Ironwood Pharmaceuticals is gearing up for the possibility of an IPO. The Cambridge, MA-based developer of a new treatment for bowel disorders like for irritable bowel syndrome and chronic constipation said it may raise as much as $172.5 million from investors through the deal, according to a prospectus filed late today.

The proposed offering would be underwritten by JP Morgan Securities, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, and Wedbush PacGrow Life Sciences. The prospectus doesn’t list how many shares it hopes to sell, or what the price range will be. Its proposed ticker is (NASDAQ: IRWD).

The proposed IPO filing doesn’t come as a surprise—we raised this question to the company last month when it added Genentech’s former chief financial officer, David Ebersman, to its board of directors. Ironwood has certainly put itself in a position to go public. Earlier this month, it passed the first two of four pivotal clinical trials, demonstrating that its drug is an effective new treatment for chronic constipation. The company has racked up a deficit of $290 million since its founding in 1998, yet it had $98.9 million left in the bank at the end of September according to today’s filing, so it’s not in urgent need of cash. Its lead drug candidate, linaclotide, treats chronic constipation that affects an estimated 26 million Americans, there are few available therapies for it, and the Ironwood drug has a way of working that’s unlike anything on the market. The U.S. healthcare system spends an estimated $25 billion on treating irritable bowel syndrome.

“We believe that linaclotide could present patients and healthcare practitioners with a unique therapy for a major medical need not yet met by existing therapies,” the company wrote in its prospectus.

Ironwood has no products currently on the market, but it has secured partnerships with three organizations to help commercialize linaclotide around the world. They are Forest Laboratories in the U.S., Laboratorios Almirall in Europe, and Astellas Pharma in certain Asian countries. The company has 167 employees.

Who stands to make the most money if Ironwood can complete an IPO? Ridgeback Capital Investments has the biggest stake in the company at 13.4 percent prior to the offering, followed by Venrock Associates with 11.3 percent, Polaris Venture Partners at 8.1 percent, and Morgan Stanley with 6.9 percent. Ironwood’s founding CEO, 46-year-old Peter Hecht, has a 5.5 percent stake, while Fidelity Biosciences has a 4.8 percent holding.

Ironwood still has a way to go before it can start generating cash flow from its first product. Results are expected from the additional two clinical trials of linaclotide in the second half of 2010, and the company will need time after that to submit its application to U.S. and European regulators and wait for them to complete their reviews.

If Ironwood can pull off this IPO, plenty of other biotech companies will to it as a bellwether to rekindle investors’ appetites for speculative biotech companies developing new products. Last month, Seattle-based Omeros (NASDAQ: OMER) completed the first IPO of a traditional U.S. biotech in the development stage since February 2008. While the company raised $62 million, it was a flop for investors. Omeros stock is down 25 percent from its IPO price of $10.

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Seattle-based Blue Marble Energy, the developer of renewable energy and specialty chemicals from biomass, said it has received a $2 million state grant through a partnership with the Odessa Public Development Authority. The company plans to use the grant, from the Washington Community Economic Revitalization Board, to build a refinery in Lincoln County that will turn organic biomass from around Eastern Washington into as much as 858 metric tons of biochemicals and 700 metric tons of green ammonia per year, says CEO Kelly Ogilvie, in an e-mail. The facility is expected to create 30 to 50 full-time jobs in its first year, he says.

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[Update: 1:55 pm Eastern, 11/20/09] After a bitter standoff earlier this year with billionaire investor Carl Icahn over alleged mismanagement, Cambridge, MA-based Biogen Idec now faces another sharp attack from a major shareholder.

New York-based HealthCor Management, a hedge fund that invests in health and biotech companies, said today in a regulatory filing that Biogen (NASDAQ: BIIB) overpays CEO James Mullen, that his performance has been poor, and that the company has a record of “excessive and fruitless” spending on R&D and little regard for its shareholders. HealthCor portfolio managers Joseph Healey and Arthur Cohen, in a letter dated November 18, urged the board to “revisit” Mullen’s compensation, cut research spending, and start buying back shares to boost the stock price. HealthCor said it holds 3.65 million shares, or about a 1.3 percent stake in Biogen, and it has held a position for more than a year.

HealthCor is urging the board to turn things around by buying back $500 million to $1 billion worth of stock annually. That would reduce the supply of available shares, and increase the value of those that remain on the market.

