Sony Ericsson, the London-based mobile handset maker, is shutting its Seattle-area office, as first reported by Engadget and Triangle Business Journal. Sony Ericsson is cutting about 2,000 out of 9,900 jobs globally, including closing offices in Research Triangle Park, San Diego, Miami, Kista, Sweden, and Chennai, India. The moves are part of a company-wide restructuring that includes moving its North American headquarters from Research Triangle Park to Atlanta, GA.

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[Update: 6:22 pm Eastern, 11/13/09] Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse for Genzyme, it did. The FDA reported today that it has found tiny bits of garbage—steel, rubber, and fiber—in vials of five of the major drugs produced by the Cambridge, MA-based biotech company.

Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) shares fell $3.89, or about 7 percent, to $49.28 at the close of trading today after the FDA made its disclosure on its website.

The agency said it found the new contamination in five of Genzyme’s top-selling products—imiglucerase (marketed as Cerezyme), agalsidase beta (Fabrazyme), alglucosidase alfa (Myozyme), laronidase (Aldurazyme), and thyrotropin alfa (Thyrogen), according to a report from the Associated Press. The FDA estimates the contamination only affects about 1 percent of Genzyme’s products, and the agency says that no serious side effects have been reported related to the latest contamination, according to the AP.

This is the latest major setback for Genzyme’s manufacturing operation, which was hit by a viral contamination in June that forced it to shut down production at its Allston Landing plant over the summer. That earlier contamination caused Genzyme to slash its sales estimates for the year, and created a new opportunity for competitors like Shire and Protalix Biotherapeutics.

Christopher Raymond, an analyst with private equity firm Robert W. Baird who covers Genzyme, said in a note to clients today that the latest contamination shouldn’t affect the company’s ability to start shipping new batches of imiglucerase and agalsidase beta to patients, but noted that “continued issues at Allston, and the fact that FDA inspection of Allston remains ongoing is not encouraging.” Fellow Baird analyst Tom Russo noted that “underscores the upside potential” of Shire to gain new market for its products.

[Updated comment from Genzyme, 6:22 pm Eastern, 11/13/09]

Genzyme issued a statement later Friday about the situation. The company says a global 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. However, a theoretical safety risk remains should a particle enter the bloodstream.”

The company added that doctors are being reminded to visually inspect vials for foreign particles before patients are injected. It says the rate of foreign particles in vials has not increased over time, although the company “remains committed to reducing the frequency of foreign particles in all of our products.”

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Luminus Devices in Billerica, MA, may hold the record among Massachusetts technology companies for the shortest time between conception and launch. But the journey since then has been anything but straightforward.

One summer day in 2002, recent MIT PhD graduate Alexei Erchak and his former advisor, physicist John Joannopolous, were meeting to talk about whether Erchak should accept a lucrative job offer he’d just received, or start his own company—perhaps around the work he’d done in Joannopolous’s lab on ways to use photonic crystals to extract more light from LEDs. “John said, ‘Let’s give Ray Stata a call and see what he thinks,’” says Erchak.

Stata, of course, is the famous MIT alum who co-founded Analog Devices, and a frequent venture investor in local startups. He took the call, and said he had half an hour to talk—but only if Erchak and Joannopolous could come to his office right away.

“We flew out of John’s office, sped down the Mass Pike at 90 miles per hour—at this point I still had jeans and a T-shirt on—and we ended up at that meeting,” Erchak recalls. “We walked into a big board room totally unprepared, except for some slides I’d grabbed out of my PhD presentation. We said ‘We have no idea how to deploy this technology, but if you give us some seed funding, we’ll go figure it out.’ Ray, being a very entrepreneurial-minded person, said that was all he needed to hear.”

By the end of the day, Erchak was at an attorney’s office signing incorporation papers—and had a promise of $200,000 from Stata.

Seven years and at least three iterations of its business plan later, Luminus Devices makes the world’s brightest LEDs, using highly guarded methods based on Erchak’s research and other technologies to manufacture its own “PhlatLight” chipsets right here in Massachusetts. (The “Phlat” stands for photonic lattice.)

