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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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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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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Several of New England’s tech and life sciences firms got juicy deals the past week and a half.

—Boston’s RunMyErrand, an online clearinghouse where busy people can find helpers for odd jobs, raised $1 million in a Series A venture financing round. The cash, from California investors Baseline Ventures and Maples Investments, will help the startup staff up and expand to San Francisco.

—Cambridge, MA-based Cequent Pharmaceuticals raised $3.35 million in the first tranche of its second venture financing round; the round could eventually total $15 million. Cequent, a developer of RNA-interference based drugs, raised $15 million in its 2007 Series A round from Ampersand Ventures, Pappas Ventures, Yasuda, and Novartis Option Fund.

—Pulmatrix raised $30.2 million in a Series B venture round led by Arch Venture Partners and Novartis Bioventures Fund and joined by Polaris Venture Partners and 5AM Ventures. The Lexington, MA-based startup is developing drugs that prevent a variety of microbes, including influenza, from infecting the lungs.

—GTC Biotherapeutics (NASDAQ:GTCB) of Framingham, MA, raised $10 million in a sale of stock to French biotech drug maker LFB Biotechnologies, already a major shareholder

—Waltham, MA-based On-Q-ity, a developer of cancer diagnostic tools, reportedly raised $21 million in a Series A round of venture capital from Mohr Davidow Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Physic Ventures, and Northgate Capital. The startup was formed through the merger of two Mohr Davidow portfolio companies, CELLective Diagnostics and The DNA Repair Company.

—Boston’s Flybridge Capital Partners helped funnel $3.4 million into New York-based open-source database developer 10gen. Returning investor Union Square Ventures also contributed to the Series B round.

—Special effects software startup GenArts of Cambridge, MA, acquired St. Louis, MO-based Wondertouch, whose software generates so-called “particle-based” special effects. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Wade took a fun look at the companies’ technologies.

—We got the inside scoop last week at our Xconomy event on pharmaceutical innovation when Boston-based Enlight Biosciences revealed that it struck a deal with Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT). Abbott agreed to join the consortium of big pharmas that are …Next Page »

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“People say if you fail in Seattle, you’re screwed,” said Marcelo Calbucci. “If you fail in the Bay Area, you just have a badge of honor.”

We were at the TechStars reunion event in Seattle last week, listening to early-stage investors Brad Feld, Andy Sack, Steve Hall, Greg Gottesman, Shawn Broderick, and Chris Sheehan speak about entrepreneurship and the tech startup scene in their respective cities. Calbucci, the founder of Seattle 2.0 and Sampa (which folded in August), was asking the panelists about how the tolerance of failure, whether real or perceived, affects a region’s culture of innovation.

It’s a deep question, and it continues the discussion of startup cultures in different cities that I highlighted last week. It’s also part of a debate on failure that has been going on since long before I wrote about it in Xconomy last January. There seem to be two camps. Most entrepreneurs I’ve talked to feel there is a stigma associated with having a failed startup in Seattle. Most venture capitalists, not so much. But it’s a much broader issue than just Seattle. My colleague Bruce talked with a Web 2.0 startup founder in San Diego last week who said his first failure, earlier this year, “was truly a painful experience, and I’m still not over it.” And meanwhile, Brad Feld, the co-founder of TechStars and Foundry Group in Boulder, CO, had some provocative things to say about the failure aspect of Boston’s culture.

But first, Andy Sack of Seattle’s Founder’s Co-op gave his perspective on having failed at his last startup, Judy’s Book, after having had three successes prior to that. “As much as you teach entrepreneurship, as much as there’s supply of capital out there, really when push comes to shove, entrepreneurship comes from within,” he said. “I couldn’t take a job at any of the big companies. We’ve been through the tech boom of the ‘90s. We’re just coming off of a major hiccup. I’d say right now, early-stage investors in Seattle have retreated some; venture capital has retreated some, they’re focused primarily on their portfolio. That said, you [Calbucci] failed and went out and started your own thing. I failed and went out and started my own thing. Because we didn’t know any better. The entrepreneurs that don’t know any better, they just go do it again.”