“We fear that continued acquiescence to the status quo will be viewed as an indictment of the Board’s lack of focus on shareholder value creation,” HealthCor wrote in a letter to the board, which was disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

[Update with company response, 1:55 pm Eastern, 11/20/09.] Biogen Idec “actively engages with our shareholders and we appreciate their input,” says company spokeswoman Jennifer Neiman. That said, she also noted that Biogen has already done share repurchases worth $5 billion since 2004, and last month its board authorized an additional $1 billion of share repurchases.

HealthCor said in its letter that it has been arguing for changes at Biogen for more than a year. The fund noted that the company’s stock has seen no real growth for six years, and is currently trading near levels seen before the company filed for FDA approval of natalizumab (Tysabri) in 2004. (The stock was selling for $44.26 per share on February 17, 2004, and was at $46.05 at the time HealthCor wrote its most recent letter on November 18, 2009.)

While “investors have been left holding the bag,” in HealthCor’s words, the firm …Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based Cambridgesoft, which makes software for life sciences companies, disclosed in regulatory documents filed November 17 that it has raised $31.3 million in new equity-based financing. Cambridgesoft first announced the funding round (though not the amount) in a November 16 release that named new investor Health Evolution Partners and existing investor Goldman Sachs as the funders in the round.

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Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN), the developer of what it hopes will be the first FDA-approved treatment to actively stimulate the immune system against cancer, said today the U.S. regulatory agency has received its amended application and set a deadline of May 1, 2010 to complete its review. The company is seeking clearance to start selling sipuleucel-T (Provenge) for men with prostate cancer that’s no longer controlled by standard chemical castration therapies. The application includes data from a 512-patient study which showed the drug could extend lives by a median of four months when compared with a placebo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We hope to make this a regular feature in our Xconomy cities. It’s a look at small financings of private companies in tech, life sciences, and cleantech. These are deals in the roughly $100,000 to $1 million range, and they’re increasingly where the action is for local entrepreneurs, yet they’re often harder to track than the bigger deals we tend to report on.

And there were at least 12 of these smaller financings in the Northwest in October (see table below), according to ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company tracking VC, angel, and other investments in private companies. ChubbyBrain gets its data from regulatory filings, user submissions, and other sources, and this is the second monthly installment of “under the radar” deals in the Seattle area (you can see the previous deals for September here). The data didn’t include the investors or the stage of financing.

A few quick observations: Like the previous month, most of the financings were in Washington (7 out of 12), but a significant number (5) were in Oregon. Most were equity deals (7), with the rest (5) being debt financings. The majority of financings (9) were in software, Internet, or tech, while a much smaller number (3) were in life sciences and healthcare, and no cleantech or energy deals made the list.

If nothing else, these lists are a cool way to hear about emerging startups we otherwise wouldn’t know about. For example, I’ve heard of Teranode, Nearlyweds, and 1000Museums before, but Zapproved and Intellisist are completely new to me.

Here are the 12 “under the radar” deals from last month:

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Seattle-based Omeros expects to apply for FDA clearance to start selling its first product by the second half of next year, and it also hoping to strike at least one partnership over the next couple of years with a bigger drugmaker, CEO Greg Demopulos said today in his first quarterly update running a public company.

Omeros (NASDAQ: OMER) is “on track” to finish enrollment next year of more than 1,000 patients in clinical trials of its lead anti-inflammatory drug candidate that’s supposed to help patients recover faster from arthroscopic knee surgery, Demopulos said on a conference call with analysts. Results from those pivotal studies should be available by the middle of 2010, and if the results are good, the company will ship off an application to the FDA to start marketing the product before the end of 2010, he said.

The clinical trial update was an important point for Omeros to make in the first week it has been legally allowed to make public statements since the 15-year-old company completed its initial public offering on October 7. Omeros raised about $62 million through the transaction, but its shares lost more than a third of their value in the first two weeks, earning it the dubious distinction of having the worst performing IPO of the year. Omeros has rebounded a bit since then, although its shares are still down 23 percent. Now the company is setting up expectations of events in the year ahead—like an FDA filing or a big corporate alliance—which could entice more investors to lift its stock out of the doldrums.

If the clinical trials go well, “we’ll have the first commercially available drug delivered directly to the surgical site to improve recovery” of knee surgery patients, Demopulos said.

