Plans for IPOs and venture funding dominated the New England deals news this week.

—A new seed fund, backed by venture firm New Enterprise Associates and hosted by Harvard, came out of the woodwork last week. The Experiment Fund will invest up to $250,000 in seed funding in selected startups, with a focus on technologies that come out of Cambridge, MA. The news broke just a few days ahead of Facebook—the one that got away—revealing its plans to go public.

—Radius Health, a Cambridge-based startup working on treatments for osteoporosis, filed paperwork indicating its plans to raise as much as $86 million in an initial public offering.

—A PricewaterhouseCoopers and National Venture Capital Association report shows a mixed picture for life sciences investing in 2011, my colleague Arlene reported. Biotech companies raised $4.7 billion, showing a 22 percent increase over 2010, but the deal volume for the sector dropped 9 percent to 446 transactions. Medical devices companies also showed an increase in funding dollars but a drop in number of deals.

—Cambridge-based Brightcove set the price range of its initial public offering at $10 to $12 per share, according to an amended filing with the SEC. The video hosting startup plans to sell 5 million shares, and give underwriters the option to purchase another 750,000 shares. Brightcove first filed paperwork last August indicating it intended to raise $50 million in an IPO.

—Synchroneuron of Waltham, MA, nabbed $6 million in Series A funding from Morningside Technology Ventures. The startup is developing treatments for movement disorders such as tardive dyskinesia.

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There, sitting about 10 feet in front of me, was the ninth most powerful person in the world, according to Forbes.

Dressed in his signature t-shirt and jeans, you wouldn’t be able to tell Mark Zuckerberg apart from a random college student outside the lecture hall. As he took his seat and began speaking about the technical challenges he encountered at Facebook, the fun he had during his (short) time at Harvard, and his enthusiasm for recruiting people to join the company, I could tell he was at ease in front of this crowd of hand-picked computer science and engineering students. He even cracked programming jokes: “My roommate decided to learn how to program and bought a book about Perl. Who writes anything in Perl?” Mark laughed. The audience laughed. It was a truly inspiring homecoming for Harvard’s most recent entrepreneurial success.

His talk was infused with anecdotes about his time at Harvard. Mark originally thought he would be a Classics major before he decided to major in computer science. Dustin Moskovitz, Zuckerberg’s technical co-founder, learned how to program on the fly, having only taken the introductory computer science course at Harvard. He even used to sit in the quintessential Harvard pizza place, Pinocchio’s, to discuss the technology world with his friends.

Harvard today has support for entrepreneurs that Mark could never have imagined as a student back in 2004. The new Harvard Innovation Lab is bound to be where the next Facebook prospers, and students today mentor each other and forge connections like never before. (My own mentors, Peter Boyce ’13 and Andrew Rosenthal HBS ’12 probably know all of the Boston tech ecosystem between them.) Students simply have the resources to start the companies they want. Add that to the burgeoning Boston startup community, and you have an environment that even Mark admits would have kept him in Boston.

The entire experience was surreal for everybody in the room. For many people, including myself, Mark Zuckerberg was the reason we came to Harvard. The promise of being the next Zuckerberg or Gates was often too alluring to turn down. Having heard from many of my friends who also attended the talk, the general feeling is that Harvard will now have a second uptick in startup fever, after an initial excitement following the release of The Social Network.

Hamed, Zuckerberg, and Tivli founders Nicholas Krasney and Ho Tuan at the Harvard Innovation Lab

The irony is that part of Mark’s motivation to drop out came from a visit that Bill Gates made to Harvard when Mark was still a student here. “The advice Bill gave me when he came to Harvard was to take time off and build something,” he said. While Mark’s talk was billed as a recruiting talk, there was an undercurrent of the same advice: join us at Facebook for an amazing career, but don’t be afraid to make something cool on your own and run with it.

At the end of his talk, Mark made his way to the Harvard Innovation Lab for a surprise visit. He walked around the building with i-Lab Director Gordon Jones and i-Lab coordinator Neal Doyle, observing the huge new space that will foster innovation across Harvard University and the Boston community as a whole. He watched as Tivli founders Nicholas Krasney and Ho Tuan demoed their live TV streaming startup, built completely at Harvard.

“Wow,” Mark said. “This is actually pretty cool.”

It was a unique moment of one generation of entrepreneurs fostering and encouraging the next generation of startup founders. Indeed, the next Mark Zuckerberg may very well have been in the room Monday. Let’s just hope they don’t code their idea in Perl.