The company is poised to help reinvent not only portable devices such as pocket projectors, but the entire lighting industry. Retail, residential, outdoor, stadiums and TV studios, you name it—almost anywhere there’s a conventional incandescent or fluorescent bulb, Luminus’s technology offers a brighter, longer-lasting, less toxic, and in many cases more energy-efficient alternative.

“This company is a home run just waiting to happen,” says Keith Ward, a lighting industry veteran who joined Luminus five months ago as president and CEO, replacing founding CEO Udi Meirav. “LEDs are seven times more efficient than incandescent and starting to surpass halogen and metal halide, so if you can fit them into the existing infrastructure, it’s a win.”

Unfortunately, that’s a big if. The one shadow in Luminus’s outlook is that the company is entirely dependent on device makers, lighting-fixture manufacturers, and other partners to get its PhlatLight LEDs out into the world. It’s a fact that has sent the startup back to the drawing board twice—the first time shortly after Stata’s seed investment, when it became clear that the company’s initial target market, cell-phone manufacturers, weren’t ready to incorporate a new light source into their displays, and the second time just in the last two years, as an unexpectedly rapid drop in the price of big-screen LCD televisions killed off demand for rear-projection DLP televisions, an application for which Luminus’s large, bright LEDs were thought to be ideal.

But Luminus’s investors have signaled their confidence by continuing to pour cash into the company—most recently, in a $72 million Series E round led by …Next Page »

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Tech manufacturing exports from Washington state grew for the sixth straight year in 2008, up to $3.5 billion (15th out of 50 states), according to a TechAmerica Foundation report highlighted today by the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). Washington ranked fifth nationwide in consumer electronics exports, which totaled $320 million. The top three tech export destinations for the state were Canada, Taiwan, and the Netherlands. The report did not include software exports.

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Seattle-based Dendreon recruited some serious industry experience in marketing and manufacturing today to its board of directors. The company has added Ian Clark, the CEO of Roche’s Genentech unit and former head of Genentech’s commercial operations, along with Pedro Granadillo, a former senior vice president of manufacturing at Eli Lilly, according to two separate regulatory filings released late Friday.

Clark was in charge of commercial operations at Genentech when it was the largest U.S. maker of cancer drugs, marketing blockbusters like bevacizumab (Avastin), and trastuzumab (Herceptin). He is now CEO of the Genentech unit in South San Francisco that’s owned by Switzerland-based Roche. Granadillo, who also has extensive experience in human resources, also serves on the boards of Haemonetics, Nile Therapeutics, and Noven Pharmaceuticals, according to a profile page on the Forbes website.

Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN) is seeking to add expertise throughout its organization as it hopes to win FDA approval and start marketing its first product, sipuleucel-T (Provenge) for men with terminal prostate cancer. The company’s stock has boomed this year, and it has raised $221 million from investors, after showing that this first-of-its-kind immune-boosting treatment was able to help men live longer with minimal side effects. The company has also gone on a hiring binge this year as it seeks to make sure it has the talent to make the most of this drug, recently saying it plans to double in size to about 600 employees.

Dendreon lists seven board members on its website, and there were no associated filings that said anyone has vacated a seat. A spokeswoman for Dendreon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about why the company added the new directors.

Both Clark and Granadillo were awarded 4,994 shares in the company in connection with joining the board, according to SEC filings. The shares are worth about $137,000 at today’s closing stock price of $27.48.

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Heartland Robotics confirmed today that it has raised $7 million in a Series A-1 venture financing round, a story first reported by Xconomy on August 21. The lead funder in the round was Charles River Ventures of Waltham, MA, according to Heartland president Patrick Sobalvarro. Bezos Expeditions, the Seattle-based venture investing operation of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, also participated.

Heartland’s announcement, also detailed in a forthcoming press release, is the first time the Cambridge, MA-based company has gone public with information about its investors. Our earlier story, which was based on a regulatory filing and interviews with anonymous sources, did not name Charles River Ventures as a participant in the new round. According to the information released today, Bezos Expeditions and BrooksLab, LLC, which is headed by Heartland Robotics founder and chief technical officer Rodney Brooks, participated a previously unreported $5 million Series A round sometime in 2008—meaning the stealth-mode company has raised about $12 million all told.

