This week we’ve seen financing news for a mix of New England IT and life sciences startups.

—Massachusetts startups raised $250.5 million across 34 deals in July, down from about $564.7 million the month before. The July drop in funding is a pattern we’ve observed before, thanks to data from our partner CB Insights, provider of FundingFlash, a daily roundup of companies receiving venture capital, angel investment, and growth equity funding.

—Cambridge, MA-based marketing tech firm HubSpot bought also Cambridge-based Oneforty for an undisclosed sum, scooping up the Oneforty team and bringing the merged company’s head count to 285 employees. Oneforty provides social media marketing tools and a directory of social media apps.

—Hopper, a Montreal-based travel startup looking for office space in Cambridge for the fall, announced it pinned down an $8 million funding round led by Atlas Venture with participation from Brightspark Ventures.

—Natick, MA-based cloud data storage provider TwinStrata nabbed $5.7 million in equity funding from 27 investors. The financing could hit $8.7 million, according to an SEC document.

—Two Cambridge diagnostics technology startups raised money this week. Quanterix—previously funded by Bain Capital Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, and Flagship Ventures—raised $6 million in new equity financing. And Foundation Medicine, a provider of cancer genomics testing, pinned down about half of an equity round that could hit $20.5 million.

—Our VentureDeal feed pulled another slew of New England financing headlines: $1 million for Newton, MA-based TenMarks, $500,000 for Boston-based Nyx Devices, $3 million for Pittsfield, MA-based Nuclea Biotechnologies, $7 million for Lebanon, NH-based Mascoma, and $1.5 million for Glastonbury, CT-based PayVeris.

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Cambridge, MA-based diagnostics startup Quanterix has inked a $6 million equity investment from nine investors, an SEC filing shows. Members of Bain Capital Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, and Flagship Ventures are listed as Quanterix directors on the filing. Earlier this year Novartis struck a deal to use Quanterix’s technology for diagnosing a neurological disorder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Quanterix envisions its technology could someday be a driving force in the $8 billion a year global diagnostics industry. Now it has one of the industry’s big players on board, taking a look for itself at close range to see what the Cambridge, MA-based startup can do.

Novartis Diagnostics, the unit of the giant healthcare company that tests the safety of 80 percent of the U.S. blood supply, has struck a deal to get access to Quanterix’s technology in Cambridge. Novartis plans to run tests to see how good the Quanterix instrument is at finding a rare protein biomarker in the blood associated with an undisclosed neurological disorder. Terms of the partnership aren’t being disclosed.

“We’re starting with one target, but we’re talking about looking at a few others,” says Quanterix CEO Dave Okrongly. “I hope this will grow into a close relationship that builds over time. Novartis has a lot of interest in accessing new technology, and when they looked at what Quanterix has to offer, they saw it gives them an edge they can’t get with other protein measurement technologies.”

Quanterix, started in 2007 by Tufts University chemist David Walt (the founder of San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN), has been on our radar since its early days. The big idea is to create an instrument that measures proteins in a way that’s 1,000 times more sensitive than standard Elisa tests, made by big players like Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT) and Becton Dickinson (NYSE: BDX). Those standard tests are made to detect antibodies in a blood sample that show whether a patient has been exposed to HIV, hepatitis C, or other pathogens. Quanterix was off and running in August 2008 when it snagged a $15 million financing from Arch Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Flagship Ventures.

While building the tool, hammering out technical issues to ensure it generates precise and reproducible results, the company has also sought to prove its value for biomedical research. The company generated a lot of attention last June when it published research in Nature Biotechnology that showed it was more effective than Elisa at spotting prostate specific antigen (PSA), the common diagnostic marker for prostate cancer. That paper triggered a number of inquiries from academic researchers, and a few from industrial scientists, who wanted to get access to the Quanterix technology to see if it could find novel biomarkers which are thought to be correlated with disease, Okrongly says.

Dave Okrongly

Quanterix isn’t ready to commercialize this instrument—that day won’t come until late 2012 or early 2013, Okrongly says. So for now, the company is keeping its fledgling technology inside its walls, while providing select academic and industrial scientists access in a number of different settings. So getting an organization like Novartis could be quite valuable if the first test pans out, because like Okrongly says, it could lead to more uses.

“The most important thing it represents is a shot on goal,” Okrongly says.

