make too little of a particular enzyme, or to make a “misfolded,” or unstable, version of it. Genzyme’s treatment is one of a number of enzyme replacement therapies designed to fix those deficiencies.

Amicus was founded in 2002 on a technology developed at Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. The technology yields small molecules that attach themselves to the defective enzymes, stabilize them, then transport them to the part of the cell where they need to go in order to … Next Page »

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When New York hedge fund manager John Taylor co-founded Inspiration Biopharmaceuticals in 2004, his main goal was to help his son, who suffers from the blood-clotting disorder hemophilia. So he and co-founder Scott Martin—a Texan who also has a child with hemophilia—set up a virtual biotech company and began pursuing new treatments for the disease. They were a far-flung group: Their chief scientist, for example, was based in Laguna Niguel, CA. “When you’re 12 people in 18 different labs and universities, the lines of communication get difficult,” says Taylor, who is the CEO and founder of FX Concepts, a New York-based hedge fund and foreign exchange management company. “I used to joke that we were a biotech company with no running water.”

As of January 1, Inspiration has gone non-virtual, and yes, it has plenty of running water. The company has moved into its new home at One Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA, where it’s under the tutelage of former Genzyme executive John Butler, who became CEO of Inspiration in October. The company expects to expand its staff from 60 to 100 by the end of 2012 and to file for FDA approval of its lead hemophilia compound in the first half of the year. On December 22, Inspiration announced four new executives had joined the company, two of whom also came from Genzyme.

The access to so much biotech expertise was key for Inspiration, Taylor says. “Massachusetts is a spectacular place to be when you’re in the hemophilia business,” he says.

Inspiration’s lead compound, IB1001, is a form of “recombinant factor IX,” a bioengineered protein that helps blood to clot properly. It is not the only version of the protein to be developed: Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) markets factor IX under the brand name BeneFIX. But, says Inspiration CEO Butler, that product has sometimes been in short supply, and its cost can be prohibitive to … Next Page »

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Seattle-based NanoString Technologies has made a big bet that the future of the company depends on turning its genetic analysis research tool into a diagnostic workhorse. Today, it presented some hard data that suggests it is on its way.

The company reported today that its instrument, called nCounter, was able to predict whether or not women with early-stage breast cancer were likely to have a recurrence in the future, by looking at an array of 50 genes known as the PAM50 signature. The information went beyond the usual 21-gene analysis done by Redwood City, CA-based Genomic Health (NASDAQ: GHDX). While some women get clear information today from Genomic Health about when they are at “low” or “high” risk of recurrence, doctors and patients often are confused about how aggressive they should be with chemotherapies when the results put patients into the “intermediate” risk group. NanoString’s tool could prove valuable because it classified fewer patients in the “intermediate” risk category.

The findings for the NanoString study were presented today in front of several thousand people at a plenary session of the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

NanoString CEO Brad Gray

“This is one of the single most important events in NanoString’s history, along with the launch of our first commercial system,” says Brad Gray, NanoString’s CEO, when reached by phone at the conference. “It really validates we can develop diagnostics on the nCounter, and that our first product is likely to be a significant one.”

NanoString, a spinoff from the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, introduced the first commercial version of its tool in the summer of 2008, for research purposes only. The technology provides scientists with a digital readout on the extent to which genes are dialed on or off in a sample—what’s known as gene expression analysis. The tool has gained popularity the past couple years with academic customers, especially those at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, because of its ability to help spot patterns in complex diseases like cancer where 50 or 100 genes might be perturbed instead of just one.

But the research market has its limits, and NanoString has been thinking big about the diagnostic potential for the nCounter. In October, the company introduced a second-generation product that’s supposed to have 50 percent higher bandwidth (known as throughput in the genetics business); more flexible software for analyzing the data from the instrument; and hardware that is manufactured in line with more rigorous, consistent diagnostic industry standards. Last month, the company raised $20 million in venture capital from a syndicate that includes GE Healthcare and former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer, to help pursue its diagnostic opportunity.

NanoString’s vision is to challenge Genomic Health directly, with a different kind of business model, Gray says. While Genomic Health runs its sophisticated 21-gene analysis at a centralized lab that doctors ship samples to, NanoString envisions selling instruments to labs around the world so … Next Page »

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Clinical data, startup financings, and collaborations, oh my. It’s been a busy New England life sciences news week.

—Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme revealed that its experimental multiple sclerosis treatment, alemtuzumab (Lemtrada), significantly reduced relapses and disability in a Phase 3 trial where it was tested head-to-head against Rebif, a form of interferon sold by EMD Serono and Pfizer. The drug from Sanofi’s Genzyme reduced relapse rates by 49 percent and reduced the risk of worsening disability by 42 percent.

—Lexington, MA-based Avaxia Biologics recently announced a $2.2 million investment led by Cherrystone Angels in Providence, RI, with participation from Boston Harbor Angels and undisclosed individual investors. Avaxia is developing an anti-inflammatory drug by inoculating pregnant cows and collecting antibodies from their milk.

—Third Rock Ventures, Frazier Healthcare Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners led a $15 million Series A investment in Allena Pharmaceuticals of Newton, MA. The startup, whose team comes from the now Eli Lilly-owned biotech Alnara, is working on enzyme-based oral treatments for kidney and urologic diseases.

–Agios Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge took in $78 million in an oversubscribed Series C financing. The money comes from existing investors Arch Venture Partners, Flagship Ventures, and Third Rock Ventures, and Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG), who Agios has been collaborating with on developing cancer-starving drugs.

—Speaking of drug collaborations, Cambridge-based Aileron Therapeutics expanded a partnership it first inked with Roche in 2010. The two companies had been working on turning Aileron’s “stapled peptide” technology into cancer treatments in two programs, and announced this week that they would add a third, focused on inflammatory diseases.

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Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme, owned by French drug giant Sanofi (NYSE: SNY) said today its experimental drug to treat multiple sclerosis, alemtuzumab (Lemtrada), reduced relapse rates by 49 percent and dropped the risk of of sustained worsening of disabilities by 42 percent in patients treated in a pivotal, Phase 3 trial. The drug was tested in a head-to-head trial against a form of interferon sold under the brand name Rebif by EMD Serono and Pfizer (NYSE: PFE). Genzyme plans to file for FDA approval of the drug in the first quarter of 2012, and it will be reviewed in an expedited manner by the FDA, which has granted it “fast track” status.

Genzyme scientists are particularly encouraged by how long-lasting the drug’s effects are proving to be. In the trial, one group of patients received alemtuzumab as a daily IV injection for five days, but then didn’t receive any medication for a year, at which point they were given the drug again for three days. The patients in the comparator group, by contrast, had to take interferon “subcutaneously” (injected under the skin) three times a week throughout the two-year trial period. “The contrast is obvious,” says Michael Panzara, therapeutic area head for multiple sclerosis, immune diseases, and neurology for Genzyme. “Even though our drug is active for a short period of time, the change it creates in the immune environment persists.” Panzara points out that in a previously reported five-year trial, patients only got two courses of alemtuzumab, but its efficacy lasted for the entire duration of the trial.

Alemtuzumab is an antibody that works by targeting a protein on cell surfaces called CD52. Genzyme’s research suggests that the drug depletes the T and B cells believed to be responsible for cell damage in MS. “When the cells come back, they are different,” Panzara says, “and we believe that leads to the prolonged effect.”

Patients in the trial suffered from a form of the disease called relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, and they had previously failed to respond to other therapies. Patients with this type of MS suffer episodes of weakness, sensory changes, severe fatigue, and other symptoms that “cause neurological deficits that do not go away,” Panzara says. “It knocks them out of work, it limits their ability to interact with their children.”

David Meeker, who became CEO of the Genzyme unit on November 1, believes the efficacy and dosing regimen offered by alemtuzumab in the trial are unprecedented. “This trial focuses on a population of patients who are underserved,” he says. “They continued to progress on other therapies. We’re confident we will be able to offer a highly differentiated offering for these patients.”

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This week’s roundup of New England deals includes companies working on vocal cord repair, cancer stem cells, database software, IT services, and drug counterfeiting prevention.

—Prolific MIT professor and inventor Bob Langer is working on a new project with a Harvard University surgeon that’s aiming to repair damaged vocal cords. The vibrating gel they’re developing has attracted funding from The Who’s lead singer Roger Daltrey, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, and actress Julie Andrews, and could help treat aging singers as well as throat cancer patients.