The treatment, called OMS103HP, combines a couple of generic anti-inflammatory drugs into an injection designed to reduce post-operative swelling and speed up recovery time, Demopulos said. The clinical trials aren’t designed to see if the Omeros drug can wean patients off opioid-based pain relievers that circulate throughout the bloodstream, but it’s possible that could be one of the benefits, Demopulos said in response to a question from analyst Mark Monane of Needham & Company. Omeros is also looking at health economic analyses that might help justify the drug’s expense by showing how it speeds up recovery time, reducing rehab costs, and allows people to get back to work sooner than they otherwise would, Demopulos said.

While investors are certainly interested in the knee surgery drug candidate, Omeros has made plain that it isn’t putting all its eggs in that basket.

One key piece of the strategy is based on scientific work that it hopes will enable the company to hit a whole new class of targets on cells that have long been considered “undruggable.” This is the group …Next Page »

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Waltham, MA-based ImmunoGen (NASDAQ: IMGN) said today that Amgen has purchased a second license to develop a treatment that uses ImmunoGen’s technology for linking targeted antibodies to cell-killing agents that make them more potent. ImmunoGen will get $1 million upfront and could receive $34 million worth of milestone payments over time if Amgen is successful in developing a drug against an undisclosed target on cancer cells. Amgen bought its first such license to the ImmunoGen technology in September.

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

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

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

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San Diego-based Ligand Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: LGND) said today it has received $2 million in milestone payments as part of research collaboration with Merck that is due to expire next month. The partnership started with Organon, which was later acquired by Schering-Plough, which was then acquired by Merck.

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Few doctors knew much about a rare brain infection called PML back in 2005, when two patients on a hot new multiple sclerosis drug from Biogen Idec and Elan died from the side effect. The infection, at the time, was generally considered a death sentence. But now with three years of data from more than 60,000 patients worldwide who have taken natalizumab (Tysabri) under strict monitoring by physicians, a new picture is emerging that shows PML is still very much a serious threat, but that it isn’t nearly as deadly as first feared.

While each and every confirmed case of PML, known formally as progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, scares investors in Cambridge, MA-based Biogen (NASDAQ: BIIB) and Ireland-based Elan (NYSE: ELN), I sought to assemble a big picture view of exactly how deadly PML really is when I interviewed Al Sandrock last week. He’s the senior vice president of neurology R&D at Biogen, and an assistant clinical professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

Before diving too far into the numbers about the risk of Tysabri, a little background is required. This drug, an antibody treatment designed to block certain white blood cells that cause MS when they attack nerves, has a history of also making patients vulnerable to infection. Biogen and Elan yanked it off the market in February 2005 after two cases of the brain disease were confirmed among patients taking the drug; a month later, a third case was confirmed. But legions of patients still demanded the drug, considered to be the most effective medicine on the market at reducing the disabling nerve damage from multiple sclerosis flare-ups. The FDA allowed the drug to return to the market in July 2006 after determining its benefits outweighed the risks, but it also forced doctors into a strict monitoring program to keep an eye out for the early signs of PML.

This matters not just for doctors and patients, but for Biogen’s and Elan’s financial futures. The drug, Biogen’s fastest-growing product, generated $560 million in sales in the first nine months of this year. (The importance of this drug is one reason why investors get so ticked at Biogen when it isn’t exactly forthcoming about every newly diagnosed case, but that’s a bone to pick another day.)

When the drug came back on the market, its FDA-approved prescribing information contained a prominent warning that about 1 out of every 1,000 patients on the drug were likely to get PML. But that was really just a forecast, and the actual risk-benefit balance for this drug is really a moving target that shifts over time when a new case is confirmed. So I sought to build a simple chart when I spoke to Sandrock that provides a snapshot of PML cases in February 2005, when the drug was pulled off the market because of the PML risk, versus those confirmed as of yesterday. Here’s what I gathered:

The February 2005 figures came from clinical trial data and formed the foundation for the FDA-required warning of the 1-in-1,000 chance of getting PML. The more recent figures include all the experience of patients who have gotten the drug since it was returned to the market in July 2006. The thing that jumped out at me was the fact that only five of the 27 confirmed patients with PML have died—meaning that the current survival rate stands at over 80 percent.