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Xconomy and the folks at WGBH (Bob Seay, to be precise) are at it again: bringing you the latest and greatest in news from Boston’s innovation community. The Xconomy Report airs every Friday morning at 7:49am on 89.7 FM. To find out about the project that both The Who’s Roger Daltrey and actress Julie Andrews are funding, have a listen on WGBH’s website.

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As you may or may not know, it’s not just Xconomy’s staff editors who are powering our website with thoughtful reflections on the happenings in each of our city’s high-tech and innovation communities. We have more or less a dream team of innovators in each city who write for our Xconomist Forum, submitting posts on subjects plaguing their fields or assembling around a big news event (for example, the death of a tech icon like Steve Jobs). Once a year in each city, we get together to celebrate that group of inventors, entrepreneurs, (seed, angel, and venture) investors, academics, lawyers, and more.

This year’s Boston-area Xconomist reception, sponsored by Goodwin Procter and BDO (thank you!), was held at the hot new Kendall Square restaurant Catalyst, a great venue for our high-caliber guest list. Among the attendees? Mathematica inventor Stephen Wolfram, Nobel laureate Phillip Sharp, Harvard geneticist George Church, retired Vertex Pharmaceuticals CEO Josh Boger, venture capitalist Rich Levandov, and iRobot founders Rod Brooks and Helen Greiner. I could tell you more, but that’d be ruining the fun of flipping through these snapshots.

	NEXT IMAGE >>
	Young guns – Left to right: Rob Go from NextView Ventures; Phil Beauregard and Matt Grace from Objective Logistics.
	photo by Keith Spiro of Kendall Press

… Next Page »

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Can drugs that supposedly “activate” a controversial target—sirtuin proteins—stop or even reverse the aging process? A new report this week said “No.” According to this report, published Wednesday night in Nature, sirtuin activators do not extend lifespan in roundworms and flies and earlier studies that said they did were flawed. Nonetheless, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) continues to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into developing drugs to hit these targets—more about their findings below—and if the drugs work, for whatever reason, the scientific squabbles will not matter.

I recently had the chance to hear Harvard professor David Sinclair talk publicly about his and GSK’s research into sirtuin activators. Sinclair was the scientific founder of Sirtris and he reported at a forum on longevity in Cambridge, MA, that GSK has high hopes of near-term confirmation in mice that some sirtuin activators do extend lifespan. Based on its continued investment, GSK still believes that the $720 million acquisition of Sirtris in 2008 was a smart one.

The Nature report, just the latest in a series of publications that question the sirtuin-longevity link, will be even tougher for Sinclair and other sirtuin researchers to overcome. The new research reported that sirtuin proteins, when overexpressed in nematode worms and fruit flies, do not actually have an effect on longevity. This directly contradicts the original publications linking Sir2 and other sirtuins with increased lifespan. The new report further goes on to contradict the landmark 2006 paper, also published in Nature, in which Harvard researchers led by Sinclair reported that mice fed resveratrol which, they demonstrated using expression analysis, activated sirtuins, live on average 20 percent longer and in some cases much longer than that.

The same researchers, both at University College London, went on the record as sirtuin skeptics in 2007. David Gems and Linda Partridge then set out to prove their claim that the original sirtuin and resveratrol findings, which led to the founding and eventual acquisition of Sirtris, were irreparably flawed. Building on earlier reports that the round worms used in the original studies carried a gene that control organisms did not carry, and that it was this gene that predisposed the worms to live longer, Gems and Partridge showed in this paper that organisms identical to one another except for the expression level of sirtuins could not be made to live longer.

Sirtuin research is nothing if not contentious. Apparently eager to fan the flames, Nature in the same issue this week published a rebuttal from Leonard Guarente, the author … Next Page »

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Looking back on my SATs, I felt like I might have been at a disadvantage having prepped for the test with a book, as opposed to a living, breathing coach or instructor with a bit more personalization.

Sunnyvale, CA-based Faqden, whose founding team includes Harvard and MIT alums, has set its sight on combining the best things you can get from a book and from a teacher. It’s all coming together in a mobile app that it calls IntelliVocab.

The app quizzes users on vocabulary terms but offers the more interactive, tailored experience of personal coach. It has versions on the iPhone for SAT, GRE, and GMAT, and is also available on the Android platform.