Sobalvarro tells Xconomy that Heartland’s attraction to Charles River Ventures boiled down to experience—both the firm’s, and that of Devdutt Yellurkar, the CRV partner working with Heartland. “I think Charles River has a lot of experience with innovative, early-stage companies, and Devdutt in particular has run companies building complex products involving a lot of software, [including] as the CEO of Yantra,” Sobalvarro says. “That kind of experience really brings a lot to the table when you’re building and early-stage company.”

But Heartland was also looking for a venture firm with demonstrated fundraising traction, Sobalvarro says. “The thing that anybody needs to be conscious of when the economy is the way it is right now is that some venture firms have been really successful in closing new funds and others haven’t,” he says. “Frankly, CRV closed a new fund in the spring and that meant a lot to us.”

Heartland continues to be somewhat guarded about its technology, saying only that it is designed to make manufacturing more productive and efficient. “We’re doing an innovative kind of robot for …Next Page »

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Hillsboro, OR-based TriQuint Semiconductor (NASDAQ: TQNT) announced today it has acquired TriAccess Technologies, based in Santa Rosa, CA. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. TriAccess makes integrated-circuit amplifiers for audio, video, and HDTV applications. TriQuint Semiconductor, founded in 1985, makes wireless communication technologies for mobile manufacturers, cellular base stations, and defense and aerospace contractors.

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The big news of the week was Microsoft’s sale of Razorfish to Publicis (see directly below), but there were a few other important deals in software, biotech, and energy.

—Microsoft’s online advertising subsidiary, Seattle-based Razorfish, was bought by French marketing firm Publicis for approximately $530 million, as Bob reported. The payment is expected to include cash and Publicis Groupe treasury shares. In addition, Microsoft and Publicis have entered into a five-year strategic alliance whereby Publicis clients can purchase display and search advertising from Microsoft on favorable terms. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) originally acquired Razorfish in its 2007 purchase of aQuantive.

—Bellevue, WA-based Confirma, a medical imaging software firm, has been acquired by Merge Healthcare, a Milwaukee, WI-based health IT provider, for about $22 million, as Eric reported. Merge will incorporate Confirma’s MRI software into its IT offerings for doctors.

—Vancouver, BC-based Tekmira (TSX: TKM) formed a two-year partnership with Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals to develop new particles to deliver RNA-interference drugs to diseased cells deep in the body, as Ryan reported. Financial terms of the deal weren’t given. Alnylam is funding the research effort and has exclusive rights to new discoveries, while Tekmira can use the discoveries for some of its own RNAi treatment programs.

—Seattle-based EnerG2 won $21.3 million in federal stimulus funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a new manufacturing plant in Albany, OR. The University of Washington energy-storage spinout is developing nano-scale materials to make better ultracapacitors for electric and hybrid vehicles and other applications.

—A few more terms of the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, in which Yahoo will use Bing as its search engine and will control ad sales for five years, were spelled out in a filing with the SEC. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) will pay Yahoo $50 million a year for three years to cover transition and implementation costs. It will also hire 400 Yahoo employees, plus another 150 to assist with the transition. Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) can opt out of the deal if it isn’t approved within a year, or if Microsoft and Yahoo’s combined share of the search market dips below an undisclosed percentage.

—Seattle-based Oncothyreon (NASDAQ: ONTY), a developer of cancer drugs, raised $15 million by securing commitments from investors to buy new shares and warrants, as Luke reported. Last week, the company said a small group of lung cancer patients showed long-lasting responses after taking Stimuvax, the immune-boosting vaccine therapy Oncothyreon is co-developing with Germany-based Merck KGaA.

—Seattle-based WatchGuard Technologies, a network security company, acquired Toronto-based BorderWare Technologies, an e-mail and Web security firm, as Eric reported. Financial terms were not given. WatchGuard plans to use BorderWare’s technology to make its security software more comprehensive and competitive.