That curious fact has been buried under a rash of scary headlines …Next Page »

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Drug development programs got extended at two San Diego life sciences companies, while others had some good news on the fund-raising front. We wrap it all up for you here.

—Fate Therapeutics, a startup working to supply “industrialized” stem cells for the pharmaceutical industry without using embryos, said it raised $30 million in venture capital. That brings the total amount raised by the San Diego-based company to about $50 million since its inception two years ago.

—Cadence Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: CADX) said the FDA has delayed its review of the San Diego company’s intravenous pain reliever by three months, to Feb. 12. Cadence provided additional data to the FDA after an advisory panel raised concerns about liver damage from excessive doses of acetaminophen. But Cadence said it remains confident it will win FDA approval of its drug, which contains acetaminophen.

—Carlsbad, CA-based Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ISIS) and its Big Pharma partner, Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ), have extended the timeline for their much-anticipated cholesterol-lowering drug by nearly a year. The companies reported encouraging results from a clinical trial, but noted that four out of 34 patients saw their liver enzymes increase to three times normal, a sign of potential liver damage. The companies plan to tinker with the dose of the injectible drug in future trials.

—San Diego-based NextImage Medical, a developer of a Web-based system for scheduling and managing diagnostic imaging services, reporting raising $5 million in a venture round led by Chrysalis Ventures of Louisville, KY.

—San Diego-based Altair Therapeutics, a company developing inhalable drugs to block inflammatory proteins involved in asthma and other respiratory diseases, has closed on the second part of a Series A venture financing, bringing the total amount raises this year to $17 million.

—San Diego-based Cyntellect, which makes work stations used by biotechs for cell analysis, purification, and processing, raised $15.5 million so far in a secondary round that aims to raise a total of $18.6 million, according to a recent regulatory filing.

—GenVault, a Carlsbad, CA-based company that markets dry-storage technologies that allow scientists to store biological samples at room temperature, said it expects to break even by the end of next year. The startup has raised about $32 million so far.

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Three years have gone by since the region’s top biotech company was taken over by Eli Lilly, so it seemed like a good time to find out where all that talent migrated around the Northwest.

—Icos was once the great hope for Seattle biotech, but now three years have passed since the Bothell, WA-based company agreed to be sold to Eli Lilly for $2.3 billion. I wanted to find out where most of that scientific and business talent went in the wake of the mass layoffs that ensued, so I found a few Icosahedrons (as I’m told some of them like to be called) to help me put together a fascinating list of 270 alumni who have moved on to new opportunities.

—Seattle-based Trubion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: TRBN) said this week that its co-founder and CEO, Peter Thompson, has resigned. He’ll be replaced on a temporary basis by Arch Venture Partners’ Steve Gillis while the company searches for a permanent replacement. I also recapped some of Trubion’s latest tribulations, to give a sense of what Thompson is leaving to his successor.

—Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners wanted a bigger piece of the original action in San Diego-based Fate Therapeutics, and now it grabbed some of that by leading a $30 million Series B venture round in the stem cell company. Carl Weissman, an OVP managing director and the CEO of Accelerator, will take a seat on Fate’s board as part of the deal.

—Seattle-based Oncothyreon (NASDAQ: ONTY) said it has decided to advance one of its experimental cancer drugs, PX-866, into mid-stage clinical trials next year. This is another sign of the company’s improving financial health, and its shift from cancer vaccines to cancer drugs, which I described in an in-depth feature earlier this year.

—Seattle-based NanoString Technologies earned a golden word of mouth endorsement this week from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which agreed to buy a couple of NanoString’s gene-expression tools to use them for a three-year research collaboration. Broad director Eric Lander, one of the big names in biology, said NanoString has “exciting” technology.

—People who work in Seattle’s global health cluster love to tell anecdotes about how certain projects can make a difference in people’s lives, but there hasn’t been as much effort to really catalog all the projects going on here and where they extend around the world. That was the goal of the Washington Global Health Alliance, a nonprofit led by Lisa Cohen, who wrote about it in this guest editorial. You can read more about the alliance in a profile I did of Cohen and her fledgling association in January.

