When you hear about personalized medicine, you might think first of the applications for cancer treatment, or maybe cystic fibrosis. But Dave Martin, the former head of R&D at Genentech, is thinking about personalized medicine in a whole new context—for antibiotics.

This concept, at South San Francisco-based AvidBiotics, is still at its earliest stages of development, and the company’s most promising antibiotic candidate probably won’t enter clinical trials until 2013, Martin says. But the program has potential to become a fascinating case study that nudges the healthcare system away from the reactionary, “one-size-fits-all” antibiotic prescribing habit that has led to problems with drug-resistant superbugs.

Here’s how AvidBiotics is thinking about taking on a dangerous bacteria called Clostridium difficile, or “C. diff.” About 3 percent of U.S. adults have C. diff in their guts already, and it usually co-exists just fine with all the other bacteria, causing no problems. But C. diff can become a problem if a patient comes to the hospital in a high-risk situation to get a certain form of surgery, cancer care, or maybe to spend time on a ventilator in the intensive-care unit. Knowing there’s a high risk these patients will get a virulent form of C. diff, the hospital can run a 45-minute diagnostic test from Sunnyvale, CA-based Cepheid to see if the patient is a carrier.

If so, the doctor could someday prescribe a targeted “narrow-spectrum” antibiotic from AvidBiotics that’s designed to kill the C. diff bug, and spare virtually all the normal, healthy bacteria in the gut. By using the drug in a preventive setting, doctors hope to stop the bug before it causes the nasty diarrhea that hospitals dread. An estimated 700,000 people a year are affected by C. diff, and the death rate is estimated at about 6 percent. By attempting to prevent the worst symptoms before they appear, a drug/diagnostic combo has potential to greatly reduce the number of long-term hospitalizations, which can easily cost the healthcare system more than $100,000 per episode.

“An ounce of prevention is really valuable in this disease. If we can prevent this disease in high-risk patients, rather than waiting until patients are very sick, then everybody wins,” Martin says.

This would represent an unusual approach to antibiotics. These drugs today are often prescribed after a patient gets sick. The doctor doesn’t know right away what bug caused it, and he or she has to wait a day or two for a lab culture to provide the answer. Rather than wait around for symptoms to get worse, the doctor often has to act quickly, prescribing a carpet bomb “broad spectrum” antibiotic that kills all kinds of bacteria, both bad and good. Researchers know that this indiscriminate killing of bugs in the gut interferes with the natural equilibrium, and creates problems for people’s immune systems, and nutrient absorption, that can linger for months, Martin says.

AvidBiotics isn’t the only company thinking about a prevention strategy with a narrow-spectrum antibiotic—San Diego-based Optimer Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: OPTR) is pursuing a similar strategy with its newly marketed product, fidaxomicin (Dificid). That company, which I reported on earlier this week, is studying its new FDA-approved antibiotic as a way to prevent C. diff infection in patients undergoing bone marrow transplants, where C. diff infections are known to increase the death rate, and cost an average of $130,000 per patient to treat. (Martin says the Optimer drug is an important advance, but he believes his company’s experimental drug is designed to more narrowly hit C. diff, while sparing other forms of bacteria.)

AvidBiotics, which I profiled here in September 2010, is using technology platform it licensed from UCLA to make engineered proteins that hit specific molecular targets on the surface of bacterial cells. These molecules, which the company calls Avidocins, are supposed to … Next Page »

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Good morning from Mountain View, CA, and from the close of the 2012 Personalized Medicine World Conference, which brought together thought leaders of business, government, healthcare-delivery, research and technology. Four themes that emerged from this year’s program:

• Greater optimism, triggered by the 2011 approvals of two major oncologic agents paired with companion diagnostics: vemurafenib (Daiichi Sankyo and Roche / Genentech) for patients with metastatic melanoma with a mutant biological pathway known as BRAF V600E and crizotinib (Pfizer) for patients with non-small-cell lung cancer that overexpresses a protein called ALK. Walter Koch from Roche and Hakan Sakul from Pfizer proudly discussed their development processes and speedy approval timelines. Those approvals were also cited by several other talks as examples of major progress made in the quest to deliver the right drug to the right patient.

• Greater clarity from the FDA. Although the FDA was not able to meet its self-imposed deadline of year-end 2011 to finalize guidance to industry on the best practices for developing companion diagnostics, Elizabeth Mansfield reiterated Commissioner Hamburg’s commitment to personalized medicine and told the audience to expect final guidance before the end of June. Mansfield also said that the FDA would provide guidance on how to co-develop a drug & test in parallel, as well as how to “enrich” clinical trials through careful selection of patients, based on their genetics. Both of these important regulatory steps could happen in 2012. The most surprising revelation, though, was Mansfield’s staffing: her group has just four people to evaluate all personalized-medicine-related medical devices.

• More sequencing. Just a few weeks ago at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, 800-lb sequencing gorillas Illumina and Life Technologies / Ion Torrent announced that scientists can expect the $1,000 genome by the end of 2012. Piggybacking on that announcement, Mostafa Ronaghi, chief technology officer of Illumina, presented a thorough overview of his company’s progress to date, bragging that 90 percent of all sequences produced worldwide had been produced on an Illumina instrument. Among other projects, Ronaghi’s team is working on techniques to accurately cover the 8 percent of the genome that cannot be sequenced because of repetitive regions. (Ronaghi made his presentation just hours before news broke of Roche’s unsolicited $5.7 billion takeover bid for Illumina.)

• More translational bioinformatics. Given the implied data glut that whole genome sequencing will produce, last week’s conference revealed more accomplishments in the application of bioinformatics to the remedy of disease. One of the unsung heroes of this year’s conference was Elizabeth Worthey from the Medical College of Wisconsin, who walked the audience through a case study of a pediatric patient presenting with undefined inflammatory bowel disorder. Worthey’s whole exome sequencing and variant analysis of the patient revealed a key mutation in the XIAP gene. A cord blood transplant ultimately cured the child, who was eating, drinking and playing again within four months.

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First of all, students should be studying what they are passionate about. Clearly, computer science will continue to spread into all aspects of human life. Within computer science, I believe machine learning and AI are perhaps the biggest study opportunity today. Biology and medicine are also undergoing vast changes. Personalized medicine will become a big issue; the understanding of the human genome and cell chemistry will open up entire new opportunities for innovation. So any study in the area of life sciences that connects to those new opportunities will be important. The will be amazing bioengineering opportunities, e.g., by developing materials and systems that connect with human tissue. Nanotechnology will become a major driver of new technologies in the future, with tons of great things to study at the intersection of new materials and human life.