—Verastem, a Cambridge, MA-based developer of treatments focused on cancer stem cells, has filed for an initial public offering after just 15 months in business. The startup—founded on the science of MIT’s Bob Weinberg and Eric Lander and led by biotech entrepreneur Christoph Westphal—is looking to raise $50 million in the IPO.

—Basho Technologies, a Cambridge-based database software maker, raised $5 million in new funding from its existing equity holders. And Waltham, MA-based Innocentive, whose collaboration software platform has roots at Eli Lilly, bumped its most recent funding round up to $5.1 million.

—Henri Termeer, former CEO of Cambridge-based Genzyme, joined the investor syndicate of Seattle-based NanoString Technologies, a startup developing a diagnostic tool to better enable personalized medicine. NanoString collected a $20 million Series D investment from Termeer, GE Healthcare, BioMed Ventures, Clarus Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and OVP Venture Partners.

—MindShift Technologies, a Waltham-based provider of cloud, data center, and other IT services for businesses, was acquired for $167 million by Best Buy (NASDAQ: BBY). The retailer said the acquisition helps it expand its IT services offerings for small and mid-sized businesses. MindShift, meanwhile, will keep its name, leadership team, and all 500 employees.

—-Late last month, Lebanon, NH-based PharmaSecure raised $3.9 million in a round of funding led by Innovation Endeavors—the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—with participation from Gray Ghost Ventures, Healthtech Capital and TEEC Angel Fund. My colleague Arlene took a closer look at the four-year-old startup, which is developing drug packaging technology to prevent counterfeiting in markets like India.

—Newton, MA-based Zeo, a maker of sleep management technology, raised $1 million of a debt-based offering that could hit $4 million, an SEC filing showed. This September the startup expanded its sleep coaching system to a mobile app.

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NanoString Technologies has pulled in another $20 million to capitalize on its genetic analysis instrument for researchers, and to pursue the lofty goal of creating a workhorse diagnostic tool that enables more personalized medicines.

The Seattle-based company is announcing today it has raised $20 million in its Series D venture financing, which includes new investors GE Healthcare, BioMed Ventures, and Henri Termeer, the former CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme. NanoString’s existing investors, Clarus Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and OVP Venture Partners, also participated. Founded in 2003 with a technology license from the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, NanoString has now raised a total of $67 million in its history.

The investment from GE is the industrial heavyweight’s first as part of a new five-year, $1 billion R&D initiative to beef up its cancer diagnostic and molecular imaging capabilities. The technology it’s betting on provides scientists with a digital readout on the extent to which genes are dialed on or off in a sample-what’s known as gene expression analysis. The tool has gained popularity the past couple years with academic customers, especially those at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, because of its ability to help spot patterns in complex diseases like cancer where 50 or 100 genes might be perturbed instead of just one.

Once researchers identify more of these complex signatures, and learn what they mean to various types of cancer, NanoString says its machine could help physicians craft individualized strategies about what types of drugs to use, and how aggressive to be, with individual patients.

“I think we could end up being as big a molecular diagnostic company as there is, and will be,” says CEO Brad Gray. “Our technology is perfectly tuned to where medicine, in particular, cancer, is going.”

NanoString CEO Brad Gray

The investment by Termeer is the second big check he has written in the past couple months to support R&D in personalized cancer medicine, after he and his wife Belinda donated $10 million to start a new program at Massachusetts General Hospital. Gray, a former vice president of Genzyme Genetics, says he re-connected with his former boss over the summer to tell him about the potential applications of NanoString’s tool for personalized medicine.

“Henri is incredibly passionate about personalized medicine. He was a leader in genetic medicine, before it was in fashion,” Gray says. From a business standpoint, Gray says Termeer was drawn to the idea of NanoString selling its machine around the world as a diagnostic tool used by physicians and technicians in clinical settings, instead of the traditional model in which diagnostic firms set up centralized labs and have physicians ship in their samples.

“Henri immediately became intrigued with the potential of nCounter to enable a distributed version of personalized medicine,” Gray says. “We’re talking about taking very high complexity molecular diagnostics out of the central lab, and into a globally scalable business, where these tests can be run in any lab in the world.”