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Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN), the Seattle-based developer of an immune-boosting drug for prostate cancer, announced today that it has leased property in Atlanta to build a second manufacturing plant for the drug. Rumors about the deal surfaced last month, but Dendreon would not comment before the official announcement. The factory will actually be built in Union City, GA, just southwest of Atlanta, and cover 160,000 square-feet of land. Financial details were not released, but the plant may cost an estimated $80 million and create around 300 jobs for people in the area, according to a report last month in the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

Dendreon’s first factory is in Morris Plains, NJ, but the company expects that extra manufacturing capacity for the drug, sipuleucel-T (Provenge), will be necessary. Concerns over manufacturing limitations have previously been an issue with Dendreon after the clinical trials for the treatment turned out so well. The issue is that sipuleucel-T is not just a pill but a complex treatment. It requires blood to be taken from a patient and processed at a clinic three times a month. It’s extremely important therefore to keep the supply chain uninterrupted.

The FDA is expected to approve Dendreon’s treatment by early next year, but demand is expected to easily outstrip the production capacity of the New Jersey factory. And since most of the estimated 100,000 American candidates for sipuleucel-T live in the eastern corridor of the United States, placing the second plant in Georgia makes a lot of sense.

The state of Georgia plans a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the factory on September 30.

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Seattle-based EnerG2, an advanced materials startup focused on energy storage, has scored a $21.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a new manufacturing plant in Albany, OR. The funds are part of a total of $2.4 billion in federal stimulus grants announced today to speed up the manufacturing and development of next-generation batteries, energy storage technologies, and electric vehicle components. (Check out the map of all 48 awardees here.)

EnerG2, a University of Washington spinout, is developing novel nano-scale materials to make better ultracapacitors. These are devices that can store and release large amounts of energy much faster than conventional batteries, and with longer lifetimes. Ultracapacitors are typically used in electric and hybrid vehicles, forklifts, and cranes. Their performance depends on the materials used to make their electrodes—and that is where EnerG2 comes in with its unique concoction of synthetic carbon nanomaterials.

The U.S. Department of Energy has great interest in companies like EnerG2 that seek to improve energy storage and efficiency more broadly. That’s partly because as more alternative energy sources come online, they will require technologies that can deal with the natural peaks and valleys of that kind of power generation.

“This is obviously an exciting turn of events for EnerG2,” says Chris Wheaton, the company’s co-founder and chief operating and financial officer. “It’s a great confirmation of the role ultracapacitors can play in the automotive industry, as well as the role that materials science can play in helping the country achieve our energy efficiency goals for the future.”

EnerG2 will work together with Oregon Freeze Dry, one of its manufacturing partners, to build the new plant, which Wheaton says will be the first in the world dedicated to commercial-scale production of high-performance synthetic carbon materials. Wheaton adds that construction is expected to take about 18 months, and the new plant should create 25 to 50 new jobs in Linn County, OR. As for why EnerG2 wants to build the plant in Oregon, he says, “[Oregon Freeze Dry] have both the skills and the land that make it an ideal place to situate this facility. They’re already our partner.”

Better ultracapacitors could potentially have a big impact on electric and hybrid vehicles. EnerG2 co-founder and CEO, Rick Luebbe, told me last fall that ultracapacitors could be used to get 150,000 miles out of a plug-in hybrid car battery. Wheaton says vehicles will use a combination of a battery and an ultracapacitor. The latter is used to accelerate the car and store braking energy, while the battery gives you longer driving range. “The ultracapacitor makes the whole system more efficient,” Wheaton says. “It makes the battery last longer and not need to be as big and expensive.”

EnerG2 is backed by OVP Venture Partners, Firelake Capital, Yaletown Venture Partners, WRF Capital, University of Washington, Washington Technology Center, the Sustainability Investment Fund, Northwest Energy Angels, and the Frontier Angel Fund. Back in October, the company raised $8.5 million led by OVP and Firelake. That funding round was augmented by an additional $2.5 million investment in June, which brought in Vancouver, BC-based Yaletown as a new investor.

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Wilmington, MA-based Advanced Electron Beams has raised $14.2 million in a Series C round of financing, the company announced today. AEB, whose compact electron beam technology is employed to initiate chemical reactions in various industrial processes, says it will use the money to accelerate sales growth and develop new applications designed to enable energy-efficient manufacturing. The latest financing was led by Flagship Ventures of Cambridge, MA, and includes previous investors Agman Partners, Atlas Venture, GE, General Catalyst Partners, and RockPort Capital Partners. AEB says it has now raised more than $50 million since the fall of 2005.

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Shire, the U.K.-based specialty pharmaceutical company, had some good news this morning for patients with Gaucher’s disease that might not be nearly as good for its competitor, Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ).