Greg Gottesman of Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group is one of those VCs who says he doesn’t see failure as a black mark. “My sense in this community is, to people who matter most, I don’t think failure is a huge negative,” he said. “There are certain types of failures, like failure of integrity—that’s hard to recover from. But failure of a startup, just speaking with all my partners, that’s not a negative. We talk about that as a learning experience. It’s just another piece of the puzzle.”

So how does Seattle’s tolerance of failure differ from, say, Boston’s or Silicon Valley’s? Feld, who has been investing nationally for 15 years, said, “I actually believe that the shtick of ‘failure as a badge of honor’ is really great shtick. I’ve failed a lot. It’s hard to fail. Failure impacts a person in …Next Page »

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It seems like every few days since Labor Day weekend we at Xconomy get invited to attend or cover an entrepreneurship competition. This is a good thing. It means there are more and more opportunities for innovators in New England to gain exposure to the business community and investors—as well as a chance to win some cash and other prizes to help get their ventures off to a strong start.

Indeed, many startups in the Boston area have cut their teeth in the business plan competition circuit before raising rounds of venture capital or achieving other milestones. Take some of the past winners of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition: Cambridge, MA-based video game developer Harmonix Music Systems, creator of the hugely popular Guitar Hero franchise, and the dental imaging firm Brontes Technologies, which was acquired by 3M for $95 million three years ago. And Wilbraham, MA-based FloDesign, which won both the $200K MIT Clean Energy Prize and $100K Ignite Clean Energy competition last year, recently learned that it has been tentatively awarded $8.3 million from the U.S. government to advance development of its next-generation design for wind turbines.

There will no doubt be many more successful startups to emerge from entrepreneurship contests in the region in the years ahead. Some of these contests have been around for years. Others are brand new. But even for those that have been around for a while, schedules and prizes can change from year to year. So we thought it would be a good idea to round them up in one place with the latest information about them we could find.

So whether you’re an investor interested in new companies or an innovator searching for opportunities to transform your ideas or inventions into a startup, here is a list—not a ranking—of entrepreneurship competitions in New England that cater to ideas for businesses in the life sciences, clean-tech, and IT sectors. (Please note that the information came from the contest websites or organizers, and in all but one case I didn’t separate cash from in-kind services factored into the value of each prize):

—Babson College business plan competitions

Babson College holds annual business plan competitions for undergraduate and graduate students. In fact, this year the Massachusetts business college held its 22nd competition for graduate students, making it one of the oldest business plan contests in the state.

Undergraduate Track:

Deadline: Dates for the 2010 competition weren’t available online, but last year the deadline for entries was in winter and the finals were in spring.

Top prize: $5,000 (2009)

Graduate Track:

Deadline: Not dates specified for 2010 competition.

Top prize: $20,000 (2009) …Next Page »

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Partners HealthCare’s Center for Connected Health is holding its sixth big Connected Health Symposium in Boston this week, and there’s definitely more optimism here that information technology is becoming more mainstream in healthcare than in years past. The big focus of the conference is on technology that is used to extend healthcare outside of traditional clinics or hospitals into the homes of patients—something often called telemedicine or, at least at Partners, connected health.

Telemedicine got a big boost when IT was identified earlier this year in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a. the economic stimulus) as playing an important role in improving quality of care—and perhaps most urgently—reducing healthcare costs. Currently there are provisions in bills under consideration in Congress that would create incentives for healthcare providers to adopt, say, remote patient monitoring and teleconferencing technologies. Indeed, the healthcare reform train is moving fast in Washington nowadays, and major players in the telemedicine market such as Philips Healthcare and Intel—which both have strong presences here at the symposium—are working hard to jump aboard and ensure that technologies that allow connectivity between patients and doctors are part of the agenda.

This symposium is interesting because it attracts a rare mix of physicians, entrepreneurs, hospital administrators, academics, and technology executives. Big names in tech like Google, Microsoft, and Verizon Wireless have sent executives here. Meantime, there are plenty of folks from Harvard, MIT, and the multiple research hospitals in town involved in the discussions to add a strong clinical or scientific perspective to the conference.