NanoString introduced the first commercial version of this tool, called nCounter, in the summer of 2008, for research purposes only. Last month it rolled out a second-generation product that’s supposed to have 50 percent higher bandwidth (known as throughput in the genetics business); more flexible software for analyzing the data from the instrument; and hardware that can be used by basic researchers, but that is manufactured in sync with more rigorous, consistent diagnostic industry standards.

Major life science tool companies like San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) and Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) and others have struggled this year amid uncertainty about cuts to federal research budgets that are the lifeblood of their customer base. NanoString is privately held and doesn’t disclose its financials, but Gray did say the company has … Next Page »

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It was a meaty New England life sciences week, with clinical advances, new funding, CEO hires, and acquisitions headlines.

—Sanofi hired David Meeker as the new CEO of its Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme unit. Meeker, who got started at the company in 1994, will move into his new role on November 1 and will lead the rare diseases and multiple sclerosis divisions. Other Genzyme units have already been integrated into Sanofi’s global operations.

—My colleague Arlene took a closer look at Cambridge-based Rhythm Pharmaceuticals, a startup developing diabetes and obesity drugs. Rhythm is navigating a crowded but struggling drug space with licensed compounds from the French biotech company Ipsen.

—Lexington, MA-based Cubist Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: CBST) will acquire Adolor for $4.25 per share in cash ($190 million total), plus milestones for Adolor’s experimental drug for treating chronic opioid-induced constipation, ADL5945. That pushes the total value of the deal to $415 million. The transaction was made possible, Cubist says, when pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) dropped out of a co-promotion deal with Adolor (NASDAQ: ADLR) after their drug for accelerating healing after bowel surgery ran into safety issues and was only cleared for in-hospital use.

—Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) met its goals in a second clinical trial of its first pill for multiple sclerosis. In the study, Biogen’s pill reduced MS flareups by 44 percent when patients took it twice a day, and by 51 percent when they took it three times a day. The company’s stock shot up 7.6 percent to $115.07 per share at 10:06 Eastern time after the news. Biogen also announced it would pay $45 million upfront to South San Francisco-based Portola Pharmaceuticals to collaborate on autoimmune disease drugs.

—Atreaon, a new Newton, MA-based biotech company, raised $8 million of a potential $20 million equity round, according to an SEC filing. And Watertown, MA-based Arsenal Medical, a developer of biomaterial-based treatments, said it was spinning out a new company called 480 Biomedical. It also announced it had raised $3 million and 480 had raised $15 million, from return Arsenal investors return investors Polaris Venture Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Intersouth Partners. The new spinout will focus on developing scaffold and delivery technology for treating a form of peripheral vascular disease known as SFA occlusive disease.

—Cambridge-based BIND Biosciences and Watertown-based Selecta Biosciences each received $25 million from Rusnano, a $10 billion Russian federation fund focused on nanotechnology startups. Each company, which will establish Moscow subsidiaries, also took in another $22.25 million from new and existing investors.

—Cambridge-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) announced revenues of $659 million for the quarter ended September 30, its first ever profitable quarter from its own product sales. (Vertex turned a profit once before due to a one-time milestone payment.) The $221 million ($1.02 a share) profit last quarter was drive in part by Vertex’s new FDA-approved drug telaprevir (Incivek) for patients with hepatitis C that was cleared by the FDA in May.

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Genzyme only had one leader for more than 25 years, and it has found a new one in David Meeker, now that the company is part of Paris-based pharmaceutical giant Sanofi.

Meeker will become the CEO of the Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme unit starting Nov. 1, and will report to Sanofi CEO Chris Viehbacher, according to a Sanofi statement. Meeker will oversee divisions that work on rare diseases and multiple sclerosis, while other parts of Genzyme’s former business have been integrated into Sanofi’s global operations.

Genzyme, the biotech giant that Henri Termeer led for most of its history, agreed to be acquired by Sanofi in February for about $20 billion after several months of negotiations. The company struggled through manufacturing shortages of a couple of its most important enzyme replacement therapies—Cerezyme and Fabrazyme—before ultimately agreeing to be acquired.

David Meeker

“After working closely with David over the past six months, I am confident that he is the best person to lead Genzyme,” Viehbacher said in a statement.