Shire said today that its experimental treatment for Gaucher’s, a rare genetic disorder, passed a key clinical trial in 25 patients. This is the first of three pivotal trials Shire is conducting, so this news might have gotten little notice except for one thing. The data is good enough that Shire persuaded the FDA to allow doctors to start prescribing the new treatment, velaglucerase alfa, before it’s ready for commercialization. Shire said it will provide free drug for patients who enroll in a special protocol.

This move clearly puts some additional heat on Genzyme, which is dealing with a shortage of its best-selling product, imiglucerase (Cerezyme), the market-leading enzyme replacement therapy for Gaucher’s. Genzyme’s Allston, MA-based manufacturing plant was plagued by a viral contamination in June, and the company shut the facility down for sanitizing, which created a shortage of Cerezyme production expected to last 6-8 weeks. This has created a serious concern for patients, who need to stay on steady medication to prevent the buildup of a fatty substance in their spleen, liver, lungs, and bones that can interfere with the function of those organs and lead to extreme fatigue, and death.

Other competitors besides Shire, like Switzerland-based Actelion, have sought to fill the void in the market during the Cerezyme shortage. Genzyme said in its second-quarter financial report that its sales of Cerezyme this year will likely be between $750 million to $1 billion, down from its previous forecast of $1.25 billion to $1.275 billion.

“With Allston supply issues front and center, it would be hard to imagine worse timing for Genzyme,” to face new competition from Shire, said analyst Christopher Raymond of Robert W. Baird & Co, in a note to clients today. This could erode Genzyme’s market share, especially if shortages continue, he said. “That said, we remain confident in Genzyme’s ability to bring Allston back up in a timely fashion.”

Genzyme shares fell 2 percent to $50.62 at 11:05 am Eastern.

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Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ), the Cambridge, MA-based maker of drugs for rare genetic diseases, said today it has finished sanitizing its biotech drugmaking plant in Allston, MA and is on schedule to re-start production there this month. Last month, the company spotted a viral contaminant that forced it to halt production. The company is now preparing to deal with 6-8 week supply shortages of two of its best-selling drugs, Cerezyme and Fabrazyme. Sales of Cerezyme are now expected to run between $750 million to $1 billion this year, instead of the company’s prior forecast of $1.25 to $1.275 billion.

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Dendreon takes pride in being a Seattle-based company, and CEO Mitchell Gold likes to say he envisions building it into the Northwest’s next biotech powerhouse, like Immunex in the 1990s. But compared to the rest of the country, Seattle just doesn’t have that many people ill with prostate cancer. So it’s a safe bet he will look a few thousand miles away, in the southeastern U.S., when Dendreon moves to build a second factory for the company’s immune-boosting drug for prostate cancer.

The first inkling that Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN) has its eyes on the south broke last week in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, which reported that Dendreon is considering building an $80 million manufacturing facility in that city that might create 300 jobs. The company didn’t comment for the story, and the paper didn’t cite its sources.

The report may be unconfirmed, but it is plausible, based on what Dendreon itself has had to say in the past. The company already has its first manufacturing plant for sipuleucel-T (Provenge) in Morris Plains, NJ, which, not coincidentally, is smack in the middle of the biggest concentration of prostate cancer patients in the U.S., according to this slide that Dendreon prepared for its investors several years ago. Because of the nature of Dendreon’s manufacturing process, in which it is important to be close to patients, then it almost has to look in the southeastern U.S., based on this company-produced map, and this report on geographic distribution of prostate cancer incidence in the U.S. created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Dendreon map in particular, as you can see, shows a tight concentration of prostate cancer drug sales in the New York/New Jersey corridor, the retirement communities of south Florida, and in the Upper Midwest population centers of greater Chicago and Detroit. Inside that geographic triangle in the east, you have one of the world’s busiest airports at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International, and you have Memphis, TN, home of FedEx. Greater Los Angeles is the only fairly big prostate cancer sales center West of the Mississippi, according to the company.

Dendreon chose not to comment for this story, although company spokesman Jennifer Williams said questions about the company’s manufacturing plans will be addressed at a Dendreon analyst summit being planned for September. The company raised $221 million from investors after it presented clinical trial results in April showing Provenge helped men with terminal prostate cancer live longer. And Dendreon has made clear it will use the money for manufacturing and marketing the drug.

