[Updated 1/11/12 5:15 pm. See below.] “Sermo has been my baby, my blood and tears,” its former CEO Daniel Palestrant told me in a phone call last week.

So it was pretty shocking last week when news surfaced that the founder of the Cambridge, MA-based online community for doctors was moving onto a new Web startup, along with Sermo chief medical officer Adam Sharp. It wasn’t always going to be that way, Palestrant said, but more on that later.

Par8o, the new startup, began as a research project within Sermo. Drawing on the insights of its large online physician community (more than 130,000 people strong now), Sermo had formed the opinion a few years ago that the healthcare bill would not achieve its goals of improving patient care and lowering costs, Palestrant said. Among other things, the community thought the bill (signed into law March 2010) needed greater reform to medical malpractice policy and ways to improve patient engagement.

The research team at Sermo hypothesized that to achieve these goals, what’s needed is “the introduction of Pareto dynamics,” where efficiency is created through better matching supply and demand, said Palestrant. The idea comes from the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.

So what exactly does that look like and how can a new health Web startup help? Palestrant explains that in Par8o’s case, it’s about improving the patient referral process. Referrals, he said, are “a critical moment in a patient’s healthcare journey, either a change in diagnosis or an escalation in care.”

Often, this means the general practitioner sees a new health problem in a patient and needs to bring in a specialist to really tackle it, said Palestrant. That should work fine, right? Not exactly, according to Palestrant. Of the tens of millions of patient referrals per year, somewhere between 20 percent and 40 percent never actually result in another appointment or handoff to a new doctor. “The patient never … Next Page »

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Clinical trial results and drug collaborators made up the New England life sciences news this week.

—New Jersey-based drugmaker Merck announced backing a few Boston-area companies in the past few weeks. Its Global Health Innovation Fund led a $10 million financing for Cambridge, MA-based Daktari Diagnostics, a developer of technology for testing small quantities of blood and other fluids that it hopes can monitor HIV patients in the developing world. And Merck pledged $17 million to Marlborough, MA-based Physicians Interactive Holdings. The company will put the money towards developing its online and mobile tools to connect doctors and pharmaceutical companies.

—An experimental drug from Cambridge-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY) helped lower so-called bad cholesterol by an average of 39 percent at the highest dose studied in a small clinical trial.

—Aveo Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AVEO) of Cambridge said it met it goals in a clinical trial called TIVO-1 of its experimental drug for treating kidney cancer. In the study of 517 patients, Aveo’s tivozanib was able to keep tumors from spreading a median of 11.9 months, compared with 9.1 months for another drug in its class from Bayer and Onyx Pharmaceuticals. It was a narrow victory, though, as the trial’s goal was to show the Aveo drug kept tumors from spreading about an extra three months.

—Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) said it will pay Carlsbad, CA-based Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ISIS) up to $299 million for collaborating on a treatment for a spinal muscular atrophy, a rare disorder found in newborns.

—Inspiration Biopharmaceuticals moved into its new digs in Kendall Square, after more than seven years of operating as a virtual biotech company that’s pursuing hemophilia treatments. It was founded by hedge fund manager John Taylor and Scott Martin, a Texas energy veteran whose son has hemophilia.

—The founders of Sermo, a Cambridge-based provider of an online community for doctors, are moving on to a new spinoff called par8o, the online publication Pharmalot reported. CEO Daniel Palestrant and chief medical officer Adam Sharp say on the par8o website that the new company will be focused on more efficiently connecting doctors and patients.

—Watertown, MA-based Forma Therapeutics inked a deal with Germany-based Boehringer Ingelheim that provides $65 million in upfront cash and four years of R&D support for discovering cancer drugs. Forma, which now has seven partnerships with heavy hitters, could also get potentially $750 million more from Boehringer Ingelheim as the cancer drugs move through development.

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Founders of Sermo, the Cambridge, MA-based provider of an online community for physicians, are off to a new health-focused Web startup. The news was first reported today at online publication Pharmalot, which noted Sermo CEO Daniel Palestrant’s departure.

Sermo founder and chief medical officer Adam Sharp is also a founder of the new startup, Par8o, according to its website. Par8o seems to be an outgrowth of Sermo, with Palestrant and Sharp stating on the Par8o website that “having built the largest physician community in the world, we’ve seen first-hand what is happening to our profession and understand what it is doing to our colleagues, and most importantly, our patients.” The new startup says it is focused on enabling patients and physicians to collaborate directly on patient care, and is apparently leveraging concepts of efficiency and the allocation of goods from the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.

Sermo was founded in late 2005 and hoped to make money by charging financial services firms for access to the doctors in its online community (it stayed away from ads and subscription fees for the physician users). But it struggled to bring cash in that way, and later pivoted to focus on medical device and drug makers as paying customers, as we reported in December 2009. Two days after that report, news surfaced that Sermo laid off about 30 of its employees, reducing a workforce that was previously between 60 and 80 people.

We last heard from Sermo in August, when the company announced a new mobile app that enabled doctors to snap pictures of findings, X-rays, or lab results, and send them to others in the Sermo community for real-time advice. The company also took in another $3.5 million in growth financing from MMV Financial last February. We hope to get more details from Palestrant about the new gig, so stay tuned.