Meeker, who got his M.D. from the University of Vermont Medical School, joined the company in 1994 as a medical director to work on a cystic fibrosis gene therapy program, according to the Sanofi statement. He worked his way up in the company’s rare disease operations, and oversaw the commercial introductions of Aldurazyme, Fabrazyme, and Myozyme. He became chief operating officer of Genzyme in 2009.

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Seems like Cambridge, MA, is buzzing with dollar signs. Many of the financings we spotted this week went to life sciences and Web companies in the city.

—MC10, a Cambridge-based developer of technology enabling electronics to bend and stretch, added $2.5 million in Series B funding, bringing the round’s total to $14.75 million. The new money comes from Windham Venture Partners; North Bridge Venture Partners and Braemar Energy Ventures previously invested in the round.

—Cambridge-based Locu, formerly known as Goodplates, raised $623,000 in seed financing from crop of Boston and Bay Area angel investors. The company, whose founders met at an MIT class focused on the semantic Web technology known as linked data, is developing a platform enabling restaurants to better manage menu content online.

—Aura Biosciences, a Cambridge-based developer of nano particles for cancer drug delivery, raised $4.5 million from a group of private individual investors in the pharmaceutical industry.

—More cha-ching for Cambridge. Backupify, a maker of Web technology for storing data from e-mail and social media applications, brought in $5 million in Series B money, led by existing investor Avalon Ventures. Return Backupify investors General Catalyst Partners and Lowercase Capital also participated in the deal, which will help the Cambridge-based company further develop its data backup technology for businesses that use Google Apps.

—Imaging and detection technology developer Caliper Life Sciences (NASDAQ: CALP) of Hopkinton, MA, will be acquired by PerkinElmer for $600 million in cash. Waltham, MA-based Perkin Elmer (NYSE: PKI) paid $10.50 per share for Caliper, a 42 percent premium on Caliper’s closing share price of $7.39 the day before … Next Page »

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Henri Termeer, the former CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme, has given $10 million to Massachusetts General Hospital to establish a new center for developing more personalized cancer drugs, according to a report in today’s Boston Globe.

The new Henri and Belinda Termeer Center for Targeted Therapies will initially focus on certain genetic forms of breast cancer, lung cancer, and leukemias, the Globe said. The center will have 25 employees and will be led by Jose Baselga, the chief of hematology-oncology at MGH.

“I hope this will help Massachusetts be recognized globally as the knowledge center in targeted medicines,” Termeer told the newspaper. “This is a global effort, but Massachusetts has the responsibility to lead, to use the talents and capabilities it has built over many years.”

Termeer stepped down from Genzyme this past spring, after the company agreed to be acquired by Paris-based Sanofi for more than $20 billion.

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Mara Aspinall, the founder and former CEO of Waltham, MA-based On-Q-ity, has moved on to become president of Ventana Medical Systems, an Arizona-based division of healthcare giant Roche that focuses on cancer diagnostics. The appointment was announced in a press release today and is effective next month.

Aspinall is well known in the diagnostics world, having previously served as president of the genetic testing unit of Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme. On-Q-ity, which started in 2009, focuses on molecular diagnostics for cancer. The startup’s website still lists Aspinall as a founder and director, but makes no mention of a successor (or search for one) yet.

Xconomy profiled On-Q-ity last summer and earlier this year, when the company formed a strategic alliance with LabCorp to help commercialize its technology for detecting circulating tumor cells in the blood.

“My career has been about asking what is the greatest need for patients? The greatest need for patients today is in increasing the efficacy of treatments available now,” Aspinall said at the time. “We’ve made such progress with new drugs, we need to use diagnostics to improve the information the physician has if we want to improve how we use those drugs.”

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Today marks the debut of Lotus Tissue Repair, a Cambridge, MA-based company that’s developing a treatment for a rare, genetic disease called dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (DEB). The disease may not be well known, but the folks behind the startup certainly are. Lotus has closed a $26 million Series A financing round led by Boston-based Third Rock Ventures. Co-founders include Philip Reilly, a Third Rock partner and a clinical geneticist by training, and Mark de Souza, a veteran of Cambridge biotech Dyax (NASDAQ: DYAX).