I’m also seeing or catching wind of new innovations from the gaming and wireless industries that have the potential to help patients stay healthy in their homes. (However, I have to say that the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, replete with its great big crystal chandeliers and Romanesque columns, makes an incongruous backdrop for someone talking about how an academic used the popular video game Warcraft in her medical research.)

Here are five of the VIPs who spoke here on Wednesday at the symposium:

—Daniel Palestrant, CEO of Sermo. Palestrant, a surgeon by training, has led the growth of Cambridge, MA-based Sermo into an online community of 120,000 physicians.

—Paul Bromberg, vice president and general manager at Philips Healthcare. Bromberg, whose office is in Framingham, MA, heads Philips’ remote patient monitoring unit.

—Ben Sawyer, founder of Games for Health, based in Portland, ME. Sawyer, a devoted gamer who plays Rock Band and other games in his spare time, does R&D on gaming technologies that are designed to improve healthcare.

—Jamie Heywood, co-founder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe. PatientsLikeMe, based in Cambridge, provides an online forum and community for patients with diseases such as HIV/AIDS, depression, and multiple sclerosis to share information about their illnesses with each other.

—U.S. Representative Ed Markey, a Democrat representing Massachusetts. Though I wasn’t around for his panel, Markey and Partners CEO Jim Mongan talked about healthcare policy and politics in Washington.

Here, in no particular order, are a few of the themes emerging from the symposium that I think are particularly interesting:

—Philips’ Bromberg noted that 24 percent of patients treated for heart failure are …Next Page »

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Watertown, MA-based Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals has raised $10 million out of a planned $29.6 million equity financing round, according to regulatory documents filed Wednesday. The Harvard spinoff, which is using synthetic chemistry to develop new antibiotics for drug-resistant infections, previously raised $25 million in two tranches that closed in August 2008.

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The buyout of Sepracor was probably the biggest piece of New England life sciences news this past week, but it certainly wasn’t the only one.

—Cambridge, MA-based Quanterix named David Okrongly its new CEO. Founding CEO Nicholas Naclerio will continue to server as chairman of the company, which is developing single-molecule analysis tools for diagnosing cancer and other diseases. Quanterix has its roots in the Tufts University chemistry lab of David Walt, the co-founder of Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN).

—An FDA panel recommended that the agency approve romidepsin, a drug developed by Cambridge-based Gloucester Pharmaceuticals, as a treatment for a rare form of lymphoma. The agency has until November 12 to decide whether to clear the drug.

—Ryan had a fascinating chat with Richard Gliklich, CEO of Outcome Sciences, about his Cambridge-based firm’s efforts to track the real-world safety and effectiveness of drugs and other medical technologies. Gliklich also talked about how the company, a Harvard spinoff, is benefitting from the focus on such data spurred by the stimulus package pushed by President Obama.

—Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO) of Waltham, MA, acquired German diagnostics maker B.R.A.H.M.S. for €330 million (US $470 million).

—Marlborough, MA-based drugmaker Sepracor (NASDAQ:SEPR) said yes to a $2.6 billion buyout offer from Japanese drug firm Dainippon Sumitomo Pharma; the deal is slated to proceed via a tender offer to begin no later than September 15.

—Ryan profiled Cambridge-based Daktari Diagnostics, which just scored $2.8 million in Series A financing to support the development of cheap, portable technology for performing blood tests for HIV patients. The technology, based on work from Massachusetts General Hospital and Purdue University, could dramatically improve the treatment of HIV in places like remote African villages where standard lab techniques are impractical.

—A federal judge ruled that Irish drugmaker Elan breached its multiple sclerosis drug agreement with Cambridge-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) by proposing a deal with Johnson & Johnson that would have given J&J an option to acquire Biogen’s stake in the drug, natalizumab (Tysabri), if some other company acquires Biogen.

—In other Biogen news, Redwood City, CA-based Facet Biotech (NASDAQ: FACT), rejected the Massachusetts firm’s $355 million hostile takeover bid.

—Bedford, MA-based Spire sold off its dialysis catheter business to Bard Access Systems for $15 million. Following the sale’s completion, Spire will focus exclusively on photovoltaics manufacturing.