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Believe it or not, the troubles besetting Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) were not the only life science stories coming out of the Boston area this week, although they sure grabbed most of the attention. So let’s get them all out of the way first:

—On Friday the 13th, the FDA said bits of steel, rubber, and fiber had been detected in vials of five major enzyme replacement drugs made by Genzyme, all manufactured at the company’s troubled Allston Landing plant in Boston. But the agency said that the problem affected only about 1 percent of Genzyme’s products, and that no serious side effects have been reported. In a statement, Genzyme said a review of its safety database “has not identified any safety concerns to suggest that patients treated with Genzyme products have been exposed to foreign particles.”

—On Monday the 16th, Genzyme got word that the FDA won’t approve its application to market its drug alglucosidase alfa (Lumizyme), a proposed treatment for Pompe disease, until the company fixes deficiencies at the Allston Landing facility, where it wants to mass-produce the drug in large batches. But Genzyme continues to make the drug in smaller batches and sell it under the name Myozyme.

—On Tuesday the 17th, shares in Carlsbad, CA-based Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ISIS) fell 16 percent after Isis and Genzyme released the full details of joint clinical trials of mipomersen, a cholesterol-lowering drug that the two companies see as a potential successor to Pfizer’s blockbuster atorvastatin (Lipitor). The drug lowered “bad” LDL cholesterol levels by 25 percent on average, but in several patients it raised liver enzymes to triple their normal levels, indicating potential liver damage. In new trials, Genzyme and Isis say they’re going to study what side effects, if any, mipomersen causes at different doses.

—On Wednesday the 18th, Genzyme said it had decided to scrap an experimental kidney disease drug, an “advanced phosphate binder,” after a clinical trial of 349 patients showed that it was no better at ridding phosphorus from the blood of dialysis patients than Genzyme’s existing drug sevelamer carbonate (Renvela). Genzyme’s two existing phosphate binders, which generate $850 million per year in sales, go off-patent in 2014, and the company is anxious to find a next-generation treatment.

—In non-Genzyme news, Chelmsford, MA-based Zoll Medical (NASDAQ: ZOLL), which makes cardiac defibrillators and other emergency medical devices, released a CPR training app for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch that Ryan called the “most advanced” he’s seen. The “PocketCPR” app, which provides visual and audio instructions on proper CPR technique, could help lower the death toll from sudden cardiac arrest, which kills 300,000 Americans each year.

—Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS) of Cambridge, MA, said a 250-patient clinical trial showed that its drug naltrexone (Vivitrol), which is already used as a treatment for alcoholism, was more effective than a placebo at treating dependence on opioids such as heroin. The company plans to ask the FDA to approve this new use of the drug next year.

—Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners contributed to a $30 million Series B venture financing round for San Diego-based stem cell startup Fate Therapeutics. Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led the deal, which also involved Arch Venture Partners, Venrock Associates, Astellas Venture Management, and Genzyme Ventures. Fate has collected about $50 million in venture funding all told.

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The threat of global infectious disease was already a significant humanitarian concern when Ken Stuart set up his independent research lab in 1976. Now known as Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, Stuart’s lab directed the research spotlight on tropical diseases, such as malaria, at a time when few others had shown interest.

Fast-forward more than 30 years later: the Seattle region and Washington State have become known throughout the world as a nexus of global health innovation and entrepreneurship.

Original efforts decades ago by SBRI, PATH and the University of Washington have been joined by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the Institute for Systems Biology, the Infectious Disease Research Institute, Seattle Children’s Research Institute and its Global Alliance for the Prevention of Prematurity and Stillbirth program, Battelle/Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, Washington State University and, most significantly, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. These groups together now form a regionally based, yet powerful, alliance in the interest of global health. And as a result of their collaboration, this state has become the symbol of the United States’ compassion and goodwill to millions of people whose lives have been improved or saved.

This is not a statement we make lightly. It takes more than personal anecdotes of success to paint an accurate picture. So, we have created a map—a preliminary but precise accounting for the broad and deep impact that our state’s health research organizations have on global disease.

Researchers and health care workers in Washington state directly run 480 health projects in 92 countries, according to a study commissioned by the Washington Global Health Alliance, which examined nine of the state’s global health institutions.

These organizations are responsible for, among others, 183 different projects focusing on emerging and epidemic diseases and 105 vaccine and immunization programs. They work with 593 unique partners, including 44 foreign government entities, 60 corporate partners and 245 hospitals and universities.