DEB only affects about 300 people in the U.S., but it ends up being a death sentence for many of those patients. The disease, which emerges during childhood, is caused by a deficiency or malfunction of a protein called collagen type VII. DEB causes painful skin blisters that can result in fingers and toes getting fused together. Sometimes the blisters erupt in the esophagus, making it difficult for patients to eat. And the disease puts its victims at high risk of developing squamous cell carcinoma—a deadly skin cancer. “These children suffer terribly, then they develop a fatal cancer in their adult years,” says Reilly, who specializes in finding opportunities in rare diseases for Third Rock. “And there is no effective therapy.”

Lotus was co-founded by University of Southern California (USC) dermatology professors Mei Chen and David Woodley, who licensed their technology to the startup. Chen and Woodley developed a genetically engineered form of collagen type VII called rC7, which they believe could be given to DEB patients to keep the disease in check. The researchers have performed a number of animal studies showing that the protein replacement treatment specifically zeroes in on wounded skin, healing it in a potent and long-lasting manner.

Chen and Woodly recently received grant money to start the first human trials, which will begin at USC shortly, de Souza says. The company has not yet determined the timeline for the complete clinical-trial program, but with the new source of cash, he says, “We’ll be able to move forward quickly.”

DEB is so rare that it’s considered an “ultra-orphan” disease, de Souza says. But USC’s early research indicates that rC7 might also work in other skin disorders that are much more common, such as diabetic foot ulcers—a key consideration in determining the technology’s promise as a commercial product. “The pre-clinical evidence shows that collagen VII plays a role in accelerating healing, so we think there’s a huge upside in treating other types of chronic wounds,” says de Souza, who is … Next Page »

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We didn’t bring you a life sciences roundup last Friday due to some time constraints, but some of the weeks’ headlines were too important to skip altogether. So here are two weeks worth of biotech profiles, partnership announcements, personnel moves, financing news, and more.

—The American Chemical Society awarded its highest honor, the Priestley Medal, to MIT bioengineering professor Bob Langer, in a rare move, as the award typically goes to chemists. The ACE cited Langer’s prolific laboratory and droves of patents, pending patents, and dozens of companies started as the reason he got the award.

—Cambridge, MA-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals paid $60 million upfront to license a couple of new hepatitis C drug candidates from South San Francisco-based Alios Biopharma that it hopes to make part of an entirely oral drug regimen for the disease. Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX) could pay up to $715 million in development milestone payments over time, and potentially $750 million in sales milestones.

—Tal Medical launched to commercialize technology developed at Belmont, MA-based McLean Hospital that aims to treat depression using a specific type of magnetic field found in some MRI imaging machines. The company has about $800,000 in seed funding from PureTech Ventures and other investors, and an Eli Lilly veteran as its chief scientific officer.

—Former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer took a spot on the board of Verastem, a startup aiming to develop treatments against cancer stem cells.

—My colleague Luke caught up with Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) CEO George Scangos in the biotech’s temporary office space in Kendall Square. Biogen is eyeing a move of its headquarters back into Cambridge to be closer to R&D operations there.

—Our New York editor Arlene wrote a profile on Constellation Pharmaceuticals, the Cambridge-based epigenetics startup that earlier this month announced it had raised another $15 million in its Series B venture financing—bringing … Next Page »

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By the time you read this, I’ve probably already wrapped up my work as a correspondent for Xconomy, turned in my key to office on Rogers Street in Cambridge, MA, and taken a deep breath in anticipation of my exciting new role as an executive editor for the life sciences group at FierceMarkets.

I’m really not being modest when I say that I don’t expect my departure from Xconomy to qualify as anything close to an event [Editor's note: Ryan is, indeed, being modest---we're going to miss him like crazy!], and Xconomy has a great life sciences reporting team in place with or without me. But I spent about 33 months at Xconomy, mostly covering the biotech and healthcare IT scenes in the Boston area, and I thought a proper goodbye post would be appropriate. It’s also an opportunity for me to brag a bit about some of the cool stories that we did during my stint with Xconomy. (Still, I promise to keep this farewell relatively brief.)