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Scientists have been trying for years to solve the mystery of why a few rare individuals get infected with HIV, yet somehow retain immune defenses so they never get sick. Today, researchers at a small Seattle biotech company, Theraclone Sciences, and collaborators at San Diego’s Scripps Research Institute say they have found a new vulnerability in the virus that could lead the way to new treatments or possibly a vaccine.

By studying rare blood samples from HIV-resistant people in the lab, scientists have found two weak spots on the virus, and were able to genetically engineer two new antibodies that broadly neutralize many variations of the virus circulating around the world, according to research being published this week in Science. Besides Theraclone and Scripps researcher Dennis Burton, this effort included collaborators from South San Francisco-based Monogram Biosciences (NASDAQ: MGRM) and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) in New York.

This effort is still in its early days, and nobody knows yet for sure if these new antibodies will even work in lab animals. But this is the first time in more than a decade that scientists have discovered antibodies with broad neutralizing capability that can stand up to multiple strains of the wily virus in the lab. Plus, they were found in blood samples from donors in developing countries, where most of the new infections occur.

While HIV is largely considered a chronic disease in wealthy countries like the U.S. where there are 32 FDA-approved antiviral drugs, the discovery of neutralizing antibodies is potentially groundbreaking. The antibodies could be critical ingredients used to develop the first HIV vaccine, which would be most useful in poor countries. More than 30 million people around the world are thought to be living with HIV, and the disease is still thought to kill 2 million people a year.

“These new antibodies, which are more potent than other antibodies described to date while maintaining great breadth, attach to a novel, and potentially more accessible site on HIV to facilitate vaccine design,” said Burton, a professor of immunology and microbial science and scientific director of the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, in a statement. Burton is also a member of the newly-formed Ragon Institute, a collaboration of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard.

We first wrote about this HIV work in April based on an interview with Theraclone CEO David Fanning. I caught up with Fanning again by phone to talk about the business implications of getting such big recognition in one of the world’s top two scientific journals.

Theraclone CEO David Fanning

This publication—and all the global media attention it is bound to attract—is definitely going to attract the interest of prospective partners in Big Pharma and biotech, and funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health, that Theraclone needs to help pay the bills for its research program. When Fanning called me, it was 4 a.m. in Japan, where he has been meeting with potential partners. “I’m not here for vacation, you can put it that way,” he says.

“This really validates our technology in the eyes of people that we want to see start using it,” Fanning says. “Instead of us being a small private biotech that may or may not be doing something interesting, we’ve now made a mark very rapidly in one of the biggest challenges of all infectious disease.”

Still, the work is clearly just beginning. Theraclone, through ongoing financial support …Next Page »

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If you’ve never heard of NaviNet, the builder of what the company claims is the nation’s largest real-time healthcare communications network, then the Cambridge, MA-based firm bears most of the responsibility, says company CEO Brad Waugh. The 11-year-old firm spent its first 10 years building the network and its customer base, and over the past year has the firm put a greater emphasis on telling health plans, doctors, and others about its multiple capabilities, Waugh says.

NaviNet helps doctors’ offices instantly access patients’ insurance information, such as their benefits eligibility and claims status, over the Web. So far it’s connected 770,000 doctors and other healthcare providers to the network, covering about 40 percent of the total market, according to Waugh. Big health insurers like Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna, and UnitedHealthcare are attracted to and use NaviNet’s services because they save money by accessing sharing information via the company’s Web portal rather than through costlier call centers, Waugh says. NaviNet makes the bulk of its money, he says, on transaction fees that insurers pay the firm to connect with doctors.

There are certainly other important details of NaviNet’s business to speak of. But the big question I had was how the company is adapting to the rapidly evolving landscape of the U.S. healthcare system, which is expected to undergo major reforms under the Obama administration. (Read on for my conversation with Waugh on this topic.) With the goal of driving down healthcare costs, among other things, the federal stimulus package passed earlier this year includes $19 billion in incentives for hospitals and practices that adopt electronic health records. While the exact rules governing how the money will be doled are still being worked out, Waugh says that his company already has the information “rails” over which the government and the healthcare system could move information smoothly and securely.