I also believe some of the mundane aspects are ripe for overhaul, such as transportation and manufacturing. Studying robotics, rapid prototyping, autonomy in fields such as Aero-Astro, mechanical engineering, or computer science, should position students today to become the technology leaders of tomorrow. For students studying in humanities, I urge them to connect to the digital revolution that is unfolding right now. I am less excited about studying finance, since too many of us are already too creative in inventing new financial instruments that make society less stable.

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There’s a long-held belief that, if caught early, colorectal cancer is almost always treatable through surgery alone. But according to Ann Arbor-based Everist Genomics, nearly one in three Stage 2 colon cancer patients who have surgery alone, without adding chemotherapy, will suffer a recurrence of their cancer. And more than 80 percent of those patients, Everist says, will die from their disease.

Those statistics inspired Everist Genomics to develop OncoDefender-CRC, a molecular diagnostic test that identifies patients at high risk of cancer recurrence. The test became commercially available for the first time last month.

“The essence of personalized medicine is to diagnose a problem before there are noticeable symptoms,” says Alex Charlton (pictured above), executive vice-chairman of Everist Genomics. “If we’re treating patients very early, we save lives and it costs much less.”

The scientific team at Everist Genomics identified research which revealed that patients with high-risk Stage 2 colorectal tumors can benefit greatly from adjuvant therapy, with three-year disease-free survival rates increasing from 84.7 percent in patients who did not receive chemotherapy to 96.4 percent in those who did. Improvements in five-year overall survival rates increased from 86.4 percent to over 98 percent.

These discoveries led the scientists at Everist Genomics to begin a two-year development program to find out the combination of genes and their expression levels that would identify patients with these high-risk early stage colorectal cancer tumors. Everist Genomics integrated molecular diagnostics with its proprietary learning algorithm, Evolver. The computer-based model analyzed and evaluated possible combinations of genes and gene expression levels to identify the genomic culprits. Out of 25,000 genes, there are five specific genes tied to colorectal cancer recurrence. Knowing how those genes behave, Charlton says, represents a huge breakthrough in preventative treatment.

“The key to effective personalized medicine and utilizing genomics is you have to know which genes represent the risk of disease in the first place,” Charlton says. “It’s easier said than done. It’s an exercise in expert detective process.”

Everist just received regulatory approval for a second molecular test called OncoDefender-MMR (MMR stands for “mismatched repair”), which will be able to predict a person’s risk of getting cancer in the first place. Armed with that kind of information, Charlton says, patients would be able to make significant lifestyle changes that could decrease their cancer risk.

“What cancer is, at the very simplest level, is an overproduction of certain cells in a certain part of the body,” Charlton says. “The OncoDefender-MMR test will detect … Next Page »

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In the news since the Thanksgiving holiday, we’ve had a fascinating bit of biomedical research from Internet guru Larry Smarr, a criminal conviction, and an extended Q&A with Eli Lilly CEO John Lechleiter. Your life sciences briefing begins now.

—Under fierce competition in the market for gene expression microarray tests, Santa Clara-based Affymetrix (NASDAQ: AFFX) agreed to pay $330 million to acquire San Diego-based eBioscience, a maker of flow cytometer instruments and chemical reagents used in biomedical diagnostics. Affymetrix said it plans to keep eBioscience’s management team and operations in San Diego.

—Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), the New York pharmaceutical giant, agreed to buy Excaliard Pharmaceuticals, a Carlsbad, CA-spinoff from Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ISIS). Isis said it’s getting $4.4 million upfront, and as much as $14 million over time for its stake in Excaliard, plus additional milestone and royalty payments. Excaliard was founded in 2006 to use Isis’ gene-silencing technology, known as antisense, to curb the activity of certain genes implicated in excessive skin scarring.

—A 23-page article offers an insightful glimpse into the converging future of personalized medicine, health IT, and wireless health. It is titled, “Quantified Health: Toward Digitally Enabled Genomic Medicine: A 10-Year Detective Story of Quantifying My Body.” I’m curious what other experts in these fields think about this bit of scientific research from Larry Smarr, founding director of the UC system’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2). I posted my question-and-answer session with Larry here.

—A San Diego jury convicted Kent Thomas Keigwin, a 61-year-old financial advisor, in the first-degree murder of John G. Watson, a retired life sciences CEO and local angel investor. Prosecutors argued that Keigwin killed Watson to steal millions of dollars from Watson’s accounts, by using Watson’s personal information to impersonate him. Keigwin is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 20.

—Amid the celebration of their success with Amira Biosciences (purchased earlier this year for $475 million by Bristol-Myers Squibb), Versant Ventures’ Brad Bolzon and Amira co-founder and CTO Peppi Prasit started a new company, Inception Sciences. Prasit and Bolzon plan to operate Inception Sciences as a holding company for spinning out individual drug development programs as separate corporate entities. I hope to get more details about the venture next week.

—In a ruling issued before Thanksgiving, a federal judge in San Diego declared that San Diego-based Histogen and its Histogen Aesthetics subsidiary are not infringing on a couple of key patents held by Carlsbad, CA-based SkinMedica. In a lawsuit filed in early 2009, SkinMedica alleged that Histogen was infringing on its proprietary “NouriCel” technology for culturing certain types of skin cells in growth media. Both companies use growth factors and other proteins derived from the cells to make skin care products.

—Luke devoted a two-part BioBeat column to his conversation with Eli Lilly CEO John Lechleiter about the pharma business generally, and Lilly (NYSE: LLY) in particular. In part 1, Luke talked mostly with Lechleiter about ways to get pharma out of its current rut. In part 2, Luke featured the Lilly CEO’s responses to questions that readers relayed to him via Twitter.

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You could feel Herman Cain’s presence last week on the biotech beat. And there was a lot of grousing about it.

Cain, the Republican presidential candidate known for his simple 9-9-9 tax plan and some dubious extra-curricular activities, didn’t attend the Personalized Medicine Conference at Harvard Medical School. But a former advisor to President Obama, Ezekiel Emanuel, was there channeling his inner Cain, delivering a simple, blunt message to top biomedical researchers, business executives, and investors.

The word from Emanuel, the University of Pennsylvania bioethicist and player in the landmark healthcare reform law of 2010, boiled down to this: Personalized medicine is a lot of hype, it will add costs to the healthcare system, and we can’t afford it. What personalized medicine ought to offer, he said, is a “1-100-0″ plan. That means treatments that are truly tailored for a single individual; almost 100 percent effective; and have almost zero side effects.