Before I talk about those stories, I want to say thanks to Xconomy. I feel plain lucky that Bob Buderi, Xconomy’s founder and editor-in-chief, called me on my cell phone in late July 2008 to ask me if I was interested in working for his startup media company. I got that call while I was literally carrying my box of personal stuff out of a building on Federal Street in downtown Boston after my last day as the biotech reporter for Mass High Tech, and I was still wondering at the time whether I was crazy for moving with my wife to Vermont, where I would try my luck as a freelancer. Thanks to Bob and Xconomy co-founder and executive editor Rebecca Zacks, I was given a shot to stay on the Boston biotech beat.

In those first few months at Xconomy, I chased down a news tip from Bob and broke a little story about the big $400 million endowment that philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad gave to their namesake research center, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. (The experience told me that my sources still worked, even when I was up in Vermont.) Around the same time, I started working more closely with Luke Timmerman, Xconomy’s National Biotech Editor, who joined Xconomy via Bloomberg several months before my arrival. Luke writes terrifically detailed and compelling news copy at speeds that would rival fictional Clark Kent’s fastest work at The Daily Planet. Luke also never hesitated to share tricks of the trade with me, and I’ll try to never forget those lessons. I learned a bunch from the other editors as well.

I don’t have a “top 10″ stories list or anything to share with you, but I’m very proud to have had the opportunity to be the first reporter to provide what I would call in-depth coverage of many healthcare-related startups in the Boston area. Some examples include stories about KEW Group (most recently), Seventh Sense Biosystems, Life Image, Momelan Technologies, and Vedanta Biosciences. I also got to do some memorable stories that involved big companies such as Biogen Idec (NASDAQ:BIIB), Genzyme, GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK), and Novartis (NYSE:NVS). The only regrets I have are getting beat on certain Boston biotech stories, yet I feel like I did about as much as I could while covering the beat mostly from my home office in a little college town some 200 miles from Kendall Square.

If you’re still reading this nano-memoir, then perhaps you’ll be interested to know that I’ll still be following the Boston biotech scene as well as the life sciences industry in other geographies in my new role at Fierce. I’ll also be in Boston and other major hubs of the biotech industry to cover stories and attend meetings. And I plan to continue to provide Twitter updates under my @ryan_mcbride handle.

So perhaps this isn’t really a goodbye as much as a note of thanks to the editors at Xconomy and to you the audience, with whom I aim to keep in touch through my work at Fierce.

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New England biotechs made news this week with approvals from FDA advisory panels, licensing deals, collaboration agreements, and lawsuits.

—An FDA advisory panel unanimously recommended the FDA approve telaprevir, the thrice-daily pill for hepatitis C from Cambridge, MA-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX). The FDA, which usually takes the recommendations of these panels, is scheduled to make its final decision on the drug on May 23.The NASDAQ halted trading of Vertex’s common stock on Thursday while the advisory committed reviewed the application. The day before, an FDA panel voted unanimously to approve Merck’s (NYSE: MRK) rival hepatitis C pill, boceprevir.

—Proteostasis Therapeutics, a Cambridge-based developer of technology to fight neurodegenerative diseases by keeping proteins in balance, said it obtained two exclusive licenses from Harvard, pertaining to the ubiquitin-proteosome pathway. It did not disclose financial terms.

—Cambridge-based Dyax (NASDAQ: DYAX)  said it will collaborate with South San Francisco-based FivePrime to discover new antibody drugs. Dyax will get technology license fees and research support and is eligible for milestone payments and royalties if FivePrime successfully develops drugs using Dyax’s phage display technology.

—My colleague Ryan wrote about KEW Group, the new Concord, MA-based cancer care startup that’s been in the formative stages for about a year and is working on raising venture money. KEW is led by Boston biotech veterans and Harvard scientists, and is working to open up a network of oncology clinics that make IT and evidence-based medicine, like genetic testing, more accessible to patients get treated at community clinics.

—Genzyme, the Cambridge-based biotech now owned by Sanofi-Aventis (NYSE: SNY), amended its patent infringement lawsuit against Anika Therapeutics (NASDAQ: ANIK) surrounding Anika’s osteoarthritis treatment, Monovis. Genzyme also filed a new complaint in U.S. District Court in Boston that includes a newly issued patent.

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Investors are rewarding Bluebird Bio for wracking up accolades with its experimental gene therapies for serious genetic diseases. The Cambridge, MA-based biotech firm has brought in $30 million in a Series C round of funding, just over year after investors pumped $35 million into the firm in its second-round financing.