The 238-person company is already seven years into operating profitably, Waugh says, but because NaviNet is private, he doesn’t have to share actual financial numbers. He says the continued growth of the business will help support an eventual public offering. (I’m sure the company’s investors, such as Waltham, MA, venture firms …Next Page »

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Brian McAndrews, the former CEO of digital marketing technology firm aQuantive (formerly Avenue A), is joining the world of venture capital with Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group. Madrona is announcing today that McAndrews has joined the firm as a managing director.

McAndrews was chief executive of aQuantive for eight years, and he oversaw the company through its $6 billion-plus acquisition by Microsoft in 2007. Until this past January, he served as a senior vice president at Microsoft, leading the advertising and publisher solutions group.

In his new job, McAndrews is charged with identifying and leading new investments from Madrona’s most recent $250 million fund, which it closed in June 2008, as well as supporting the firm’s existing portfolio companies. Madrona currently has more than $675 million under management, and is known for backing firms like Amazon, Isilon Systems, Farecast, iConclude, and, more recently, AdReady, Apptio, Skytap, and Yieldex. (See also our profiles of ExtraHop Networks and PetraVM.)

The new hire strengthens Madrona’s expertise in digital advertising and marketing. What’s more, McAndrews’s skills and experience seem to complement those of the firm’s other top decision-makers—managing directors Tom Alberg, Paul Goodrich, Greg Gottesman, and Matt McIlwain. “Brian has an amazing talent for identifying exceptional people and helping them develop ideas to their full potential,” said McIlwain (who, I’m told, has been McAndrews’s neighbor in Seattle’s Windermere neighborhood for years) in a statement. “That’s what he accomplished at aQuantive, growing the company from a small digital agency to a leading global technology marketing company.”

It may seem like a tough time to make the transition to VC, but McAndrews sounds undaunted. “As we learned at aQuantive, technology-driven innovation occurs in all market cycles, and I am excited about jumping in and helping talented teams take their ideas and build them into lasting companies,” McAndrews said in a statement. (It’s probably safe to assume McAndrews has given his new colleagues grief for not putting Madrona’s capital into Avenue A back in 1999—although Alberg personally invested as an angel.)

Before joining Avenue A as CEO, McAndrews, a Harvard alum and Stanford business school grad, worked as a product manager for General Mills and as executive vice president and general manager for ABC Sports. He currently serves as a director for Clearwire, Fisher Communications, WhitePages.com, and United Way of King County.

Last December, when Microsoft announced McAndrews’s departure, CEO Steve Ballmer noted in a statement, “Brian McAndrews built a world-class business for advertisers and publishers and led the successful integration of aQuantive into Microsoft, setting the foundation for our next phase of growth.”

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Famed scientist Phil Sharp’s retirement from the board of directors at Biogen Idec (NASDAQ:BIIB) leaves the board without what was perhaps its leading scientific voice, but his departure doesn’t leave activist investor Carl Icahn with much of an opening to seize greater control over the company.

When I reported last week that Sharp had stepped down from the board of Biogen, which he co-founded in 1978, it was still unclear whether or how Sharp’s retirement would impact the balance of power at the Cambridge, MA-based biotech company, which Icahn is on a quest to take over. It turns out that Biogen’s board of directors will decide whether or not to find someone to take Sharp’s seat on what is now a 12-member board of directors—but the board wouldn’t have had this power had a vote that took place at Biogen’s annual shareholders meeting on June 3 turned out differently.

At the meeting, Biogen shareholders rejected an amendment that Icahn proposed to the company’s bylaws, which would have set the number of seats on the board of directors at 13. During the proxy battle leading up to the meeting, Biogen, which also has significant operations in San Diego, advised shareholders to reject that amendment because it would remove the board’s power to determine how many directors there should be.

As of this writing, there were no indications one way or another from Biogen about whether its board would seek a replacement for Sharp.