IntelliVocab works by using research from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and MIT Web Semantics Labs to profile users to figure out how advanced they are already in their vocabulary, says founder Irfan Mohammed. Each of their answers to initial vocab questions develops this profile. The app processes this information, and uses it to determine the type of repetition and frequency of questions that would be best suited to the user’s learning style. It also can also decide which format of question—synonyms, antonyms, fill-in-the-blanks, or straight definitions—the user best responds to for learning the word.

Faqden is also using its technology to develop an app aimed at helping professionals prepare for interviews for high tech jobs and one for helping users learn Latin, says Mohammed, who completed a joint master’s degree in management and engineering at MIT this year. He took a six-month break from MIT to work at the San Francisco-based mobile app design and development firm Sourcebits.

“We’re re-skinning the app and targeting new markets,” Mohammed says.

The firm has about 200,000 registered users in its database for IntelliVocab, which hit app stores earlier this year. The application is currently free, but will upgrade to “freemium” model sometime September, requiring users to pay for any words beyond the first 100, says Mohammed.

The education apps aren’t Faqden’s only mobile business opportunity. The company is also developing mobile versions of existing Web apps like Basecamp, for the iPad, as part of an enterprise-focused business unit.

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This week was dominated by financing news from younger, privately held New England drug developers and diagnostics and devices firms.

—Waltham, MA-based Proteon Therapeutics inked a $15.2 million equity- and options-based investment. The firm is developing drugs for kidney and vascular diseases.

—Fluidnet, an Amesbury, MA-based developer of electronic infusion pumps for administering IV fluids, raised $19.8 million of an equity offering that could total $25 million.

—Sudbury, MA- and Shreveport, LA-based Embera NeuroTherapeutics took in $4.5 million in Series A funding to put toward advancing its treatment for addictions, EMB-001, through a safety study and subsequent clinical trials. The money came from existing backers Louisiana Ventures, Louisiana Fund I, and Themelios Ventures, as well as other private investors.

—Lexington, MA-based lung disease drug developer Pulmatrix announced it raised $14 million in Series B financing and revealed its plans to advance its lead compound, PUR118, as a new treatment for cystic fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The funding came from all of Pulmatrix’s existing investors, which includes Polaris Venture Partners, 5AM Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, and Novartis Venture Fund.

—Healthcare companies in Massachusetts collectively raised $134 million in July, according to data from CB Insights‘ FundingFlash, a daily roundup of companies receiving venture capital, angel investment, and growth equity funding. Cambridge, MA-based obesity drug developer Zafgen led the way last month with $33 million.

—SEC documents revealed a couple of life sciences-related financings in the middle of this week: Cambridge-based Daktari Diagnostics ($1.17 million in debt-based funding), and Lebanon, NH-based PharmaSecure ($2.5 million of a $6 million equity offering). The companies are working on HIV diagnostic systems and medicine counterfeiting prevention, respectively.

—Xconomy Seattle and national biotech editor Luke Timmerman profiled Tony Coles as part of our new Xconomist of the Week feature. Coles, now the CEO of South San Francisco-based Onyx Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ONXX), spent his residency training in cardiology and internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He got his master’s degree in public health from Harvard University and held a research fellowship at Harvard Medical School.

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This week’s New England deals list includes a mix of life sciences and IT companies.

—Lexington, MA-based T2 Biosystems, a developer of a system for identifying biological substances such as proteins, small molecules, viruses, and DNA more cheaply and quickly than existing methods, took in $23 million in Series D financing. New T2 investor Aisling Capital led the round, which also included return backers Flagship Ventures, Polaris Venture Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners, Physic Ventures, Partners Healthcare, Arcus Ventures, RA Capital, Camros Capital, and WS Investments.

—Boston-based online data storage firm Carbonite raised $62.5 million in an initial public offering, selling 6.25 million shares at $10 per share. That was the bottom end of a range ($10 to $11) that Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB) had already lowered earlier on the day it priced. Late last month it had said it expected to price the shares at $15 to $17 each.

—My colleague Greg wrote about how Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development is looking to raise another fund of $20 to $30 million, up from its $10 million “Accelerator Fund,” created to help the school’s scientists commercialize their inventions.

—Amesbury, MA-based Fluidnet, a maker of electronic infusion pumps for administering IV fluids, raised $19.8 million of an offering that could hit $25 million, according to an SEC filing.

—Proteon Therapeutics, a Waltham, MA-based kidney and vascular drug developer, nabbed $15.2 million from 19 investors, an SEC filing showed.