ARCH Venture Partners joined the investor syndicate at Bluebird, and Steven Gillis, a managing director at ARCH, took a seat on biotech’s board of directors. The new round also drew investments from previous Bluebird backers Third Rock Ventures, TVM Capital, Forbion Capital Partners, and Easton Capital Investment Group. Nick Leschly, president and CEO of Bluebird, says that the company hadn’t exhausted its cash from its previous financing prior to closing this latest round of funding, but the additional capital will help the firm advance its clinical development plans, as well as invest in its technology.

Bluebird (formerly Genetix Pharmaceuticals) has helped change the headlines about gene therapy, from those of yesteryear that highlighted dangerous side effects, to ones describing renewed promise in the field. In September, the prestigious journal Nature ran an article about how the company’s gene therapy for an inherited blood disorder called beta-thalassemia provided significant benefits for a man in his early 20s with the disease. There are also four patients who have been treated with a version of the firm’s therapy for childhood cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy (CCALD)—a genetic brain disorder also known as “Lorenzo’s Oil” disease. And the firm revealed data in May 2010 that showed its treatment had stabilized CCALD in two patients who had been treated three years earlier.

With its new financing in hand, Bluebird is planning to increase enrollment in an ongoing Phase I/II trial for its beta-thalassemia treatment over the next 12 months to about 10 patients. The treatment might also be effective in treating sickle cell anemia, and the firm plans to test it in people with that disorder too. Toward the end of the year, Leschly says, the firm aims to begin a clinical trial in the U.S. and Europe for a CCALD treatment. The trial would follow the ongoing pilot study in CCALD patients. In the meantime, the company plans to invest further in its core gene therapy technology, which Leschly says could be used to treat a variety of severe genetic diseases.

“The idea here is really to accelerate our … Next Page »

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We saw financings, CEO and board hires, and clinical results from New England area biotechs this week.

—Blueprint Medicines, a startup focused on developing personalized cancer treatments, said it nabbed a $40 million Series A financing led by Third Rock Ventures. Mark Levin and Alexis Borisy of Third Rock serve on board of directors at Blueprint, which is using molecular and cancer genome data and a proprietary chemical compound library to develop drugs more tailored to patients’ conditions.

—Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) said that its oral multiple sclerosis drug candidate, dimethyl fumarate (BG-12), met its main goal in a pivotal study of 1,200 patients, by reducing MS flare-ups over two years compared with a placebo. The treatment also met its secondary goals, like slowing the rate of disability from the neurodegenerative disorder.

—Aveo Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AVEO), a Cambridge, MA-based drug developer working on an advanced treatment for kidney cancer, said that it added Henri Termeer to its board of directors. Termeer will be leaving his role as chairman and CEO of Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) now that Sanofi-Aventis has completed its $20.1 billion buyout of the biotech.

—Enlight Biosciences, a Boston-based firm founded to aid Big Pharma with R&D challenges, added Roche veteran Michelle Browner as CEO. Enlight founding CEO David Steinberg, a partner at Boston-based venture firm PureTech Ventures, will remain on the company’s board.

—Brighton, MA-based surface engineering and nanotechnology provider Nano Terra said it acquired Surface Logix, also of Brighton. Both firms were founded by Harvard University chemist George Whitesides. The acquisition will enable Surface Logix, a drug developer, to apply the Nano Terra technology to healthcare products.

—MIT spinout Taris Biomedical added $18.3 million in a financing led by new investor Third Rock. The money will go to advancing the company’s lead drug, a potential treatment for a number of bladder ailments, into mid-stage clinical trials.

—Monsanto (NYSE: MON) said it was partnering with Cambridge-based Atlas Venture to find life sciences investments complementing Monsanto’s agriculture business. The were no financial terms disclosed for the multi-year collaboration, in which Atlas will help Monsanto scout investments in the areas of genomics, informatics, and biology, and Atlas will gain insight and technology to make its own future investments.

—Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge-based developer of cancer treatments, announced it had raised $77 million in Series G funding from new and existing investors, which include Crocker Ventures, Jennison Associates, TPG-Axon Capital, and WT Investment Advisors Fund.

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