Getting a shot is really all a startup can ask for in what’s a pretty darn tough financing environment. Since the original $15 million financing, Quanterix has pulled in a $2.5 million bridge loan, and one other partnership with an undisclosed big company, Okrongly says. Last month, when I met him at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, he said he hoped to do a few of these partnerships to help validate the technology, bring in some cash, and pave the way for a Series B venture financing later in 2011.

So I figure it’s fair to say a lot is riding on this year’s battery of trial runs. “Such a big opportunity is waiting for us,” Okrongly says. “We have a lot of people coming to us who want access.”

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Cambridge, MA-based Quanterix is announcing today that Martin Madaus, the former CEO of Billerica, MA-based Millipore, has joined the startup’s board as executive chairman. Millipore, a giant supplier of diagnostics and lab equipment to biotech companies, was acquired by Germany-based Merck KGaA for about $7 billion in July. By joining Quanterix, he’s getting on board with a startup seeking to develop much more sensitive diagnostics that aims to spot disease earlier, and help doctors improve how they monitor the progression of disease. “This is a game changing technology,” Madaus said in a statement.

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Cambridge, MA-based Akrivis Technologies is named after a Greek word that means precision and accuracy. It’s too early to say whether it can fulfill that promise, but if it does, it could provide highly sensitive diagnostics for serious health conditions, targeted drug delivery for cancer, and even a platform on which to integrate drugs and companion diagnostics.

Joel Berniac, the co-founder and CEO of Akrivis, filled me in on this versatile technology during a recent call—following up on our initial chat about his company at an Xconomy networking reception held at Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company last month. What I mostly remembered from that conversation: Berniac has an office at the Cambridge Innovation Center, he got his MBA from Northeastern University in Boston, his company’s technology was invented by a professor at the same university, and the chief executive speaks with a French accent.

Everything else we talked about over drinks needed further explanation, and the rest of this post mostly covers what I learned in my second conversation with Berniac. The startup, which has raised about $500,000 from angels since it was founded in 2009, is being built on technology from Northeastern. The main goal is to develop a signal amplification system for diagnostics and imaging inside the body. The same core system might also be useful in delivering chemotherapy drugs and targeted doses of radiation to treat cancer. And at the center of the system is a biodegradable polymer that can carry multiple types of molecules. Ban-An Khaw, the co-founder and chief scientist of Akrivis, is the primary inventor of the technology and a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Northeastern.

It’s early days at Akrivis, and Berniac warned me after our latest interview that things at the firm—even the name of its core technology, now called “Zeptacsys”—might change in the coming months. For now, the firm plans to generate some quick cash by selling its technology as reagents for research purposes. The CEO said that the firm is in the process of figuring out how to tap this research market, which would not require his firm to gain any FDA clearances to begin sales. Revenue from this market would help fund studies to get the technology approved as a clinical diagnostic, Berniac says.

He showed me some images that illustrate how the firm’s technology might be a vast improvement over Elisa, a standard immunoassay technology. Akrivis’s system uses some of the same binding antibodies and materials as Elisa tests, but the firm’s novel carrier unit is supposed to amplify the signal, without adding background noise, from each biomarker it detects in order to increase the sensitivity of the system. A potential application of the technology would be to detect early biomarkers for assessing a patient’s risk of having a heart attack, Berniac says.

Still, there are a number of young companies in the Boston area and beyond that are developing technologies that could beat standard Elisa tests in the accuracy department. For example, Cambridge, MA-based … Next Page »

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If Bob Nelsen ever wanted to hide, yesterday would’ve been the time. Ikaria, the futuristic “hibernation-on-demand” company he bankrolled five years ago, was on the cusp of going public this week at a valuation of more than $700 million. It was a moment he had been eagerly awaiting a long time. Two years ago, Nelsen told Xconomy that Ikaria “will probably be the biggest biotech IPO ever when it decides to go public.”

This week, when Ikaria tested the IPO waters, it actually found nowhere near that kind of demand from investors. The offering was withdrawn at the 11th hour Wednesday night.

One of those rare moments in venture capital—the moment an illiquid investment becomes liquid—had slipped away. Arch had missed an opportunity to have its Ikaria stake valued at more than $56 million. It was also bad news for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and founding scientist Mark Roth, who both have substantial holdings in the company.

But Nelsen came to work anyway today, and did his best to explain why Ikaria withdrew its IPO, and why he thinks the company still has good growth prospects. He pointed out that unlike most biotech companies, which burn cash for many years in anticipation of developing a profitable drug, Ikaria is already profitable and doesn’t really need the IPO proceeds to stay in business. Regulatory filings do show that Ikaria had generated $274 million in revenue, and a $13 million profit in 2009. Here’s what he had to say in an e-mail message yesterday, and his response to a few follow-up questions.