“There is no obligation to fill his seat, as you may recall from following our proxy contest,” Biogen spokeswoman Jennifer Neiman told me, “so the board will make that decision based on …Next Page »

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North Bridge Venture Partners has committed to participating in a planned $5 million Series A round of financing for stealthy startup MC10, which the Waltham, MA-based VC firm formed last year to commercialize stretchable silicon material, according to MC10 CEO Dave Icke. The stretchable silicon is both flexible in a literal sense and in terms of its potential utility, providing a vast range of possible commercial products for industrial and biomedical applications.

MC10, which is currently housed at North Bridge’s office in Waltham, recently revealed it has licensed the stretchable silicon technology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where material scientist and MC10 co-founder John Rogers invented the technology and has been developing it for several years. The company’s planned Series A round of financing will likely be led by North Bridge, which has provided seed funding for the startup, and involve one other, unnamed venture firm, Icke says.

MC10 says it aims to deliver the high performance of brittle, rigid semiconductors in a flexible, stretchable material. The technology could be used to embed advanced electronics in products that can conform to moving, multi-dimensional surfaces. For example, this could be useful in putting sensors in …Next Page »

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Alexis Borisy stepped down from his chief executive role at drug developer CombinatoRx (NASDAQ:CRXX) last week after nine years on the job. His departure was revealed on the same day as the planned merger between Cambridge, MA-based CombinatoRx and Vancouver’s Neuromed Pharmaceuticals. I caught up with Borisy, an Xconomist, on the heels of the merger announcement to hear his thoughts about the deal and to discuss his plans for the future.

Borisy isn’t saying what his next move will be, but he sounds optimistic about his career prospects and the CombinatoRx-Neuromed merger. The merger deal initially gives owners of each of the two firms a 50-percent stake in the combined operation. Neuromed chief executive Christopher Gallen is expected to become CEO of CombinatoRx after the planned completion of the merger in the fourth quarter of 2009. Borisy credits Gallen with leading efforts at Neuromed to develop its lead anti-pain drug, called Exalgo, which is an oral, extended-release version of the opioid drug hydromorphone. The FDA is expected to say whether it will approve the drug on Nov. 22.

It’s been a difficult year for CombinatoRx and Borisy. The company’s stock lost three-quarters of its value when it reported early last October that its experimental osteoarthritis drug, Synavive, failed in a mid-stage clinical trial. To conserve cash, Borisy cut about two-thirds of the company’s staff, or about 100 workers, last year alone. He says that was a “miserable” experience to go through, especially after spending the previous nine years of his life founding and building the company. Also, Borisy says activist investors such as the Biotechnology Value Fund have bought up large stakes in CombinatoRx since the steep decline in its stock price last October.

“After we had the setback late last year,” Borisy tells me, “I felt an obligation, one, to …Next Page »

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Jeff Carbeck, a co-founder of Boston-area startups Arsenal Medical and Nano-Terra, has recently begun working with Flagship Ventures as a consultant on a confidential startup project, firm spokeswoman Kelly Friendly tells Xconomy.

Friendly says she’s unable to provide details about the startup project on which the former Princeton professor is working. Carbeck also declined to specify the nature of the startup project, yet he did note in an e-mail that he still has active roles at both Arsenal and Nano-Terra, and he does not have a permanent position at Flagship. He told me in May that he was interested in applying his expertise in materials science and chemical engineering to the venture capital game or another startup. It looks like he’s landed at the right place to do that.

“I began having conversations with Flagship recently because I was attracted by their unwavering commitment to big ideas, commercializing the most innovative technologies, and true entrepreneurial initiatives, which I think is unique, especially in the current environment,” Carbeck said, in an e-mail last week.

Given the broad utility of his technical expertise and startup experience, Carbeck could be working on a startup focused on any of several sectors at Flagship, which manages $600 million and invests in early-stage companies in the life sciences and clean technology sectors. Last month Carbeck told me that he was particularly interested in cleantech, having recently pursued and won a fellowship for aspiring cleantech executives from the New England Clean Energy Council. “I’m going to be doing something where material science and chemical engineering really play the lead role, but what specific area it’s going to be in is hard to say now,” he said when I interviewed him for that story. “But I tell you that the things I’m learning in the clean energy space are really exciting.”