That’s fantasy, of course, which Emanuel knows quite well. He was being purposefully provocative, and said so. In a roomful of like-minded people having a garden party, he was happily playing the role of the skunk.

Personally, I thought Emanuel gave a brutally honest message that a lot of these people need to hear. It could have been perceived as a rallying cry to come up with new innovations for health that truly reduce, instead of add, costs to the system.

But that’s not how the message was perceived. Everywhere I went the rest of the two-day meeting, people were grumbling about the nerve of this guy. One prominent executive complained that Emanuel shouldn’t have been invited. Emanuel’s not an economist, what does he know? He’s relying on faulty data! What about innovations that improve patient outcomes, helping people live longer and better lives? Isn’t that worth it?

“There seems to be a lot of angst about what’s going on here, but these are still early days,” said Brook Byers, the champion for personalized medicine at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, during a moderated chat later in the day. “These things take a while. I’ve been doing this long enough to have been through a lot of things in computation, healthcare, and biotech. But personalized medicine is a way of thinking.” And then he made a vague reference to Emanuel that everyone got. “I think the day got started off a little weird,” he said.

Brook Byers (right) pictured with Pascale Witz of GE Healthcare's Medical Diagnostics business, and Raju Kucherlapati of Harvard Medical School

And with that, the room burst out with a round of supportive laughter. It felt to me like a group hug, as if the crowd were saying, “Right On. Tell Him How It Is, Brook.”

Byers didn’t directly attack anything Emanuel said earlier in the day, and he did stress how important it is for entrepreneurs to work closely with payers on measuring the value of new products. But if the crowd of several hundred people in a comfy Harvard auditorium really wants to make a difference in creating innovations for personalized medicine, I’d suggest they’d listen carefully to Emanuel, and a number of health economists who are making basically the same point. The U.S. healthcare system is badly broken, and it can’t go on paying for all these wonderful life science innovations the same way it has for the past 30 years.

As I said in this space a couple weeks ago, I’m inspired by some outstanding personalized medicines that have been approved by the FDA for cancer patients in the past few months. These are superbly effective drugs for small, genetically distinct populations of patients that are worth the hefty price tags they are commanding. These treatments are paving an important road scientifically, and with regulators, which other drugs ought to be able to follow for years to come.

But these innovations need to be taken in context. The U.S. now spends $2.6 trillion a year on healthcare, and that number increases by $100 billion a year, as Emanuel pointed out in one of his recent New York Times columns. That means the U.S. healthcare sector, by itself, is roughly equal in size to the economy of France—the fifth largest economic power in the world. To shave even 1 percent of U.S. healthcare spending per year, you need … Next Page »

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We spend most of our time at Xconomy banging out stories about innovation, and putting together our big conferences like “The Genetics Institute Impact” coming up Dec. 14. But sometimes we love nothing more than just meeting at a local establishment to shoot the breeze with readers over a cup of coffee.

So that’s what I’m going to do while I’m in Boston next week. Join me and Xconomy Boston’s associate editor, Erin Kutz, for an Xconomy Meetup. This informal gathering will go from 10 am to 11:30 am next Tuesday, Nov. 8, at Voltage Coffee & Art, 295 Third St. in Cambridge. Xconomy readers are welcome to pop in any time to say hi, share a story idea, pass a little gossip, or talk sports (at least with me, I can’t speak for Erin.)

If you want to meet but that time doesn’t work, I’ll also be attending the Personalized Medicine Conference over at Harvard Medical School on Nov. 9 & 10.

One other note to all the members of the Genetics Institute alumni network. I’m looking to gather a bunch of GI memorabilia—think company T-shirts, photos, promo literature, mugs, trophies, pens, etc—to put together as part of a big display at “The Genetics Institute Impact” event on Dec. 14. If you can find any of that stuff in your closet or basement, please bring some of it to the Meetup on Nov. 8, so I can sock it away at Xconomy headquarters for a few weeks before we put it all on display. I’ll have more to say about this as we get closer to the event, but I’d love to hear some of the backstories about the memorabilia from you in person while I’m in Boston. (For an example of what I’m talking about, check this post on Al Gore’s famously unused Immunex lab coat.)

That’s it for now. I look forward to seeing lots of readers there Nov. 8, from the GI alumni ranks and beyond.

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Only a couple stories in the past decade have given advocates of personalized cancer medicines much to brag about. There was Genentech’s Herceptin for a form of breast cancer in 1998, and Novartis’ Gleevec for chronic myeloid leukemia in 2001.

But just a few short weeks ago, in August, we saw a flurry of FDA approvals that I believe will go down as a turning point in the history of personalized medicine. Industry has paid lip service to this idea for years, but I’m starting to believe that many in pharma and biotech are getting real about changing their ways, and making drugs that are superbly effective in small niches of patients, rather than settling for mediocre advances for the masses.

Even with an explosion of knowledge in biology over the past 40 years, most of the new cancer drugs produce humbling results. Many drugs shrink tumors for one-fourth or one-third of patients, and nobody knows (or at least not enough have seriously bankrolled efforts to find out) how to pick which patients would fall into the lucky few. These drugs might extend lifespan a couple months, but there’s so much variability it can look like a roll of the dice—sometimes the drug could provide zippo benefit for you, or, it might extend your life a few years.

Two things, though, were certain. Patients would endure some significant side effects, and insurance companies would get some extremely high drug bills.

That’s why this past August was so important, and why people in biotech are still buzzing about what happened. Consider this string of FDA approvals, which the agency granted ahead of its usual legal deadlines, so it could get these life-saving therapies to patients sooner.

—On August 17, Roche’s and Daiichi Sankyo/Plexxikon’s vemurafenib (Zelboraf) was cleared for sale as a new treatment for a deadly form of melanoma that has spread through the body. This drug is tailored to treat about half of melanoma patients with a mutated form of a protein called BRAF. Clinical trials showed this treatment reduced the risk of death by 63 percent in this distinct genetic population, when compared to standard chemo. Researchers are still following patients to see how much longer people can expect to live with the new drug. Importantly, the treatment was approved with a companion diagnostic test that will help doctors determine whether patients should get the drug or not. The diagnostic test costs $150, and the drug will go for the premium price of $56,400 for a six-month course of therapy.