Bob Nelsen: We pulled the IPO due to market conditions. While there was significant interest in the offering and in the company, Ikaria is one of only a few profitable biotech companies, and had the option to withdraw at this time. In other words, we didn’t need the money to survive as most biotechs would.

Ikaria generates large positive cash flows and has a solid pipeline of critical care drugs. (I think our positive net cash flows exceed all the biotechs in Seattle together)

Our next steps will be to continue to develop the pipeline, and to continue to acquire additional critical care assets.

Xconomy: Are you disappointed? … Next Page »

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In spite of the abundance of PhDs, MDs, JDs, and MBAs in biotech and pharma, we all know that on-the-job learning is really how this industry is built. Nobody goes to university to learn how to be a great CEO or manager, and there aren’t any courses in grad school where budding researchers can learn the way a pharmaceutical company operates.

That’s why it’s good to hear about the industry experience program started by the MassGeneral Postdoc Association (MGPA) with help from MGH and the MassBio Ed Foundation. It’s a grown-up version of the “take your child to work day” in which postdocs at MGH-affiliated laboratories—there’s about 1,100—have a chance to see what it’s like to work in a biotechnology or pharmaceutical company. They meet executives and scientists, tour offices and the labs, and get to ask questions about lifestyle, freedom to publish, and the various career tracks one can follow at a company. “Industry is this huge black box that academic trainees haven’t been able to see into,” says Adnan Abu-Yousif, a postdoctoral fellow at MGH who founded the program.

The idea of visiting a company for a day came to Abu-Yousif in early 2009, when he was co-chair of the postdoc association and realized there weren’t a lot of resources for people researching and considering, but not yet sure of, making the leap to industry. “We’re all scientists and we make our decisions based on observation,” says Abu-Yousif. So, he reasoned, a good way to find out if a career in pharma or biotech would be worthwhile could be to see that for himself.

He pitched the idea to folks at the MassBio Ed Foundation, and pretty soon they were approaching local companies to see who wanted to host. Three pilot rounds of visits, each involving a dozen or so postdocs, have already taken place. One of the visits already led to a collaboration between an MGH postdoc and New England Biolabs.

The program has now expanded, and this month it launched a web site on which companies and postdocs may sign up to be paired based on common interests. Already signed-up are AstraZeneca, EMD-Serono, and New England Biolabs–the three companies that participated in the pilot phase-as well as Merck Research Laboratories, Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Novartis, and Quanterix. I’m told several other big names in Boston are in the process of coming on board.

The industry’s warm reception of the postdoc association’s program—which entails not only opening up company doors, but sharing information about research and operations—is in line with a broader trend noticed by Rohit Shukla, chief executive of The Larta Institute, a non-profit organization that helps commercialize government-funded technologies. Shukla says that, over the years, … Next Page »

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Xconomy’s “Boston’s War on Cancer” forum on Wednesday delivered insights into some of the biggest questions about how scientists might be able to defeat one of the most fierce and complex diseases of our time, cancer. We heard some inspiring developments from Boston-area biotech chiefs whose companies are trying to make cancer treatments more precise, potent, and personalized. So I decided to share some of the major themes and provocative highlights from the afternoon event, hosted by Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company, in Cambridge, MA.

Know Your Target, and Drug Accordingly

Millennium CEO Deborah Dunsire emphasized during her keynote speech that new cancer drugs must treat very specific molecular drivers of the disease. (This targeted approach differs from existing chemotherapy drugs that wipe out healthy cells as well as cancerous ones and make people sick.) Novartis’s imatinib (Gleevec), Dunsire said, was the first targeted cancer drug. And she mentioned several more such cancer drugs on the horizon, such as Pfizer’s experimental lung cancer drug crizotinib and a potential cancer treatment called SGN-35, which Millennium is developing in partnership with Seattle Genetics (NADAQ:SGEN).

“You really make a difference when you can figure out what’s really the driver that we need to go after,” Dunsire said, “and then we can create a therapy that can” inhibit or target that driver.