—Lexington-based Pulmatrix raised $14 million in Series B financing, to bring its total funding raised to $60 million. The investment came … Next Page »

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Boston-based Foundation Medicine has only been around for about two years, but it’s already making friends in big places. Today the company—which is developing advanced cancer diagnostics—announced a collaboration with Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG), based in Summit, NJ. Celgene plans to use Foundation Medicine’s genomics testing technology in trials of cancer drugs, in the hopes of identifying patients who are most likely to respond well to the medicines. The deal comes just four months after Foundation Medicine announced a collaboration with Novartis (NYSE: NVS) to optimize a genome panel for use in cancer research.

The financial details of the Celgene and Novartis deals were not announced, but the big-name backing is vital to Foundation, says Michael Pellini, a diagnostics-industry veteran who joined the startup as CEO on May 12. “These are two fantastic partners to have at this stage, because they bring tremendous insight into cancer biology and drug development,” Pellini says. “They will help us refine our tests.”

Foundation Medicine is built around the increasingly popular idea that cancer treatments should be tailored to individual patients. Foundation’s technology, which it’s currently marketing to pharmaceutical companies, uses high-throughput DNA sequencing to analyze tumors for alterations in more than 200 cancer-related genes. Pellini expects that number to reach 300 “in the coming months.”

Even before the Celgene and Novartis deals, Foundation Medicine’s pedigree had helped it win over … Next Page »

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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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Vivaldi Biosciences is a rare and highly sought after property in New York City: a promising biotech startup. Why rare? Because office space is so expensive, and wet-lab space so hard to find, that most biotech companies that originate in NYC end up fleeing for some other city that has more to offer them. But Vivaldi’s far-flung startup team—which includes folks from NYC, Boston, and San Francisco—went to great lengths to keep the four-year-old company in the Big Apple.

Now Vivaldi is making strides towards reaching its first big milestone. Next quarter, the company hopes to get an application into the FDA to begin human trials of a novel flu vaccine—a product that Vivaldi executives believe could be the first truly effective vaccine in elderly people, who are most likely to suffer deadly complications from the virus. “Current vaccines leave 30 percent [of elderly people] unprotected,” says Elliott Kieff, a professor of medicine at Harvard who co-founded Vivaldi and now serves as chairman of its scientific advisory board. “What’s wonderful about this concept is it’s an entirely new strategy for attenuating the virus.”

Vivaldi’s technology originated at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Scientists Peter Palese and Adolfo García-Sastre discovered that a protein produced by a gene called Influenza NS1 prevents flu-infected cells from producing interferon. That’s a problem, because interferon really helps the human body fight off the flu, by blocking the virus from replicating.

The scientists went on to discover that deleting part of the NS1 gene essentially immobilized the flu virus, because it stimulated the cells’ interferon response, which then prevented the virus from reproducing. Studies in animals suggest that administering this mutant virus as a vaccine provides cross protection against multiple strains of the flu.

The technology could greatly streamline the annual flu-vaccine production process. Today’s vaccines are “trivalent,” meaning they raise immunity against the three influenza strains (two type A strains and one type B strain) that are expected to be dominant in the upcoming flu season. Vivaldi has generated a master truncated NS1 vaccine for all influenza A strains, and second one for all influenza B strains. The company is also developing rapid-production techniques that could make the vaccine useful in a pandemic, when huge quantities need to be produced and delivered to vaccination centers in a hurry.

The effort to turn Mount Sinai’s flu discoveries into a company started 3,000 miles away, in the office of Douglass Given (pictured above), a partner at Bay City Capital in San Francisco. Given, a scientist and physician trained in infectious diseases, had received his Ph.D. in Kieff’s lab. “I wanted to do something … Next Page »

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Need a little fashion advice? Click onto WingTipIt, a Web site launching this week, and assemble your own virtual closet of clothes you covet—then seek feedback from friends via Facebook. Or if accessories are more your thing, click over to Send the Trend, fill out a quick survey, and you’ll receive a list of jewels, sunglasses, and other accessories tailored to your personal style.

Perhaps you enjoy discovering new designers. No problem: At FashionStake, you can buy the latest offerings from up-and-coming designers, vote for your favorites, and compare notes with other fashionistas.

WingTipIt, Send the Trend, and FashionStake—all based in New York—are just a few of the many shopping sites that have stormed the Web in the last few months. Each has its own twist, but they all share a common goal: to make online shopping way more interactive and personal than the department stores can.

“Retailers are constantly looking for ways to connect with their customers in a meaningful way,” says WingTipIt co-founder Kimberly Skelton, who worked in real estate and marketing before attending Columbia Business School. While a student, she also spent a summer working in the e-commerce group at Tory Burch.