—On August 19, Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN) won FDA approval for brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) for patients with a couple of rare lymphomas—Hodgkin’s disease and anaplastic large cell lymphoma. This is a targeted drug that acts like a “smart bomb” by delivering a potent dose of chemotherapy directly to cancer cells that carry a signature marker known as CD30, while mostly avoiding healthy cells. The treatment was able to significantly shrink tumors for about 75 percent of patients with Hodgkin’s disease that had relapsed, and it produced an even better 86 percent response rate for very sick patients with anaplastic large cell lymphoma. Researchers are still following patients to see how long they are living, beyond the 2-3 year life expectancies they were given at the outset of the trial. Doctors can easily figure out which patients should get this drug based on their CD30 status, before they prescribe a product that is expected to cost about $108,000 per patient on average.

—On August 26, Pfizer showed that even though it made its fortune on mass-marketed blockbuster drugs like Viagra and Lipitor, a significant part of its future will depend on a so-called “nichebuster” in cancer. This one is called crizotinib (Xalkori), which is designed to treat about 3-5 percent of patients with non-small cell lung cancer that overexpresses a protein called ALK. The drug showed it was able to shrink tumors in a majority of patients—50 to 61 percent—and the spread of tumors was halted for close to a year. The responses have been so encouraging for this specific group of lung cancer patients that researchers, again, will have to follow patients for an extended time to get an accurate read on how long it will help patients live. Abbott Laboratories has agreed to sell the companion diagnostic test to determine a patient’s ALK status, so doctors can see which patients should get this $9,600-a-month treatment.

There’s a pattern here. These drugs are going after … Next Page »

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The benefits of generating databases based on the personal genetics of thousands of people came into better focus today with an announcement from Mountain View, CA-based 23andMe, the startup that aspires to be the world’s trusted source for personal genetic information.

Using genetic data drawn from thousands of 23andMe customers, the company says it has identified a gene that appears to protect against a genetic mutation associated with Parkinson’s disease. Specifically, 23andMe says the gene serum/glucocorticoid regulated kinase 1 (SGK1) appears to be protective against a mutation known as leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2).

A specific mutation on the LRRK2 gene, known as G2019S, is recognized as a risk factor for developing Parkinson’s. About half the people with the mutation develop the disease. Yet 23andMe says it has genetic data from a large number of people who carry the mutation, but who surprisingly don’t have Parkinson’s. In scrutinizing this group, 23andMe says it made the first-time discovery of the potentially protective nature of SGK1.

23andMe chief business officer Ashley Dombkowski previewed the SGK1 findings at Xconomy’s “Computing in the Age of the $1,000 Genome” event in San Francisco yesterday. Dombkowski said the company has amassed the world’s largest Parkinson’s research cohort, which has more than 6,000 participants and includes one of the largest groups of individuals carrying the pathogenic mutations in the LRRK2 gene.

The Parkinson’s initiative undertaken by 23andMe “has proven the tremendous potential in leveraging DNA technology, the Internet, and patient participation to accelerate findings,” says Todd Sherer, CEO of The Michael J. Fox Foundation.

The foundation awarded a $500,000 grant to the San Diego-based Scripps Research Institute in 2010 to identify a new and potentially vital therapeutic target for Parkinson’s disease. The foundation directed the grant to Philip LoGrasso, a Scripps professor of molecular therapeutics, who has been studying LRRK2 and SGK1.

“The SGK1 discovery, while still early-stage, is a promising outcome of this unique research platform, and holds potential to inform a therapeutic approach for Parkinson’s,” Sherer says. “We are eager to see the results of the continued investigation of SGK1 by Scripps.”

23andMe says it has 125,000 genotyped customers, and nearly 90 percent have opted-in to participate in research approved by the company’s Institutional Review Board. “These individuals are extremely valuable for us to study as they provide insights into why some people do not develop disease despite having high-risk genetic factors,” says CEO Anne Wojciki in a statement released by the company. “This could lead to new drug targets or diagnostics.”

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Last week’s Xconomy New York Life Sciences 2031 symposium produced lots of articulate speculation about the distant future of biotechnology and its related industries. But for those of us who work or invest in life sciences, the discussion did little to answer the pressing question: what can and should we do now to meet the evolving challenges of the next twenty years?

Implicit in the comments of panelists Sam Waksal, Eric Schadt, Barbara Dalton, and Samuel Isaly was the assumption that drug discovery will face the same problems in 2031 that drug discovery faces today: a “good molecule is hard to find” early-discovery environment; an inexact modeling of disease processes (hopefully improved by advanced bioinformatics); a confused FDA that cannot quite balance protection of the public with facilitation of medical progress; and capital markets that vacillate from total avoidance of development stage companies one year to drunken lust for the next big thing in life sciences the next.

So before we venture to 2031 let’s address 2011. How do we make the process, the regulation, and the funding more efficient today? How do we give the future panelists of Life Sciences 2051 more reasons for excitement and fewer reasons for pessimism?

We can start by using a 21st century vocabulary. In an era when we will define more and more diseases by their molecular pathways, genetic mutations, or expression signatures, why do we cling to anatomic and histologic definitions? Is “small cell carcinoma” more precise than “oat cell carcinoma?” As an intern in obstetrics and gynecology in the 1980′s I was taught that the term “ovarian cancer” represented a group of very different diseases, and that a rudimentary biomarker, CA-125, helped tease out one from another.

Yet today, small companies still present their development plans for ovarian cancer drugs with no separation into more specific patient populations—likely ruining the statistical assumptions underlying the trials, and obscuring … Next Page »

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Some big money is being put behind big names at a new biotech company called Cleave Biosciences.

The company in Burlingame, CA, founded in the summer of 2010, is emerging from stealth mode today with a $42 million Series A financing from US Venture Partners, 5AM Ventures, Clarus Ventures, OrbiMed Advisors, and Astellas Venture Management. The CEO is Laura Shawver, the former chief executive at Phenomix and president of Sugen, who was drawn to Cleave during a recent stint as an entrepreneur in residence at 5AM Ventures. She’s joined on the management team by president and chief scientist Mark Rolfe, who previously worked at CytomX Therapeutics, Facet Biotech, and Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company.

The big idea at Cleave is to develop small-molecule chemical compounds that will interact with certain protein pathways that get thrown out of whack in patients with cancer. Cleave is still at a very early scientific stage, seeking to prove not only that its protein pathways are good targets for cancer drug development, but also that its chemistry is valid, Shawver says. The concept is built on growing understanding of how protein networks can remain in a stable state of homeostasis, or how they can deteriorate over time and give rise to cancer. None of Cleave’s drug candidates are ready yet for clinical trials, but the financing will give the company three to four years of operating cash to pursue that goal.