When we spoke, Carbeck was splitting his time between Watertown-based medical devices startup Arsenal and Nano-Terra, a Cambridge firm that applies its proprietary nanotechnology inventions to tackle R&D problems in multiple industries except for life sciences. At the time, Carbeck was chief technology officer at Arsenal and chief scientist at Nano-Terra.

What is clear is that Carbeck has some great expertise and connections that will help him at Flagship. His local roots can be traced back to acclaimed Harvard chemist George Whitesides’ lab, where Carbeck did his post-doctoral research. After spending seven years at Princeton, he passed on tenure-track offer from Tufts to start Arsenal (formerly WMR Biomedical) in 2005 with a group of luminaries that included Whitesides, MIT inventor Bob Langer, and Carmichael Roberts, a partner at Northbridge Venture Partners in Waltham, MA.

Hopefully, I’ll have an update soon on Carbeck’s startup project at Flagship. For now, he says the project is confidential.

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In the 1960s, there weren’t many role models a little black girl interested in science could relate to. As a child, Evelynn Hammonds, who would become the first black female Dean of Harvard College, looked up to the Lt. Uhura character from Star Trek. Today’s generation, said the dean, will have slightly more realistic women to imitate, thanks in no small part to organizations like the Science Club for Girls.

SCFG, an after-school mentoring program for K-12 girls that emphasizes science education, holds a special place in Xconomy’s heart—indeed, we chose the organization as one of the beneficiaries of this our second annual Battle of the Tech Bands in January. So I was excited to attend SCFG’s Catalyst Awards ceremony at the Broad Institute in Cambridge last night, which coincided with the organization’s 15-year anniversary. Formed in Cambridge at the King Open School, with an initial class of 16, the program has ballooned into a network of science clubs in Cambridge, Boston, and Newton, with over 400 girls presently enrolled.

Hammonds and Larisa Schelkin received Catalyst Awards for their work promoting the involvement of underrepresented groups in science. Hammonds was cited for her accomplishments at Harvard and at MIT, where she founded the Center for Study of Diversity in Science, Technology and Medicine. Schelkin is the CEO and co-founder of the Diversity Outreach in Math and Engineering (DOME) Foundation, which promotes math and science education for minority groups.

H. Kim Bottomly, immunobiologist and president of Wellesley College, delivered the opening remarks. She reflected on how fortunate she was to have an advisor in her college years that accepted female PhD students. “Back then, talent and passion weren’t enough” to succeed in science, she said. “You also needed to be lucky. Well, women should not have to depend on luck”.

In the reception before the awards, fourth-graders Jackie Park and Carmen De Benedictis were demonstrating one of the engineering experiments they performed at the club— six cylindrical pillars made from tightly wound index cards, each having a circumference a little bigger than a quarter. Park explained how the distribution of pressure points allowed the pillars to support a heavy book, and even a person standing on top of that book. Park said she likes science because “it answers all our questions” and “is really cool” to boot.

The speakers made clear that the mission of Science Club for Girls is larger than simply preparing women for careers in the lab. Bottomly reminded the audience that science was served not only by the academics, but by “lawyers, lobbyists, and writers”. Hammonds echoed the sentiment, telling the girls in attendance that even if they did not become scientists themselves, they should strive always to be “champions of science.”

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Fate Therapeutics plans to announce this morning that it has begun its first clinical trial of a drug built on its knowledge of stem cell biology. Rather than injecting certain kinds of adult stem cells to regenerate tissues, this treatment involves a conventional small-molecule drug that’s designed to spur growth of blood-forming stem cells that patients need to recover from certain kinds of leukemia and lymphomas.

Xconomy reported in March that La Jolla, CA-based Fate—which was founded by top stem cell scientists at Harvard University, The Scripps Research Institute, the University of Washington, Stanford University, and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research—was destined to test its first drug in humans. But the company is now disclosing that the study will be done at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and provided more details on how its treatment could better the way hematopoietic stem cells from umbilical cord blood are transplanted into some cancer patients to restore their bone marrow function.