Why does location matter to Dendreon in this globalized economy? It’s because …Next Page »

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Dendreon, the Seattle-based cancer drug developer, may open a new manufacturing plant in Georgia, according to a report in the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Dendreon’s product, a new drug to treat prostate cancer, is being reviewed for approval by the FDA. Xconomy has written about Dendreon’s limited manufacturing before. The possible plant could cost $80 million and create more than 300 jobs in Atlanta. Currently, Dendreon has a commercial manufacturing plant in Morris Plains, NJ.

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Beverly, MA-based Axcelis Technologies (NASDAQ: ACLS), which makes ion implantation equipment for semiconductor manufacturers, said yesterday that it will lay off 235 workers, or about 20 percent of its global workforce. The company said the decision, which comes after a series of other cost-cutting moves, will save it $25 million in the coming year. “This is a difficult but necessary decision due to the continued weakness in the semiconductor industry,” said Axcelis CEO Mary Puma in a statement. We’ve updated the Boston Tech Layoff Tracker accordingly; the Boston area’s technology-sector job losses now total more than 12,000 since last summer.

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CMC Icos Biologics, the Bothell, WA-based contract manufacturer of biotech drugs, said today it has signed a deal to manufacture an experimental drug for acute lung injury. CMC will make IC14, an antibody drug, for Brisbane, Australia-based Implicit Bioscience. The treatment, which is scheduled to enter Phase II trials next year, was previously tested in 150 patients by Icos for its potential against inflammatory diseases.

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In a major acquisition that expands its reach across North America, Norwell, MA-based waste management company Clean Harbors (NYSE: CLH) said today that it has agreed to acquire Edmonton, Alberta-based Eveready Inc. The Canadian firm provides maintenance, lodging, and exploration services to a range of companies in the oil and gas, chemicals, paper, manufacturing, and power generation businesses. Clean Harbors said it will pay $387 million for Eveready using a combination of cash, stock, and assumed debt.

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The Rally Fighter is half dune buggy, half muscle car. Designed for off-road racing in the deserts of the Southwest, it looks a lot like any ride you might see on the cover of Road & Track. But what’s different about the Rally Fighter is that it’s a product of the Web 2.0 revolution: it was the winning design in an online competition that Wareham, MA-based Local Motors conducted last fall among its growing Web-based community of amateur and freelance automotive designers.

Crowdsourcing the design process through regionally-themed online design contests is half of Local Motors’ business model. The other half is “mass customizing” the actual vehicles at a network of what the company calls “micro-factories.” If you’re going to start a car company these days, you might as well try a radical new approach—and that’s definitely what co-founder, president, and CEO Jay Rogers is doing. My December 18 story has all the history and details.

On Friday, I reconnected with Iraq vet and Harvard MBA Rogers by phone to get the latest news about Local Motors—and to ask him for his opinion about other vehicle-related events in the news, including the first flight of Terrafugia’s “roadable aircraft” and this week’s unveiling by GM and Segway of the P.U.M.A., a multi-passenger vehicle that balances on two wheels like the famous Segway Personal Transporter. I also probed a bit about the seeming disconnect between Local Motors’ self-avowed green mission—he talked a lot back in December about the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, and about how to make cars lighter and more fuel-efficient—and the fact that the company’s first product is a racecar built to tear around the desert. He had some interesting responses, which you’ll see toward the end of the following transcript.

Xconomy: We last talked in mid-December. What’s been happening at Local Motors since then?

Local Motors CEO and co-founder Jay Rogers

Jay Rogers: We just passed our first anniversary, and one of the big things that stands out is that on the day of our birthday, March 25, we were invited to a Web-based conference [organized by Canadian automotive journalist Michael Banovsky] with Bertone, one of the top two automotive design houses in the world. It was an incredible recognition of what we have achieved in just 12 months. We are known enough that people see us as a design firm that has put together something notable. It shows the power of Web 2.0 to create a new entity. These older design houses don’t have the bandwidth to create a lot of new concepts, and as governments and everyone else around the world are looking at how to reinvigorate stale parts of the auto industry, we make a very compelling alternative.