“Our targets are novel, our chemistry is novel, and we need to prove out the principles,” Shawver says. “It will take a significant amount of money. But this way, the company can focus on executing for the long run, rather than executing a little bit and then going out and raising more money.” She adds: “Raising money can be distracting.”

The science underpinning this new venture comes from Raymond Deshaies and Francesco Parlati at Caltech and Seth Cohen at UC San Diego. Shawver didn’t disclose which specific forms of cancer the new company is pursuing, or what protein targets are high on its priority list. Cleave currently has five employees, and plans to grow to about 15 by the end of its first year, she says.

The name for the company comes from a pretty familiar concept in biology, which is that “cleave” means to cut, which is what a lot of enzymes do in the protein homeostasis network.

Cleave is certainly not the only startup with big aspirations for making drugs based on new knowledge of protein homeostasis. Cambridge, MA-based Proteostasis Therapeutics, which is seeking to develop neurological drugs in partnership with Elan, raised a similarly big $45 million Series A venture round in September 2008.

Cancer drug development has become quite a competitive business, as many companies pile in to chase hot targets like the PI3 kinase pathway, MET, MEK, hsp90, hedgehog, and more. It’s not all that often that startup biotech companies openly state they want to push the frontiers even further by going after biological targets that have less scientific validation.

Cleave hopes to minimize some of that risk by matching up its drugs, which are targeted at its specific pathways, with patients in clinical trials whose tumors are thought to be driven by the pathway. Although companies have talked about this type of personalized medicine for years, few have succeeded.

But Shawver, an ovarian cancer survivor and the founder of the Clearity Foundation which seeks to support molecular profiling of ovarian cancer patients, stresses that the new company will pursue a similar concept.

“We foresee a future when the majority of cancer patients will be treated based on the molecular profile of their tumors, regardless of whether the cancer invades the lung, pancreas, liver or elsewhere,” Shawver said in a statement. “We believe this therapeutic approach ultimately stacks the odds in favor of the patient, the physician, as well as the payor.”

Peter Thompson, a co-founder of Cleave and a venture partner at OrbiMed, added in an e-mail that he believes this approach has a chance to make a difference for patients, and be rewarded in the marketplace.

“While oncology remains a challenging arena, it also represents a therapeutic area where, conditional on results, pricing remains robust and strategic partner interest remains keen, suggesting that above-market returns will continue to be achievable for the right investments,” Thompson says.

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Thane Kreiner, in the prime of his professional life at 50, could be doing pretty much whatever he wants in Silicon Valley’s biotech industry. But about a year ago, he took a job that offered him a big cut in salary, no stock options, and no performance bonuses.

The lure? The chance to help build businesses in the developing world with the potential to make a difference for 1 billion people.

“When I applied for this job, I went to the provost and said, ‘Look, I won’t give you new theories on how to change the world. I actually want to do it,” Kreiner says.

Kreiner has been pursuing this bold goal over the past year as the executive director of the Center for Science, Technology & Society at Santa Clara University, about 40 miles south of San Francisco. The signature program he’s been working on there, in its ninth year, recruits entrepreneurs from the developing world for an 8-month mentoring program to help them figure out how to turn an already good tech-based small business into a great big one. Ideally, Santa Clara wants to help amplify ideas for things like rural electrification or clean water, which could help hundreds of millions of people lift themselves out of poverty.

Plenty of people have caught the bug for social entrepreneurship, but few people come at this emerging field with a background like Kreiner’s. He’s got a Ph.D in neuroscience from Stanford University, plus a Stanford MBA. He spent almost 15 years rising through the ranks at Santa Clara, CA-based Affymetrix (NASDAQ: AFFX), the gene-chip pioneer. The last few years, he co-founded or served as CEO of four different leading-edge biotech startups, including San Francisco-based Second Genome, Seattle-based Presage Biosciences, and South San Francisco-based iPierian. With his network of contacts in the venture world, he easily could have done the next hot thing in stem cells, personalized medicine, cancer diagnostics, you name it.

Corey Goodman, the prominent biotech entrepreneur and longtime friend and mentor of Kreiner, said he’s keeping an eye on Kreiner’s new nonprofit endeavor. “It is a very important program, and Thane is the perfect person to lead it. He has the passion and ability to make it a success,” Goodman says.

The program at Santa Clara University goes back to 1997, and its signature program, the “Global Social Benefit Incubator” got its start in 2003, before many universities had sought to tap into the growing interest in social entrepreneurship, Kreiner says. The idea of the incubator is essentially to identify entrepreneurs with proven technologies, and proven business models, who need some mentorship to scale up their companies to make a bigger difference, Kreiner says. The program matches up about 20 of these entrepreneurs from around the world with Silicon Valley VCs and entrepreneurs who help the startups define their value proposition, define target market segments, etc., over the course of an 8-month program. The program culminates in a 2-week boot camp in August every year, in which the entrepreneurs make their pitch for additional capital in front of an audience of 300 people, and a panel of judges that provide “American Idol” style instant feedback.

Results, like in many socially minded nonprofits, can be pretty squishy and subjective, unlike the hard reality of an audited for-profit income statement. Still, the program has racked up … Next Page »

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Amid all the comings and goings and CEOs changing jobs in the past week—see Rick Reidy of Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS), Mara Aspinall of On-Q-ity, and others—one person flew under the radar in Boston.

He is Stéphane Bancel, and until last month he was the CEO of bioMérieux, the microbiology and diagnostics firm based in France. Don’t let the French accent (and fashion sense) fool you, though. Bancel is a Boston guy, he’s been in town since 2007, and he’s here to stay—which is a big deal for the biotech community.

Last week, for example, BG Medicine (NASDAQ: BGMD), a Waltham, MA-based diagnostics company, said it appointed Bancel executive chairman of its board of directors. Bancel also serves as chairman of Cambridge, MA-based Knome, a personal genomics startup co-founded by Harvard’s George Church, which raised some new money this week. (bioMérieux is an investor in Knome.) Bancel is also involved with Cambridge-based ModeRNA, a stealthy therapeutics startup backed by Flagship Ventures.