To catalyze more effective and successful collaborations, researchers will leverage this study data to increase efficiencies and create new opportunities in their work. Businesses and philanthropists can see the direct impact of their investments and partnerships. Policymakers can use this information to demonstrate the strength of our state’s global health sector in the face of increasing competition. We will make the case for more federal funding and recruiting new global health researchers and organizations to the state, boosting our economy in the process.

This study measured data from all the organizations mentioned above with the exception of the Gates Foundation, which funds projects, but does not implement programs. Not included in those figures are the significant education and training programs spearheaded by our universities and community colleges, other state research organizations and humanitarian and relief organizations, such as World Vision or Mercy Corps. We expect to broaden the scope in future studies mapping global health efforts.

All told, it is clear the magnitude of Washington State’s impact on infectious disease and suffering is significant and exceptional. Ultimately, we hope this study leads to even greater progress toward our common vision-improving health for people regardless of where they may live. You can see the more detailed survey results at www.wghalliance.org.

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Another day, another piece of bad news from Genzyme. The Cambridge, MA-based biotech giant (NASDAQ: GENZ) said today it is scrapping development of a next-generation drug for kidney disease after it was unable to beat its existing treatment on the market.

Genzyme’s experimental drug, called an advanced phosphate binder, didn’t appear any better at getting rid of excess phosphorus from the blood of kidney dialysis patients than Genzyme’s sevelamer carbonate (Renvela) in a clinical trial of 349 patients, the company said in a statement. Genzyme had been hoping that the new drug would be more potent.

Those following the Genzyme story know about what’s become a brutal year. Some of the big setbacks were the viral contamination at its Allston, MA factory in June that created shortages of its top-selling products, the failure to win FDA approval of large-scale manufacturing for a Pompe drug, and the rejection of a leukemia drug for elderly patients.

But this kidney drug failure is another serious body blow. The company generates $850 million a year in sales from its two phosphate binder treatments. Patents that protect that franchise from competition from cheaper generics will expire in September 2014, according to Christopher Raymond, an analyst with market research firm Robert W. Baird. The next-generation kidney drug was supposed to help the company extend the patent life of its kidney drug market, Raymond said.

The failure is “a very significant negative in our view,” Raymond said in a note to clients today. He added that he had been starting to warm up to the company, as it has been inching closer to resolving the Allston manufacturing problems, but he called today’s halting of the kidney program a “game-changer.” Raymond has a $54 price target for the stock.

Shares of Genzyme dropped 1.3 percent to $49.65 at 9:39 am Eastern time today after the news was announced. The stock has dropped 25 percent this year.

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GenVault wants to bring biological samples in from the cold. For decades, the biological samples used to diagnose or study disease have been stored in freezers, which use a lot of electricity. GenVault markets dry-storage technologies that allow scientists to store samples—such as DNA from a blood test—at room temperature.

GenVault CEO David Wellis argues the company’s technologies free up lab space and are better for the environment. He says that one of GenVault’s desktop storage units can hold as many samples as an average-size lab freezer, which has the same carbon footprint as five automobiles. Freezers have another major drawback: a single power failure can destroy years of work.

Wellis says the time is right for his company. The use of genomic analysis for disease diagnosis, scientific research, and forensic criminal investigations is exploding, thanks in part to technical advances that enable the swift decoding of genes. All these genetic tests start with biological samples, such as blood, urine, or spit. The RAND Corp. recently estimated that more than 307 million tissue specimens are stored in the United States, with more than 20 million specimens added each year. That means more and more freezers are taking up lab space, and running up electricity bills.

GenVault, which is based about 26 miles north of San Diego, in Carlsbad, CA, estimates that sample transport and storage represents a $4.5 billion business opportunity. It is also an area in which innovation has been lacking. “All the technical development has occurred in sequencing and informatics,” says Wellis. “The management of samples has seen no innovation. It is a gaping hole.”

GenVault got started in late 2001 to fill that perceived hole. The venture-backed company has raised more than $32 million to date, and has numerous customers, including the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Genome Québec, and Amgen. The company expects to soon announce a new diagnostic lab customer that expects to store 750,000 samples using GenVault’s technology. Wellis says GenVault, which has 40 employees, could breakeven by the end of next year.

The company markets two products. One is a chemically treated paper that preserves bits of whole samples, such as blood or spit; the other a salt-like mineral matrix that preserves purified DNA. Here is how GenVault says …Next Page »

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