Alexis Borisy’s Grenade-Hurling Analogy

Guess who played the role of provocateur on our panel of biotech leaders in the field of cancer treatment? Borisy, a partner at Third Rock Ventures in Boston, is also chief executive of Cambridge-based Foundation Medicine. The startup seeks to sequence patients’ cancer genomes to better match them with the appropriate drugs and improve treatment outcomes. He used the following analogy—apropos for an event called Boston’s War on Cancer—to help us see the light:

“We have to recognize that everything that we’ve been doing [to guide cancer treatments] probably explains why the success rates have been so low. We’ve been in a room with the lights off, and we’ve been saying let’s lob these grenades. Now, in the beginning, our grenades were really huge, explosive grenades, and not at all targeted. Then we started to create more specifically shaped grenades, but we still had very little idea what things looked like. That is beginning to change now.”

Three Emerging Weapons Against Cancer

Tumors beware. We got quick looks at three of the Boston area’s most exciting startups that will switch off the genes you need to grow and survive, knock down the epigenetic enzymes that help you thrive, or hunt down any evidence that you are alive. By this I mean that we heard from: Doug Fambrough, chief executive of Watertown, MA-based Dicerna Therapeutics, a developer of new gene-silencing drugs to treat cancer; Mark Goldsmith, the CEO of Cambridge’s Constellation Pharmaceuticals, which is researching drugs that target epigenetic enzymes that control how spools of DNA in our cells are expressed or suppressed; and David Okrongly, the chief executive of Cambridge-based Quanterix, which is developing a single-molecule detection system that might be able to detect signs of cancer recurrence in the blood years ahead of the current state of the art in detection.

The Question of Important Cancer Questions

Tyler Jacks, our closing keynoter, directs the David H. Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research at MIT—an organization whose scientists and engineers seek answers to some of big questions about cancer biology. So it made sense for media veteran Mike Huckman, who conducted the chat with Jacks, to ask the noted scientist what some of those cancer questions are. (It also happens that Jacks is involved in the National Cancer Institute’s nascent effort to get more researchers around the country to tackle such questions.)

Jacks pointed to several important major unknowns, but there was one that sounded quite new to me. “What are the essential characteristics of an early lesion that allow it to progress to an advanced tumor that is now invasive, and beyond that will advance further to metastasis [the state at which the tumor spreads to other organs in the body]?”

Perhaps someone will have an answer to Jacks’s question at one of our future forums.

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New England area biotechs made the news this week with FDA approvals, clinical study results, new financings, and partnership news. We also saw a few interesting trend and profile pieces on drugmakers.

—Boston-based Gelesis, a biotech working on treating obesity, announced that its technology helped rats reduce their food intake over 18 hours when compared to a placebo. The startup is developing a capsule that—when taken with water—is designed to swell 100-fold in the stomach to make patients feel fuller.

—Waltham, MA-based ImmunoGen (NASDAQ: IMGN) announced it will get $45 million upfront from Novartis in exchange for exclusive rights to use its technology to make antibody-based drugs for cancer targets of Novartis’ choosing. ImmunoGen, whose technology combines an antibody’s targeting capabilities with potent, cancer-killing toxins, could also stand to receive $200 million in milestones per target that leads to a cancer drug, and royalties on the drug sales.

—InfraReDx, a Burlington, MA-based medical imaging startup, said it raised $21 million in Series D funding from new and return backers. The firm is putting its cash toward U.S. sales of its FDA-approved coronary imaging system, which combines near infrared light and ultrasound technology to provide detailed images of a type of fatty plaque in the arteries.

—Waltham-based Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS) announced it had received FDA approval of its extended-release formulation of naltrexone (Vivitrol) for the purpose of preventing relapse of opioid drug dependence. The drug, injected once per month, received approval in 2006 for treating alcohol dependence.

—Ryan rounded up some of the major storylines—both past and evolving in the future—surrounding the New England biotech scene, including the influence of … Next Page »

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Pretty much anyone who makes a living in the pharmaceutical and biotech business, and has turned on CNBC in the past decade, knows the name Mike Huckman. He reported on the biggest developments in the cancer drug development field in those years, telling the stories of groundbreaking therapies like Eli Lilly’s Erbitux, Roche’s Avastin, and Dendreon’s Provenge.