Carla Holtze (left) and Kimberly Skelton of WingTipIt

Skelton’s e-commerce experience infused in her a desire to solve a nagging problem: Retailers can convert browsers into customers much more effectively in bricks-and-mortar stores than they can online. “In stores, customers can speak to sales agents, they can shop with their friends. They can get validation from other people,” she says. “We wanted to bring that online.”

Register on WingTipIt, and you can add a bookmarklet to your toolbar, so when you’re shopping on a retailer’s site and you see something you might want to buy, you can add it to your virtual closet with one click of the bookmarklet.

The site is fully integrated with Facebook and Twitter. So once you amass a collection of clothes, you can tweet about it, or post a link to it on Facebook, and invite your friends to comment. Or, if your birthday is coming up, you can suggest that your friends … Next Page »

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[Updated. 4/8/11. 8:09 am Eastern. See updates to section on On-Q-ity.] T2 Biosystems has chosen deadly blood-borne yeast infections as the lead targets of its system for rapidly and accurately diagnosing diseases. And the Lexington, MA-based firm is revealing results this morning from lab experiments that show the potential of its diagnostic for Candida infections to improve upon the current culture-based methods of spotting the fungal invaders.

The company says that its magnetic biosensor approach was able identify five species of Candida—the most common and deadly form of hospital-acquired fungal infections—from whole blood samples and provide a result in less than two hours. This is much faster than the two or more days it can take to conduct blood culture tests in which the fungi are grown and analyzed to provide a result. Shortening the time needed to diagnose patients’ specific yeast infections enables doctors to put them on the proper antifungal treatment quickly, potentially saving their lives, John McDonough, T2 Biosystems’ CEO, said.

The firm is planning to make the Candida test the first application of its diagnostic system, which has the potential to be used in detecting a wide variety of molecular biomarkers for diseases. The firm plans to seek FDA clearance for its magnetic biosensor system and Candida test in 2012. McDonough says that the company is also pursuing other tests for use with its system, including one for bacterial infections, but he declined to provide specifics about the type of bugs or timing of the commercial release.

T2 Biosystems, which has raised about $31 million from investors since it was founded in 2006, has been one of the high-flyers among developers of advanced diagnostics. The firm has engineered a desktop diagnostic system that uses magnetic resonance—using magnets that are about four inches in diameter as opposed to large magnets used in bulky in MRI systems—and nanotechnology to detect all manner of biological substances in a range of samples types such as blood, saliva, and urine. The small size, speed of results, and broad applicability of the system give it the potential to transform how diseases are diagnosed, the company claims.

Meanwhile, On-Q-ity has revealed research of its improved method of … Next Page »

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Boston-based nonprofit firm Diagnostics For All announced today that it has nabbed a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department for International Development, to put toward developing three diagnostic tests for the agriculture space. The firm will use its diagnostics platform to develop a test for detecting milk spoilage, one for targeting the growth of mold in corn, and a third to determine whether cows are pregnant or ready for breeding to help farmers better manage their herds. Diagnostics For All, a Harvard spinout led by veteran biotech executive Una Ryan, previously focused entirely on tests in the human health field, like a paper-based diagnostic product for measuring liver toxicity in HIV and AIDS patients that the firm plans to begin testing later this year.

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—Cambridge, MA-based Quanterix partnered up with Novartis Diagnostics, the unit of healthcare giant Novartis that tests the safety of 80 percent of the U.S. blood supply. Novartis will run tests to see how effective Quanterix’s device is at pinpointing a protein biomarker in the blood that is linked to an undisclosed neurological disorder. Terms of the arrangement weren’t disclosed.

—New York pharmaceutical company Forest Laboratories (NYSE: FRX) paid $1.2 billion ($30 per share) upfront to acquire Newton, MA-based Clinical Data (NASDAQ: CLDA), a drug developer that won FDA approval last month for its anti-depressant. Forest could pay another $6 per share to Clinical Data shareholders if the drug, vilazodone, hits certain sales goals over the next seven years.

—Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN) formed an alliance with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to make the companies’ systems more compatible and easier for healthcare professionals to use together to get a single view of patient records for hospital and outpatient visits.

—Cambridge-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) announced it had passed a pivotal clinical trial of 161 cystic fibrosis patients who were randomly assigned to the company’s VX-770 pill or  a placebo. Those who received the Vertex drug showed a 17 percent relative improvement in their ability to force out air from their lungs in one second (a measure of lung function). Vertex’s stock shot up 15 percent the morning of the news, to hit $44.03 per share at 10:14am.