Bancel had been chief executive of bioMérieux since the beginning of 2007. The billion-dollar company, which has been around since 1963, specializes in molecular diagnostic systems for healthcare, food safety, and industrial applications—like detecting salmonella in food preparation areas or bacterial infections acquired in hospitals. The firm has about 1,500 workers in the U.S., including a small office in Cambridge’s Kendall Square.

“After five years I wanted to move to the startup world,” Bancel told me this week.

Beyond that, Bancel hasn’t said much specifically about his future plans. Bancel is the kind of guy who’s involved in dozens of far-flung projects, but it wouldn’t be surprising if he spent the next part of his career focused on a new startup at the intersection of diagnostics and pharmaceuticals. (He worked for drug giant Eli Lilly from 2000 to 2006.)

Last month, before he left bioMérieux, he sat down with me to talk about the future of diagnostics, and I got the sense that that’s where his heart is. Molecular diagnostics is evolving rapidly, he said, thanks to faster and cheaper genetic sequencing and analysis and new testing approaches. And it’s changing the whole business, he said.

As Bancel put it, diagnostics used to be (and to some extent still is) a “me too” business, full of commoditized offerings from many companies. It also used to require scale—a big testing platform to do lots of similar tests, employing lots of scientists and staff. But now diagnostics is moving “closer to a pharma business,” he said. What’s more, he thinks advances in diagnostics and life sciences … Next Page »

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Every day in the world’s great science and technology clusters, brilliant people go to work thinking about innovation—how to innovate in research, how to build and grow startups, how to keep innovating at public companies so the startups don’t eat their lunch. Edward Jung admires all that work, but believes it can only go so far—that it can’t provide solutions to the world’s biggest problems. For that, he believes, you need a whole new approach to innovation.

Call it Innovation at Large Scale. And it will be the topic of Jung’s keynote talk at XSITE 2011 (the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship), which takes place this Thurday, June 16, at Babson College in Wellesley, MA.

Along with noted visionary Nathan Myhrvold and two other colleagues, Jung is a co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, the Seattle-area intellectual property firm best known for buying and licensing patents around the world—and for bringing top thinkers together for brainstorming “invention sessions” to create new patents. He is also the former chief architect of Microsoft.

I spoke with Jung last week to learn more about his planned talk at XSITE. I have to say I was expecting something about the importance of invention and patenting. But it turned out he is going to talk about how to bring innovation to some of the world’s biggest and most pressing problems—health care, energy, and the like. “It’s new and it’s not really just about Intellectual Ventures,” Jung told me.

I don’t want to steal too much of Jung’s thunder in advance of XSITE. But here are some notes from our conversation.

First, he’s talking about a model of innovation that actively involves government—rather than asks government to get out of the way. That’s because the problems he means to tackle are so huge and fundamental, government has to be involved. “There’s a whole bunch of problems to solve,” Jung says. “Whether dealing with healthcare in the developing world, or very large-scale problems through energy. It’s at a scale of problem that a single startup can’t solve, and it’s very inefficient to try to create lots of startups. Large companies can’t solve them either.”

One example he gave involves diagnostics medicine and that much-envisioned day when an array of diagnostic sensors—genomic, proteomic, visual, chemical, and behavioral—might warn us in advance of disease risk factors and provide tailored preventative treatments as well as personalized therapeutic regimens. A host of firms, such as Kaiser Permanente, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Baxter, Unilever, Walmart, and even IT powerhouses like Microsoft, Google, Intel, and Cisco—which might provide ways to store and access personal medical information—have released their own visions of the field and how their companies fit into them.

But each of these organizations, no matter how large and important, is only one bit player in what diagnostics medicine will ultimately become, and therefore their roadmaps only point to a piece of the field’s future. Think of a passenger airline industry without an Airbus or Boeing—that’s what diagnostics medicine is today, Jung says. “It’s like having a whole bunch of companies that make parts for airplanes try to talk about the vision of the airplane,” he says. What’s more, he adds, “You have no such uber company for a lot of the problems that were looking at.”

Since hundreds of separate companies aren’t going to spontaneously assemble themselves into a solution, “this is one of the cases where a government has to step in and play a role,” Jung says.

Specifically what’s needed, he says, is a master architect or “integrator” to contract with companies to provide all the pieces and then weave them together into a system that works. Now before you shout out—”Hold on, Uncle Sam as integrator, give me a break”—that’s NOT what Jung says the government should be doing. Instead, he says government should de-risk these big efforts by providing long-term guaranteed funding. It should then choose an integrator—in much the way NASA chose the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to manage its Mars Exploration Rover Project.

“Lots of new innovation can be tapped if you can just unlock the integration problem,” says Jung. The government can’t be that integrator, but it can be a demand customer who “changes the risk profile” of taking on big problems—both for large companies and startups, he says.

I’ll leave it to Jung to fully explain what he means at XSITE—and then hopefully answer some of your questions. I’m really looking forward to his talk, though, which will add an important dimension to our discussion of the Entrepreneurship Era, the theme of this year’s conference. We have speakers from startups, universities, public companies, and venture firms—including Desh Deshpande, Gilt Groupe founder Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Biogen founder and Nobel Laureate Phil Sharp, TripAdvisor’s Stephen Kaufer, and Todd Dagres of Spark Capital.

Jung’s talk figures to be the icing on the cake—as it brings the entrepreneurship and innovation discussion to mega problems and projects, including how government fits into the picture. Register here. I hope to see you on Thursday.

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A couple of San Diego biotechs have managed to raise some venture capital in recent weeks. We’ve got details on their good fortune, along with the rest of the local life sciences roundup.

—In its first big partnership with a major pharmaceutical, San Diego’s Zacharon agreed to share its expertise in developing small-molecule drugs that interact with glycans with New York-based Pfizer (NYSE: PFE). The deal that could be worth as much as $210 million to Zacharon. Glycans are thought to be promising drug targets for rare diseases, including lysosomal storage disorders.

—Conatus Pharmaceuticals, a San Diego startup with a promising compound for treating Hepatitis C, said it has raised a total of $32.5 million in a Series B round of venture equity funding. The biotech closed the round with a $7.5 million investment by MPM Capital of South San Francisco, CA.

—Luke’s BioBeat column was about Stephen Friend, who quit his job as a senior vice president of cancer research at Merck to found Sage Bionetworks, a Seattle non-profit aiming to harness the “wisdom of crowds” to improve drug development and personalize medicine. Friend is building Sage with the idea that our genomic symphony is too cacophonic for any individual or team to sort out.