Now I’m happy to say Huckman, a three-time Emmy Award winner, is bringing his experience and global perspective to Xconomy’s next big Boston-area event, “Boston’s War on Cancer,” on October 20. Huckman, now a senior vice president at MS&L Global Healthcare in New York, will moderate the closing keynote chat with Tyler Jacks, the director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

Huckman is joining a stellar lineup of speakers being featured at this event, which will take place at Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company in Cambridge, MA. Deborah Dunsire, Millennium’s CEO, will kick things off with a brief keynote talk about where she sees things heading in cancer R&D. We will also hear from the CEOs of some of New England’s leading startups taking lots of different tacks in the fight against cancer. The group includes Doug Fambrough of Dicerna Therapeutics, speaking on RNA interference drug development; Mark Goldsmith of Constellation Pharmaceuticals, on epigenetics; and Dave Okrongly of Quanterix, a company designing precise diagnostics to spot early signs of cancer in a drop of blood.

We’ll also hear from a panel of experienced drug developers who know all about the long, hard road a company must follow to take a drug candidate through clinical trials. This group includes Tuan Ha-Ngoc, the CEO of Cambridge-based Aveo Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AVEO); Adelene Perkins, CEO of Cambridge’s Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI); Alexis Borisy, the CEO of Foundation Medicine and a partner with Boston’s Third Rock Ventures; and Nancy Simonian, the chief medical officer of Millennium‘s global cancer development operation. Sylvia Pagan Westphal, a veteran reporter from the Wall Street Journal who now writes a national life sciences column for Xconomy, will moderate.

I’ll be keeping things moving along as the emcee—and I’m looking forward to hearing what this group has to say about where things are heading in cancer research and development. This event is less than a week away, and if you haven’t registered, you can still get tickets here. See you there next Wednesday, October 20.

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The past decade of cancer research and development was mainly about getting targeted. Chemotherapy that kills all kinds of cells—cancerous and healthy—is still a mainstay of treatment, but more targeted cancer drugs like Roche’s bevacizumab (Avastin) and Novartis’ imatinib (Gleevec) finally broke through and fulfilled at least some of their promise. They showed drugs could hit precise molecular targets integral to the growth and spread of cancer cells, and by doing that, they could hold tumors in check and help people live longer.

That’s past, but where are things heading in the future? Will this be the decade that molecular diagnostics come along and catch cancer at its earliest, most treatable stage? Will the era of complete human genomes for $1,000 a pop finally make the vision of personalized medicine a reality? Or will a whole new generation of antibody drugs and targeted small molecules continue to make step-by-by-step progress (and the occasional leap ahead) against specific malignancies?

These are the kind of questions we will explore on October 20 at our next big event in Boston, called “Xconomy Forum: Boston’s War on Cancer.” We’ll hear keynote talks from someone on the leading edge of research in New England (Tyler Jacks of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT) and a leading pharmaceutical industry executive (Deborah Dunsire of Millennium:The Takeda Oncology Company).

In between, as we always do at Xconomy, we will highlight some of the most interesting entrepreneurs and startups pursuing creative strategies in the fight against cancer. We’ll hear 20-minute overview presentations from Doug Fambrough, the CEO of Watertown, MA-based Dicerna Pharmaceuticals; Mark Goldsmith, the CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Constellation Pharmaceuticals; and Dave Okrongly, the CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Quanterix. They will offer up their own insights into what’s hot in RNA interference, epigenetics, and molecular diagnostics, respectively.

Deborah Dunsire

We’ll hear some added perspectives from executives who are pursuing equally innovative strategies, but are currently pushing through the long and expensive slog known as the FDA approval process for a new drug. We’ll bring together Tuan Ha-Ngoc, the CEO of Aveo Pharmaceuticals; Adelene Perkins, the CEO of Infinity Pharmaceuticals; Nancy Simonian, the chief medical officer of Millennium:Takeda; and Alexis Borisy, the CEO of Foundation Medicine and a partner with Third Rock Ventures to talk about the challenges and opportunities they see in cancer drug development. Xconomy’s national life sciences columnist, Sylvia Pagan Westphal, will moderate.

I’m excited to fly in for this event to see all these folks who are leaders in New England, but also on the international stage. There are some tickets left for this event, but there is limited seating, so it’s a good idea to register now by clicking here. See you on October 20.

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Billions of dollars are being poured into R&D against cancer, by governments and pharma companies all over the world. I write about it pretty much every week on Xconomy. So it shouldn’t be any surprise we’ve been itching around here to pull off a socko event that gathers some of Boston’s top entrepreneurs in the cancer field for an in-depth conversation about the state of cancer R&D and where it’s going.

So here it is. We are thrilled to announce our next big public event, “Boston’s War on Cancer.” It will be held on the afternoon of October 20 at Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company in Cambridge, MA. Details below.