—Greg took a look at iAMscientist, a Brookline, MA-based startup developing a global community and resource site for researchers and institutions in science, technology, and medicine. The company has raised $1 million in seed funding from a group that includes famed Harvard chemist George Whitesides, and more than a dozen companies, such as Genzyme.

—Cambridge-based Metamark Genetics is moving out of stealth mode, wrote my colleague Ryan, who caught up with the company’s relatively new CEO Mark Straley. The startup—which was founded by top scientists at Harvard and elsewhere—is out to release a molecular test to provide prognostic information that will help physicians make better treatment decisions.

—Waltham, MA-based lab instruments and services provider Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO) announced it had sold off its Athena Diagnostics and Lancaster Laboratories units for a total of $940 million in cash, to boost shareholder value. Madison, NJ-based lab testing firm Quest Diagnostics is paying $740 million for Athena, and Eurofins Scientific of Brussels, Belgium, will shell out $200 million to acquire Lancaster, a provider of contract testing and analysis services to pharmaceutical companies.

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The space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff on January 28, 1986—twenty-five years ago today. The disaster took the lives of six astronauts and one schoolteacher, and shook NASA to its core. Like other televised national traumas, it burned itself into the memories of millions of people. I was just a spectator to the catastrophe, watching speechless and horrified along with everyone else as the video clips were played and replayed on television. But that day altered the direction of my life in unusually concrete ways, and I can’t let the anniversary pass without a bit of reflection.

In January 1986 I was a 19-year-old freshman at Harvard College. On the morning of January 28, I was working on an assignment in the computer room at the university’s science center, and a student who had just taken a seat at the terminal next to mine mentioned the accident. I didn’t believe him at first. But he seemed serious enough about the story to make me nervous.

This was years before the advent of the Web—I couldn’t simply log on and check the news. So I got up and literally ran back to my dorm room, where my roommates and I had a small color TV. I remember thinking, as I charged through Harvard Yard, that the story couldn’t possibly be true. Hadn’t the shuttle traveled safely into space dozens of times before? Didn’t the engineers at NASA know how to prevent such a disaster? But sure enough, when I turned on the TV, there were the images of the spaceship disintegrating against an azure sky, sending tendrils of smoke and flames in all directions.

Like many people that day, I spent hours watching the coverage unfold, culminating with President Reagan’s eloquent televised address. The horror of the event was immediate for me. It was awful to imagine what the seven crew members must have experienced as the shuttle broke up, and to realize what a huge setback the accident represented for the U.S. space program, which I had followed with zeal since I was old enough to watch TV.

But the disaster’s real influence settled in only over the next several months, as investigators such as physicist Richard Feynman worked out the chain of events that had led to the explosion. As it turned out, a rubber O-ring in one of the solid rocket boosters, stiffened by that morning’s cold weather, had failed, allowing flames to burst through, in turn causing the shuttle’s main fuel tank to explode. It was such a predictable and seemingly preventable problem that for the first time in my life I began to question NASA’s competence, and to understand just how important the human element in any large technological system can be. On a broader level, I began to look at all technological and scientific endeavors with a much more skeptical—-one might even say disillusioned—eye.

I had a work-study job that year doing data analysis for an X-ray astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Within weeks after the accident it was clear that the massive satellite that this astronomer had been helping to design, which had been scheduled to go into space aboard a shuttle, would be delayed for years while NASA retrenched. This was a big professional blow for him, and for many other scientists whose instruments could only get into space aboard the shuttle; it affected the whole mood at the center over the following months. This, in turn, contributed to my own growing disenchantment with the job and with my long-cherished idea of becoming an astronomer or astrophysicist. (I hasten to add that I wasn’t very good at math, which would have derailed my plans eventually anyway.)

By the end of my sophomore year, less than a year and a half after the Challenger disaster, I had decided to switch majors from physics and astronomy to the history of science. In this discipline, my professors encouraged me to think skeptically about ideas that I had previously accepted uncritically, such as “American know-how” and the inevitability of technological progress. Eventually I went on to graduate studies in the history of technology at MIT and wrote a doctoral thesis about the social and political effects of technological disasters. That, in turn, helped launch me on a career in science and technology journalism. (Though there were also plenty of other influences—such as my unexpected detour into campus journalism at the Harvard Independent, and a chance encounter with Carl Sagan. But that’s another story.)