—In another turn of the wheel, Avalon Ventures founder Kevin Kinsella responded to comments made by Sofinnova Partners’ Antoine Papiernik in a continuing debate over criticisms that Kinsella has leveled against Big Pharma for its “bad behavior” in dealing with venture-backed biotechs. Because the costs and time required for extended pre-clinical development and extensive clinical trials have moved beyond the scope of venture capital, Kinsella says that biotech ventures are focusing their resources on easier bets with lower risks.

—The West Wireless Health Institute named Rhode Island software developer Steven Palmer as the winner of its $10,000 challenge to develop a cost-effective wireless device or mobile app that enables VA patients and their healthcare providers to share pertinent patient care data. Palmer, a Vietnam Veteran and melanoma survivor, won for an iPhone app he developed for use in a monthly self-examination for signs of the deadly skin cancer.

—San Diego’s Digital Healthcare Systems has raised $1.1 million of a planned $2.4 million from undisclosed investors. The two-year-old startup is not related to Cambridge, England-based Digital Healthcare, an 11-year-old health IT company that provides ophthalmologic image management and storage solutions.

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In one of the Boston area’s biggest startup deals in recent years, Cambridge, MA-based Blueprint Medicines said today it has raised $40 million in Series A financing led by Third Rock Ventures. Blueprint has been stealthy to date, but its focus is on developing “personalized” cancer treatments based on molecular and cancer genome data and a proprietary chemical-compound library.

The big idea, as I see it, is to shift certain cancers from a death sentence to a manageable condition. Blueprint proposes to do this by understanding the molecular drivers of cancer processes and developing more targeted drugs, such as kinase inhibitors that block the action of enzymes that control things like cancer cell proliferation. Presumably the company’s drugs also will take into account specific cancer mechanisms that are found in some, but not all, patients with certain malignancies.

Blueprint was founded earlier this year by Nicholas Lydon, Brian Druker, Chris Varma, and David Armistead, together with Third Rock. Back in the 1990s, Lydon and Druker helped lead the development of imatinib (Gleevec), a pioneering kinase inhibitor drug (sold by Novartis) against chronic myeloid leukemia. That drug produced remarkable responses in this small patient population, allowing almost 90 percent of patients to live at least five years, according to data published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2006. Gleevec has since become one of the biggest blockbuster cancer drugs ever, generating $4.27 billion in sales for Novartis last year.

The new effort at Blueprint Medicines is being led by Varma and Armistead, both biotech veterans, as CEO and chief scientific officer, respectively. Third Rock’s Mark Levin and Alexis Borisy serve on Blueprint’s board of directors.

To date, Blueprint has been housed in Third Rock’s Boston office, but it plans to lease an office near Kendall Square and hire more than a dozen scientists this year, according to a report in the Boston Globe.

Targeted cancer therapies are a bustling field in Boston biotech, with companies like Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company, Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis, Aveo Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AVEO), and Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI) among those in pursuit.

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It’s tough, as baseball great Yogi Berra once famously observed, to make predictions, especially about the future. But that’s the risky business we’ve signed up for tomorrow night, as I plan to ask a handful of visionaries to think big about how they see the San Francisco Bay Area biotech hub evolving over the next 20 years.

We at Xconomy have a terrific lineup of guests on our feature panel at Bay Area Life Sciences 2031, and I plan to press them to open up about what they really think. This gathering, which is close to a sell-out as of this writing, will be held from 5 pm to 8:30 pm tomorrow at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus, Genentech Hall. Registration starts at 5 pm, and the program gets going at 6 pm.

Reg Kelly, the director of QB3 will make some opening remarks, along with some comments from my colleague, the editor of Xconomy San Francisco, Wade Roush. Then I’ll start the conversation with a panel of invited leaders from academia, public and private biotech companies, and venture capital. Here’s the lineup:

—Jeff Bluestone, executive vice chancellor of UCSF.

—Peter Hirth, CEO of Berkeley, CA-based Plexxikon.

—Randy Scott, executive chairman of Redwood City, CA-based Genomic Health (NASDAQ: GHDX).

—Corey Goodman, managing director of venBio.

I’ll have questions of my own, but I’ll be sure to leave time for you to get your questions too. After that, we’ll have brief 3-4 minute overviews from four entrepreneurs who are betting their innovations of today will still matter in 2031. They are:

—Bill Newell, CEO of South San Francisco-based Sutro Biopharma.

—Nancy Stagliano, CEO of South San Francisco-based CytomX Therapeutics.

—Mickey Urdea, CEO of Emeryville, CA-based Tethys Bioscience.

—Dave Martin, CEO of South San Francisco-based AvidBiotics.

Once the panels and talks are done, it will be time for some top-notch networking that is a highlight of all the Xconomy events we’ve done around the country. If you haven’t gotten a ticket yet, you can get one here at the registration page. See you there at UCSF tomorrow night.

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Genomic Health built itself into a profitable business in molecular diagnostics by using genetics analysis instruments that were state-of-the-art in the middle part of the last decade. But as the Redwood City, CA-based diagnostics company (NASDAQ: GHDX) looks further into the future, it has come to a clear conclusion.

Out with the old, and in with the new.

Genomic Health is looking for a way to rekindle its rapid growth of the past few years, and betting on new technology is a big part of the strategy. The company said last week it generated $178 million in sales in 2010, and achieved its first full-year profit since it was founded in 2000. But investors didn’t see much to cheer about here, because revenue grew only 19 percent over the prior year, and the company forecasts are that growth will level off at around 12 percent to 18 percent growth next year. Wall Street sent the stock down 5 percent the next day.

Certainly, Genomic Health has short-term things it can do to maximize its bread-and-butter Oncotype DX test by expanding into international markets, and by branching beyond breast cancer into colon and prostate tumor tests. But as those products run their course over time, Genomic Health wants to be in position to roll out new tests based on the breakneck pace of innovation of the past couple years in fast/cheap gene sequencing. So it’s investing in new diagnostic tests will look for patterns in a lot more genes than today’s molecular diagnostics can, and will make discovery of new tests cheaper, says founder and executive chairman Randy Scott. The spending is a drag on Genomic Health’s financial performance today, but the bet is it will pay big dividends further in the future.

“We are heavily invested in R&D programs, like next-gen sequencing, that are going to impact our bottom line for the next five years,” Scott says. “But we think it will help us build this eventually into a multi-billion dollar business over the course of the next 10 years.”