This event will feature some of the big names on the local cancer drug development scene, and maybe a few that you don’t know, but will in time. Millennium CEO Deborah Dunsire will kick things off with her view of the state of the art in cancer drugs in a keynote talk. We will also hear from CEOs at some of New England’s top venture-backed startups, who are working on a variety of cutting edge strategies against cancer. The group includes Doug Fambrough of Dicerna Therapeutics from the field of RNA interference drugs; Alexis Borisy of Foundation Medicine and Third Rock Ventures on discovery of promising new cancer targets; Mark Goldsmith of Constellation Pharmaceuticals on epigenetics; and Dave Okrongly of Quanterix on new diagnostics precise enough to spot early signs of cancer in a drop of blood.

In between, we’ll hear from a distinguished panel of people who have devoted their careers to thinking about how to take promising new cancer drugs all the way through the FDA approval process and into the marketplace. This group includes Tuan Ha-Ngoc, the CEO of Cambridge-based Aveo Pharmaceuticals; Adelene Perkins, CEO of Cambridge’s Infinity Pharmaceuticals; and Nancy Simonian, the chief medical officer of Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company’s global cancer development operation. Xconomy’s own life sciences columnist, Sylvia Pagan Westphal, will moderate this conversation about all the opportunities and challenges facing these companies as they pursue new cancer treatments.

I’m personally curious to hear what all these people have to say, and will be flying in from my base in Seattle to emcee this gathering. My job, as usual, will be to help pass the microphone around to make sure this is a highly interactive conversation, and not some snoozer where we all sit back and die by PowerPoint. So mark your calendars, and get your questions ready for this distinguished group of Boston experts on cancer R&D. You can see all the details on how to register by CLICKING HERE. I look forward to seeing you on October 20.

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Life sciences news in the past week has run the gamut, from stealthy companies emerging with funding to big name drug makers scoring FDA approval and successful drug trial results, not to mention a few headlines of partnerships and acquisitions.

—Logical Therapeutics, a Waltham, MA-based developer of anti-inflammatory drugs designed to be safer on the stomach, closed a $16.9 million Series C round, led by SV Life Sciences. We broke the news last Friday that the company had pulled in the first $10 million of the financing, based on an SEC filing. Burrill & Co., Novo A/S, and Novitas Capital also participated in the funding round.

—NormOxys, which is making drugs that incite red blood cells to release a controlled amount of oxygen to deprived tissues, raised $17.5 million. The funding, which was led by Care Capital and included Index Ventures, will go to testing the Wellesley, MA-based company’s drugs in patients with chronic heart failure and cancer.

—PatientKeeper, the Newton, MA-based maker of software that assists doctors in tasks such as viewing patient data, ordering prescriptions or lab tests, and recording service charges, has made its applications available on Apple’s iPad. Originally founded as Virtmed in 1996, PatientKeeper’s technology differs from traditional electronic healthcare software in that it specifically targets physicians, a group that has been slower in adopting healthcare IT products, Ryan wrote.

—Cambridge, MA-based T2 Biosystems raised $15 million, led by Physic Ventures, to continue developing its portable diagnostic technology, which aims to identify proteins, molecules, viruses, and DNA using a handheld instrument. A slew of new and existing investors participated in the most recent financing for T2, which says its machine beats traditional diagnostic devices when it comes to speed, price, and the range of biological substances it can detect.

—Waltham-based Avila Therapeutics will get as much as $209 million from Clovis Oncology in a partnership deal for developing drugs for certain types of lung tumors. Clovis is using Avila’s drug technology, which is designed to form irreversible covalent bonds with their targets, as a way to fight lung cancer that has proven resistant to other treatments.

—Cambridge-based Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) nabbed FDA approval to sell its drug for treating the genetic disorder Pompe disease in patients who are at least 8 years old. The drug, alglucosidase alpha (Lumizyme), is made in Genzyme’s Geel, Belgium-based plant, and functions by replacing the enzyme that Pompe patients are lacking, which breaks down sugars that build up and enlarge heart and muscle tissues. Its absence can … Next Page »

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Both academics and industry have long sought ways to spot cancer in patients before it becomes deadly. This week, Cambridge, MA-based Quanterix said its single-molecule detection system could potentially find signs of prostate cancer recurrence lurking in the blood years before traditional lab tests.