Since December we have also run two or three more competitions. We just finished Chicago and the Carolinas and are about to launch Detroit. That is going to be much more toward the practical end than the conceptual end. We are going to do a design for the budding entrepreneurs in Detroit. A lot of machinists and pattern makers, as you can imagine, are out of work. What they need is a jobber’s car—a coupe with a roach coach or a hold for a set of tools, something that’s economical and isn’t a big truck. It’s going to be a real exercise in how Local Motors can target a vehicle that is relevant to a local area, especially one that is as embattled as Detroit.

The other thing is that we are in negotiations right now in Phoenix, Arizona, and here in Massachusetts to place our first micro-factory. We don’t have anything to announce just yet, but we are in some very exciting negotiations and are going to end up with a very good location in one or the other place, or it could very well be both.

We were also applying for the federal assistance program from the Department of Energy for new vehicle manufacturing concepts. At the time we last talked, GM and Chrysler were looking to hog a lot of that money. But this week, those companies were determined to be non-viable, which means they are not eligible for those loans. Which means we have a much better shot at getting some money. That’s a very positive thing.

One more thing we did which was actually very exciting was that we began to flex our muscles in the competitions, and instead of just doing exterior design, we ran an interior design competition for the Rally Fighter, our first model. Critics were saying “You can’t open-source the design of a car,” but this showed an entirely different face of our design competition. The winning concept is now going to be the interior of the Rally Fighter.

We are also breaking down [the design competitions] into discrete parts. We needed an air extractor for our engine bay, and we got 50 to 60 side-vent ideas in about six days. We posted it Friday night and we were done by the next Wednesday. Because this was so successful, we are going to be running more discrete engineering projects as competitions, instead of us doing them ourselves. It’s great for us to go to the community like this.

X: How is the Rally Fighter coming? When I visited, you had a full-scale model, but it was made of blue foam.

JR: The Rally Fighter’s body is going to be frozen this week. That means the look and feel, all of the micro-details, which is a huge achievement for us. If you were to look at it today, you’d see a …Next Page »

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Amgen, the world’s biggest biotech company, is cutting 100 jobs at a drug manufacturing site in Bothell, WA, Xconomy has learned. This round of cuts will leave Amgen with about 70 people still working in Bothell, and a total workforce in the state of just under 900 people, company spokeswoman Carol Pawlak confirmed.

Amgen, which has about 17,000 employees worldwide, decided to merge the work being done in Bothell—for manufacturing small batches of biotech drugs for use in clinical trials—into a larger facility at Amgen headquarters in Thousand Oaks, CA where that same work is done. Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) will keep an adjoining facility in Bothell that works to continuously refine manufacturing processes of biotech drugs, which are made in living cells using fermentation-style processes.

The cutbacks are not part of any larger systemic cost-cutting at Amgen, Pawlak says. Amgen endured the worst year in its history in 2007, losing $29 billion in market value that year, as the FDA warned physicians about the risk of heart attack, stroke and death found in trials of patients who took its best-selling anemia drugs. Those concerns have largely faded from public view in the past year, and now Amgen is feverishly working to win FDA approval for an osteoporosis drug called denosumab, which has shown impressive ability to reduce bone fractures in clinical trials, and which analysts predict has potential to be a $1 billion-a-year hit.

“This was a difficult decision for us,” Pawlak says. “When we looked at the two facilities we had for clinical trial manufacturing, it made the most sense to do that work in one place.”

The workers in Bothell are not being offered transfers to California, although they do have an opportunity to apply for other jobs within Amgen, Pawlak says. They are expected to be let go in July, will receive a minimum of six months worth of salary as severance, a year of paid health insurance, and assistance in finding new jobs, Pawlak says.

Amgen just announced the decision internally yesterday, and hasn’t yet decided whether to sell or sublease the Bothell facility used for biotech drugmaking, Pawlak says. Amgen first came to Washington in 2002, when it acquired Seattle-based Immunex for $10 billion, and obtained rights to its crown jewel, etanercept (Enbrel) for autoimmune diseases. Enbrel is now the world’s biggest-selling biotech drug with more than $5 billion in worldwide annual sales for Amgen and its partner, Madison, NJ-based Wyeth.

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