For me, the Challenger disaster hit at the moment when I was perhaps most impressionable—when I was in the middle of defining my world-view and choosing my future. It taught me that the world was full of risks I hadn’t contemplated; that America was not invulnerable; that extravagant endeavours can go extravagantly wrong. These are all lessons that people slightly older than myself probably learned from Vietnam, Apollo 13, and Watergate—and we certainly relearned them as a nation when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11 and the shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry in 2003. But for me, Challenger was the veil-lifting moment. And it’s all still symbolized in my mind by the iconic TV images of the exploding spacecraft, its twin boosters veering across the sky like ghostly fireworks.

This article is adapted from an essay I originally wrote for the book A Creative Guide to Exploring Your Life by Graham Gordon Ramsay and Holly Barlow Sweet (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2009). Republished by permission.

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2001 is off to a running start for dealmakers in New England’s tech and life sciences sectors, it seems.

—Cambridge, MA-based Genocea Biosciences pulled in a tidy $35 million in a Series B funding round. The vaccine developer, a spinout of Harvard, saw contributions from new investors Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation, MP Healthcare Venture Management, and Skyline Ventures. Existing Genocea backers Auriga Partners, Cycad Group, Lux Capital Management, Morningside Ventures, Polaris Venture Partners, and SR One also participated in the deal.

—Rave Wireless, the Framingham, MA-based maker of security and emergency alert software for mobile phones, reported to the SEC that is has raised $4 million in an equity offering. Rave’s previous investors include Sigma Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and RRE Ventures.

—Boston’s Longwood Founders Management capped its first fund at $85 million. The biotech-focused firm, whose partners include Rich Aldrich, Christoph Westphal, and Michelle Dipp, has already made investments in Alnara Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY) in July 2010, and Verastem.

—Littleton, MA-based Movik Networks raised $3 million in a debt offering, according to an SEC filing. Investors in the startup, which makes software for delivering content to mobile devices, include North Bridge Venture Partners and Highland Capital Partners.

—Medical device maker Augmenix raised $3 million in an equity and debt financing round. Catalyst Health Ventures, Pinnacle Ventures, and Versant Ventures have all previously invested in the Waltham, MA-based firm, which makes hydrogel implants for reducing the side effects of radiation therapy.

—Newton, MA-based Zeo, a maker of sleep-tracking gizmos, took in $12.3 million of a planned $15.4 million round of equity financing. Previous backers of Zeo include iD Ventures America and Trident Capital.

—Belmont, MA-based CQuotient, a developer of analytics software for retailers, confirmed that it recently raised $3 million in Series A financing from Bain Capital Ventures. Rama Ramakrishnan, CQuotient ‘s founder and CEO, chatted with Greg about the stealthy startup’s genesis, strategy, and “secret sauce.”

—Location-based gaming startup, SCVNGR, raised $15 million in a funding round led by London-based Balderton Capital and joined by return investors Google Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. TechCrunch reports that the deal put the Cambridge-based startup’s valuation at just over $100 million.

–Affirmed Networks of Acton, MA, raised $1.7 million out of a planned $3.2 million equity offering, according to an SEC filing. Members of Charles River Ventures and Matrix Partners sit on the telecomm startup’s board of directors.

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[Updated. 5:15 Eastern time, 01/03/11. See editor's note.] Genocea Biosciences has found some new investors as well as new executives. The Cambridge, MA-based vaccine discovery and development firm has raised $35 million in a Series B funding round, according to a press release. And the company has recently seen some changes in its top executive positions.

The new financing round will help the Harvard spinout to fund development of its lead vaccine for herpes, which is now in preclinical development. New backers in the deal include Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation, MP Healthcare Venture Management, and Skyline Ventures, according to the press release. They join Genocea’s previous venture benefactors Auriga Partners, Cycad Group, Lux Capital Management, Morningside Ventures, Polaris Venture Partners, and SR One. SR One, a venture unit of drug giant GlaxoSmithKline, led Genocea’s $23 million Series A round in February 2009. The firm says it has now raised $61 million.

A Genocea representative says that Staph Bakali, a biotech and vaccine industry veteran, ended his tenure as the firm’s CEO in September, and is serving on the board of directors. Genocea has also added Seth Hetherington, a former senior vice president of the Research Triangle Park, NC-based biotech Icagen (NASDAQ:ICGN), as its chief medical officer. Hetherington is also a former employee of Glaxo. (Editor’s note: This story originally cited outdated information form Genocea’s website this morning that said Russell Greig was serving as the firm’s acting CEO. He is no longer acting CEO, the company says.)