The study, published in Nature Biotechnology, showed that Quanterix’s technology detected proteins in the blood called prostate-specific antigens (PSA) with 1,700-times greater sensitivity than existing diagnostics. The protein is a common biological marker in testing for prostate cancer. Beyond these findings, the company claims that its technology could be used to measure virtually all proteins in the blood that are linked to diseases, some of which are difficult or impossible to quantify with existing antibody-based blood tests.

Quanterix, founded in 2007, has previously garnered plenty of attention from venture capitalists and the science press. David Walt, the Tufts University chemistry professor who invented the startup’s technology, hit pay dirt with his previous company, San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ:ILMN), which dominates the market for high-speed gene sequencing instruments. With Walt’s new technology, and his track record of success, Quanterix scooped up $15 million in a Series A round of funding in 2008 from big-name investors such as Arch Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Flagship Ventures.

Quanterix’s new study refines its pedigree further. The firm’s single-molecule array system found trace amounts of proteins linked to prostate cancer in blood samples from which standard tests for the proteins found nothing, according to the company. All 30 of the samples in the firm’s study were from men who had surgery to remove cancerous prostate tissue, Walt told me in an interview. Men who undergo such surgeries typically get their blood checked for PSAs for years in order to detect whether their prostate cancer has returned, but those existing blood tests have limited sensitivity, and signs that the cancer has come back can go unnoticed for years, until it is too late.

“The Holy Grail would be if we could … Next Page »

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This week Ryan and Luke had several great interviews with some of the newest CEOs in New England life sciences. Those and the rest of the week’s biotech, devices, and health IT news below.

—Luke caught up with Steve Gullans, a managing director with Excel Venture Management, who reports that his Boston-based venture firm is having a good year at a time when others are struggling. Early successes among Excel’s portfolio companies include San Diego-based Synthetic Genomics’ $600 million investment from Exxon Mobile and Woburn, MA-based BioTrove’s acquisition by Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies.

—Ryan scored an interview with John McCarthy, the new CEO of Marlborough, MA-based Qteros, a developer of cellulosic ethanol technology. McCarthy was formerly the executive vice president at Cambridge, MA-based cellulosic ethanol developer Verenium (NASDAQ:VRNM), and aims to help Qteros cut partnership deals like the $90 million one with energy giant BP he helped Verenium ink in 2008.

—Ryan also chatted with Scott Minick, the new CEO of Cambridge-based Bind Biosciences, which recently closed an $11 million Series C round of venture capital led by businessman and philanthropist David Koch. Minick invested in Bind, a developer of highly targeted nanoparticle-based drugs, in 2007, as a managing partner at Arch Venture Partners; he ended an 11-year tenure at Arch to become Bind’s full-time CEO.

—Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners and Arch Venture Partners, which has operations in Boston and Seattle, reportedly agreed to pay $14 million for the assets of Iceland-based genomics firm deCode Genetics (NASDAQ:DCGN), which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November. Both venture firms previously invested in deCode.

—Yet another newish CEO, Dave Okrongly of Quanterix, told Luke about his big dreams for his Cambridge-based firm. Chief among them: using technology developed in the Tufts University lab of David Walt to capture the $8 billion market for antibody-based diagnostics.

— Southborough-MA-based IkaSystems, a maker of software for healthcare payers, raised a combined $120 million from private equity fund Essex Woodlands Health Ventures and Providence Equity Partners, according to Venture Wire.

—Cardiorobotics of Middletown, RI, raised $5 million in equity investments, according to an SEC filing. Founded by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, the startup develops robotic probes for surgical applications, among other things.

—Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE:TMO) of Waltham said it will pay $145 million in cash for Ahura Scientific, which makes handheld detectors of chemicals and metal for the pharmaceutical and security markets. Backers of Wilmington, MA-based Ahura include Arch Venture Partners, Waltham, MA-based Castile Ventures, California’s Fuse Capital, and GF Private Equity Group, of Durango, CO.

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The new CEO of Quanterix isn’t afraid to dream big, and say it out loud.

“We participate in an $8 billion market,” says CEO Dave Okrongly, referring to the business of antibody-based diagnostics. “Quanterix can be a platform for that whole $8 billion market.”

Okrongly was named CEO of the Cambridge, MA-based company in September, and now that he’s been settling in for a while, I got a fresh update just yesterday. The company is the latest brainchild of Tufts University chemistry professor David Walt, who previously hit gold with Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN), the San Diego-based genetic analysis powerhouse. Quanterix hasn’t said much publicly since it raised $15 million in venture capital back in August 2008, so I’ve been curious for some time about the company’s game plan for approaching the first segments of that $8 billion antibody-based diagnostics market.