Fate’s drug, dubbed FT-1050, is a small molecule that the company plans to use to treat blood-forming stem cells from cord blood before the cells are transplanted into humans. By activating certain genes in the stem cells, the drug is intended to boost the ability of the cells to multiply and take up residence in bone marrow, Pratik Multani, vice president of clinical development at Fate, explains. The clinical trial is testing this use of the drug in patients with blood or immune system cancers whose bone marrow function—which is vital to blood production and the immune system—has been destroyed by chemotherapy and other cancer treatments.

Fate’s treatment was initially discovered in the lab of Leonard Zon, the director of stem cell research at Children’s Hospital Boston. Zon is one of several stem cell experts who was recruited by Polaris Venture Partners and …Next Page »

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New CEOs, new financings, new approvals, and new data—it was an interesting week for New England’s life sciences companies.

—Cambridge, MA-based Molecular Insight Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:MIPI) named a new president and CEO, Daniel Peters, just months after giving that post to co-founder John Babich. Babich will stay on as chief scientific officer of Molecular, which is developing a cardiac imaging agent called Zemiva.

—Artisan Pharma of Waltham, MA, indicated in an SEC filing that it has raised $9.4 million of an $11.8 million round of debt financing from undisclosed sources. Artisan is developing a treatment for a blood-clotting condition in patients with sepsis.

—Ryan chatted with Jeff Carbeck, co-founder of Watertown, MA-based Arsenal Medical, chief scientist at Cambridge, MA-based Nano-Terra, and newly named New England Clean Energy Council fellow. One of the top chemical engineers to come out of the lab of Harvard’s George Whitesides, Carbeck is bringing material science discoveries to bear not only in medical products but also in clean technology and a host of other industries.

—Cambridge, MA-based OmniGuide raised $1.8 million in an equity financing, according to an SEC filing that did not disclose investors in the deal. OmniGuide is developing fiber-optic laser scalpels for minimally invasive surgery.

—Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) launched a one-two punch at Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor campaigning to take over the board of the Cambridge, MA-based biotech giant. In a first regulatory filing, Biogen disputed Icahn’s criticism of its leadership, pipeline, dealmaking, and stock price—and argued that Icahn’s nominees for the Biogen board would …Next Page »

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Jeff Carbeck walked away from a promising career in academia four years ago to co-found Arsenal Medical, to apply advances in materials science to the healthcare market. Carbeck and I talked last week about his work at Watertown, MA-based Arsenal (originally named WMR Biomedical), which Xconomy reported last week raised $8.2 million in a third round of venture capital. In addition to the advances in biomaterials development at the firm, we discussed his recent award of a fellowship with the New England Clean Energy Council.

Carbeck, who is also chief scientist at Cambridge, MA-based nanotech research firm Nano-Terra, is not as recognized in the Boston area as some of his Arsenal co-founders, such as Harvard’s George Whitesides or MIT inventor Bob Langer. Still, Carbeck is very much on the leading edge of translating discoveries in material science for use in medical products, clean technology, and a variety of other disciplines. (Nano-Terra, in fact, is open to tackling R&D challenges in multiple industries except for life sciences.)

He’s also one of the top chemical engineers to come out of the Harvard lab of Whitesides, the chairman and initial inventor at Nano-Terra. (Whitesides’ other protégés include North Bridge Venture Partners general partner Carmichael Roberts and John Rogers, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.)

At Arsenal, Carbeck oversees development of biomedical devices in the fields of cardiology and ophthalmology. He guarded some of the fine details of the products under development, but he shed new light on some of the problems they hope to solve.

The startup is developing devices with materials that can treat arterial disease at the molecular and cellular level—rather than simply dealing with the problem mechanically with an arterial stent to prop open clogged arteries. It’s also studying materials that could deliver drugs to different regions of the eye. The company is exploring multiple other medical uses for proprietary materials at the firm, he says. Interestingly, Arsenal was not founded around a specific technology, yet subsequent to its launch has developed its own materials and gained rights to other technologies from Langer’s lab at MIT as well as research institutions not affiliated with the firm.

“I guess I see the world through the eyes of a …Next Page »

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