In these lean times for biotech startups, Genocea has managed to generate a lot of investments without having a drug in human testing. The firm has turned many heads in the drug industry with its technology for rapid development of vaccine candidates. Vaccines have been enjoying an upswing in recent years because of global demand for staples of the business such as flu vaccine as well as sales of newer products like Whitehouse Station, NJ-based drug powerhouse Merck’s (NYSE:MRK) human papillomavirus vaccine Gardasil. In 2009, preventive vaccine sales reached $22.1 billion, according to the research firm Kalorama Information.

My colleague Luke Timmerman has written in greater depth on Genocea’s vaccine antigen discovery technology, which has generated potential vaccines for herpes, malaria, chlamydia, and other diseases.

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Lots of nice deals to report this week from New England’s tech and life sciences sectors.

—E-mail archiving provider Sonian indicated to the SEC that it had raised $4 million in an equity offering that could total $9 million. Previous backers of the Needham, MA-based firm include Prism VentureWorks and Summerhill Venture Partners.

—BG Medicine of Waltham, MA, set the targeted price range for its proposed IPO at $13 to $15 per share. With 4.75 million shares in the offering, that means the diagnostics firm could raise up to $71.25 million.

—Cambridge, MA-based Semprus BioSciences, an MIT spinoff out to commercialize new coatings for medical devices, raised $18 million in Series B equity financing. SR One and Foundation Medical Partners, both new investors, led the deal, which was joined by existing backers 5AM Ventures and Pangaea Ventures.

—Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO), the Waltham-based provider of research tools and services, agreed to shell out $2.1 billion in cash for the outstanding shares Sunnyvale, CA-based Dionex (NASDAQ: DNEX).

—French drug maker Sanofi-Aventis extended its tender offer for the shares of Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme (NASDAQ:GENZ) until January 21. Genzyme has repeatedly said that the unsolicited $69 per share offer, worth $18.5 billion in total, undervalues the company and its pipeline of drugs.

—Woburn, MA-based video game developer 8D World closed a Series B financing round worth $5.25 million. Japan’s Mizuho Capital and return backers Spark Capital and Gobi Partners participated in the deal.

—Nano-Terra of Cambridge raised $17.2 million in an offering of equity and rights. The round appears to be the biggest one yet for the 5-year-old nanotech development firm, which is out to commercialize technology from the lab of Harvard chemist George Whitesides.

—Rive Technology, also of Cambridge, raised $25 million in a Series C financing round led by new investor Blackstone Group and joined by Charles River Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures, and Nth Power. The cash will help Rive do commercial tests of its MIT-developed catalyst technology, which is designed to let oil refiners get more useable fuel out of crude oil.

—Boston’s SensorLogic, a provider of cloud-based platforms for deploying applications across multiple devices, raised $5 million from existing investors. Sevin Rosen Funds and Boston Millennia Partners led the deal and UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund and Covera Ventures joined in.

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Pulmatrix might have just the defense for soldiers against respiratory invaders. Now the Lexington, MA-based biotech firm has won a $5.7 million grant to advance its technology that originated at MIT and Harvard for defense purposes.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of the U.S. Department of Defense, awarded the firm the grant to fund research for two years that is intended to lead to an inhaled dry-powder therapy, according to the company. The idea is to provide a soldier with one inhaled therapy that could treat and prevent multiple lung infections, including those brought on by natural pathogens or acts of biological warfare. The treatment could also be given to civilians, according to the company.

CEO Robert Connelly explained that this grant complements the work his firm is already doing to develop inhaled dry-powder therapies for reducing the effects of respiratory ailments such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Yet this defense award calls for the firm’s therapy to be delivered with a small inhaler that a soldier would carry during a mission. First, though, the company needs to develop the powder formula for the inhaler, then develop the inhaler itself.

“If you put yourself in the shoes of a soldier who is [at war] somewhere around the world, it’s not known what weapon or what viruses that are specific to that locale are in the air,” Connelly said. “So off the bat what you get with our technology is a take-on-all-comers approach” to combating multiple inhaled pathogens.

Defense agencies have known of the startup for years. Founded in 2003 with technology from the labs of Bob Langer at MIT and David Edwards at Harvard University, the firm received some of its early support through $1.8 million in defense- and homeland security-related funding from the U.S. government’s Technical Support Working Group, according to Connelly.

The DARPA grant will support work of the company’s core technology that has already helped the firm raise $45 million in equity investments from … Next Page »

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