Before diving into that, I first wanted to know a little about Okrongly. It turns out he’s got a doctorate in chemistry, and a resume with a lot of commercial experience, most recently as the senior vice president of the molecular diagnostics unit at Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics. Earlier in his career, he caught the startup bug at Applied Immune Sciences, an early gene therapy company that was acquired in 1995 by what’s now Sanofi-Aventis.

So while Okrongly, 51, rose in the ranks at big companies, and introduced a number of clinical diagnostic tests around the world, he felt the urge to come back to a startup to create something new. When he first heard about Quanterix, he didn’t think it was for him. “It seemed early and raw,” he says.

Then he met personally with Walt, who changed his mind. “I thought, holy cow, this could change the whole way we do immunodiagnostics. I gotta give this a run. This is a transformative technology with top-notch people around it.”

Dave Okrongly

Walt is equally enthused about the new leader at Quanterix. “Dave has exactly the right blend of diagnostics experience and strong technical background. He has helped push the company’s market strategy forward while helping it achieve its technical milestones,” Walt says.

The initial idea at Quanterix is to find a way to detect trace quantities of proteins in the blood, which could be an early warning sign for cancer or a neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. Quanterix says its test is about 1,000 times more sensitive than the gold standard ELISA assays. The older tests employ specific antibodies that are made to bind with certain biomarkers, known as antigens.

Some of these older tests can be quite cheap and reliable, but they also have their limits. One of the emerging ideas in biology is that tumors and other diseased tissues spill off specific proteins in the bloodstream, but these proteins generally come in trace amounts too small to be detected by the standard ELISA tests. The Quanterix system is designed to detect thousands of single molecules simultaneously, with proprietary chemistry and what the company calls “a relatively simple” instrument with a light source, optics, a digital camera, and an automated handling system. Software is then used to analyze the images.

Quanterix is betting that its ultra-sensitive tests can fill some of the gaps that ELISA tests struggle with. One well-known example is the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening test … Next Page »

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[Updated, Sept. 22, 11:15 am. See end of story] You might have seen Alex Rives around town in the past year, particularly if you’ve spent time hanging out at coffee shops near MIT, Harvard Medical School, and other bastions of basic research. He’s the one invariably wearing dark jeans and a sport coat over a t-shirt—and sporting a light Don Johnson beard.

Rives is a rising star associate with Arch Venture Partners in Seattle—or, rather he used to be in Seattle. Rives has just opened Arch’s first East Coast office here in Boston. It turns out that he’s actually been living in the area for about a year. But after spending most of that time working mostly out of coffee shops—where he would meet with researchers to discuss the potential commercial opportunities of their work—he moved into space on Berkeley Street in the Back Bay last month, setting up shop inside the offices of Oxford Bioscience Partners. This is Arch’s fifth office, joining those in Seattle, Chicago, Austin, and San Francisco. As of this writing the office is not yet listed on the Arch website. But it’s real and open for business, Rives told me last week over a few beers.

I’ve known something was up with Rives and Arch for a quite a while now. Even though Rives is only 28, he was the founding president of Fate Therapeutics, a San Diego-based company built in large part on science from Harvard Medical School that I profiled in April of 2008. We invited Rives to speak about Fate at an Xconomy life sciences forum with co-investor Amir Nashat of Polaris Venture Partners last September, and I’ve seen him around town ever since. I’ve been pressing Rives for months to tell me what’s he up to—and finally, he says, the time was right.

Arch has wide interests, investing across life sciences, information technology, energy, and other areas—often starting at very early stages of research. “Arch has been since its outset about working closely with basic researchers. That’s one of the things that makes us unique,” Rives says. “My role is to really work to develop close relationships with leading researchers in the Boston community. So I spend a tremendous amount of time at various academic research institutions.”

The firm has done a lot of deals over the years in the Boston area. Off the top of his head, Rives lists Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Quanterix, Ensemble Discovery, and, of course, Fate. A more recent investment, he says, was cancer drug developer Agios Pharmaceuticals, where Arch was a co-institutional founder, along with local firms Flagship Ventures and Third Rock Ventures. Bottom line, he says: “Arch has always seen Boston as vital to it.” Now, the firm apparently sees the area as even more vital.

Many, but hardly all (think Amberwave or Ahura Scientific) of the Boston area firms Arch has invested in are in the life sciences, Rives’ own specialty. But, says Rives, “I’m really focusing … Next Page »

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