You need to dive a little bit into the history of technology at Genomic Health to understand what’s going on here. The company developed its first Oncotype DX test based on an instrument known as a real-time PCR machine, which uses the TaqMan chemistry sold by Life Technologies’ Applied Biosystems unit. The instrument, which amplifies DNA samples for analysis, was used to help discover the original 21-gene signature that Genomic Health’s Oncotype DX uses to predict the chance a woman with breast cancer will relapse, and whether she will benefit from a round of preventive chemotherapy. The RT-PCR platform was the best choice at the time, Scott says, because it had “really exquisite sensitivity, reproducibility, and precision.” The machine has been so good on those parameters, Genomic Health continues to use it for running the commercial tests it performs today.

But the more genes you want to analyze, the more expensive real-time PCR becomes. To recoup its sizable investment, Genomic Health to set a price of $4,000 for its one-time test, which has forced the company to run a lot of health economic analyses to justify the price. And as the company began to reach the limits of PCR technology, it started looking for a replacement platform, Scott says.

Given that several companies are now talking about sequencing entire genomes for $10,000 today, and potentially $1,000 or less in the not so distant future, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a company like Genomic Health is particularly interested. Over the past year, Genomic Health has been switching over its discovery research work to the new fast/cheap sequencing machines … Next Page »

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The New England biotech community has lost one of its well-known members way too early. Adriana Jenkins, a public relations specialist for numerous biotech companies, has died from breast cancer. She was 41.

Jenkins worked the last several years with The Yates Network, an independent PR firm that represents quite a few of the Boston area’s most interesting biotech companies—Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Alkermes, Avila Therapeutics, Constellation Pharmaceuticals, ImmunoGen, Pulmatrix, and Synta Pharmaceuticals, to name a few.

While most PR pros toil behind the scenes to shine the spotlight on their clients, Jenkins herself had a gripping story to tell. Her fight against breast cancer was chronicled by the Boston Globe in a 2002 special report. Just as she was embarking on an exciting new job at Cambridge, MA-based Millennium Pharmaceuticals in her early 30s, Jenkins learned she had an aggressive form of breast cancer. At the time, she wasn’t sure she should accept the job, given that she might die soon.

Fortunately for Jenkins, Millennium still wanted her to come to work. Even more importantly, doctors learned her form of breast cancer was driven by a protein called HER2, which meant she was a candidate for a novel medicine at the time from Genentech called trastuzumab (Herceptin), which specifically works to block the activity of that protein. Jenkins credited that drug with helping extend her life another nine years. It was such a powerful experience for her that she wrote a guest op-ed for Forbes, which was published the day she died. In this editorial, she makes a clear and unsentimental call for Congress to establish new incentives for drugmakers to create more medicines like the one that helped her.

“She was, bar none, one of the most talented, creative, hard-working PR professionals I’ve ever worked with,” says Barbara Yates, president of The Yates Network.

Jenkins had “the whole package,” Yates says, referring to Jenkins as someone who understood stories from a journalist’s point of view, knew how to write, had creative ideas, and wasn’t afraid to dive in to learn about complex science.

Jenkins got to build a wide-ranging network around the Boston biotech community from her time at Millennium. One person she became friends with was Cynthia Clayton, who’s now the senior director of investor relations and corporate communications at Alnylam. They stayed in touch after they both left Millennium, and Clayton leaned on Jenkins at times for consulting advice.

“It was easy to forget she was carrying this burden of breast cancer,” Clayton says. “She brought a real spark to her work, she was very passionate about what she was doing.” Jenkins was so deeply connected to biotech that she felt the need to return to the industry after a stint running her own jewelry design business. “She really missed what she was doing” in biotech, Clayton says.

I personally worked with Jenkins on lots of stories over the years, both at Xconomy and during my prior stint at Bloomberg News. I didn’t know her well personally, but I do know that she was a consummate professional who offered up story and interview opportunities that made sense for me and my publications. I never knew that she had cancer until I saw her at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco in January 2010, and saw she was wearing a wig.

She didn’t say anything about it, and I was afraid to ask. I thought she looked a little less confident, a little more vulnerable than the person I had first met a few years before. Yet I had to respect she was still there at a grueling must-attend industry conference, focused on doing her job, working to coordinate a good interview between me and Avila Therapeutics CEO Katrine Bosley.

I was really struck by the Forbes piece yesterday and the clarity of Jenkins’ writing. Her post reminded me how powerful it can be when a knowledgeable patient speaks up from personal experience to weigh in on a matter of public interest. I wish more patients would come forward like this to tell their stories. Who knows, maybe Jenkins inspired a few to follow that example.

There will not be a formal memorial service, but if you have any memories of Jenkins that you’d like to share, Xconomy readers are certainly welcome to leave comments below. Instead of flowers, her family asks friends to consider sending a donation in honor of Jenkins to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 10 Brookline Place West, 6th Floor, Brookline, MA 02445. Attn: Dr. Jennifer Ligibel’s Research Fund.

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What will your doctor be able to tell you when your entire genome can be sequenced in an afternoon for $1,000 or less? Who out there in the business world has a handle on how to make this data useful? Will it actually help our society improve health and wellness?

I’m getting my game face on for a sold-out event we’re hosting this afternoon in Seattle called “Computing in the Age of the $1,000 Genome.” Registration for this half-day forum starts at around 1:15 pm, and the program will get going at 2 pm. As usual at Xconomy events, we’ll have networking before and after we hear from our all-star cast of speakers. The event will be at Swedish Medical Center’s Cherry Hill campus, Pinard Auditorium, 550 17th Avenue in Seattle.

Here’s a reminder of who’s coming to join the conversation. See you over there.

Leroy Hood, the co-founder and president of the Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle

Cliff Reid, co-founder and CEO, Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics

Eric Schadt, chief scientific officer, Menlo Park, CA-based Pacific Biosciences

Jim Karkanias, senior director, applied research and technology, Microsoft Health Solutions, Redmond, WA

Deepak Singh, senior business development manager, Amazon Web Services, Seattle

Rowan Chapman, partner, Menlo Park, CA-based Mohr Davidow Ventures

Andreas Sundquist, co-founder and CEO, Palo Alto, CA-based DNANexus

Ilya Kupershmidt, co-founder and VP of products, Cupertino, CA-based NextBio

Rob Arnold, president, Seattle-based Geospiza

Tim Hunkapiller, Seattle-based consultant, Life Technologies

Paul Rutherford, chief technology officer, Isilon Storage Division, EMC, Seattle

Bob Nelsen, managing director, Arch Venture Partners, Seattle

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