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The world of mobile software applications has evolved so rapidly in the past couple of years, it will make your head spin. One guy whose head isn’t spinning, though, is mobile-app veteran Greg Raiz. In fact, he is probably doing the spinning for everyone else.

Raiz is the founder and CEO of (aptly named) Raizlabs, a Brookline, MA-based mobile development shop that started in 2003. The company is known for developing mobile apps and doing consulting and design work for a lot of startups and big companies, especially in the Boston area—RunKeeper (FitnessKeeper), Intuit, Rue La La, and Sermo, just to name a few.

Earlier this month, Raizlabs rolled out its first software-as-a-service offering, called AppBlade. (The name is meant to connote a Swiss army knife.) The suite of tools helps developers distribute their apps to customers and helps them keep the apps secure and updated after crashes, as well as providing insights into how people are using the apps, among other things, Raiz says. The project grew out of “gaps in the workflow” at Raizlabs, he says. The goal over the next six to 12 months is to transform it from a host of app-development tools into a “robust platform,” Raiz says.

“It’s a startup within a startup,” he adds. “We’ve been incubating this idea for the past year.”

The idea, as I see it, is that every company and its brother wants to have a mobile presence. But developing a good business app is just the beginning—getting the app into the hands of a company (and its customers) requires making connections in a half-dozen places, and that can be very challenging for developers. So Raizlabs wants AppBlade to be a hub for all things mobile development. “We’re trying to centralize the experience,” Raiz says.

To that end, the firm is looking to solidify its partnerships with many businesses, some of which are working to extend the software service further into areas like app testing, analytics, financial reporting, and advertising metrics.

In recent years Raizlabs has been doubling in size every 12 to 15 months, Raiz says. Right now it has 14 full-time employees. The company overlaps a bit with Boston-based Apperian and a number of other firms looking to provide a unified software platform for creating, deploying, and managing enterprise mobile apps.

I asked Raiz, a former Microsoft program manager, for some broader trends he’s observed over the past year, and how that bodes for the future. “Companies you would not think of as mobile, or having a mobile app, have taken a much stronger position,” he says. “We’ve seen mobile going into the mainstream of business.” (He cited some New England firms with a national presence like Kayak, TripAdvisor, Monster.com, and Fidelity.com.)

What’s more, he says, “mobile sales professionals are replacing laptops with the iPad as a key sales tool.” So companies are getting custom applications built for tablets, he says. And emerging in the next year or so, will be “synergy between mobile and Web,” he says. As Raiz puts it, the first generation of mobile apps were useful on their own, but the second generation will “tie into Web services” and push data back and forth between platforms. (This echoes some recent analysis from wireless guru Tom Huseby on how “mobile is going towards the Internet,” instead of vice versa.)

Raiz, like most observers, is also interested to see how the Google-Motorola merger plays out. “We’re seeing a clash of the titans where companies that were very large in mobile, like Nokia and RIM, are getting displaced by Android and Apple and other companies like HP,” he says. Companies are “making their move and figuring out how to position themselves.”

Bringing it all back to what AppBlade can do, Raiz says: “It’s the right beginning of a story of how we understood the mobile ecosystem. We are able to build tools to help other people build applications.”

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Doctors can now immediately tap the wisdom of remote experts with just the click of a button, thanks to new mobile technology from Cambridge, MA-based Sermo. The company, which operates the largest online network of doctors in the U.S., today unveiled its Sermo mobile application for Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. The app includes iConsult, a feature where doctors can snap a picture of a physical finding, X-ray, or laboratory result, and shoot it off to other doctors in the Sermo network, who can give their advice in real-time.

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Lexington, MA-based Imprivata is among the software companies that is benefiting from the push in the U.S. and abroad to adopt electronic health records. And the venture-backed company seems to have found its place in the healthcare field by streamlining the way clinicians securely access IT systems.

This year, the U.S. government starts paying out $17 billion in incentives—which were outlined in President Obama’s economic stimulus plan two years ago—for physicians that implement electronic health records according to certain “meaningful use” standards. While most physicians seem to think that the digitization of medical recordkeeping is good for patients, a poll showed last month that 60 percent of 500 physicians from on the doctors-only social network Sermo believed that using the records would prolong exam times. (Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth, which provides an online EHR, paid Cambridge, MA-based Sermo to conduct the poll.)

For many doctors, time is money. It might take an extra few minutes to enter login information to view a patient’s electronic record, and that’s not good. Omar Hussain, the chief executive of Imprivata, says that his company has been able to reduce login times to a few seconds. (For certain records systems, the firm provides the option of using a fingerprint scan or the touch of an ID badge swipe for people to access systems.) The key is offering speedy login times while maintaining security. There are strict regulations that guard the privacy of patient information, and hospitals are on the hook for any breaches in security. The need for quick access to health IT systems and the critical need to secure patient information has made so-called “single-sign on” technology like Imprivata’s a hot area.

Sentillion, an Andover, MA-based firm that was acquired by Microsoft last year, has software that addresses some of same access-management challenges. Imprivata has been busy trying to gain new customers in healthcare—in competition with Microsoft/Sentillion—and adding features to its core technology to set itself apart from its rivals. The firm, which also serves clients in multiple sectors (Hussain mentions clothier Neiman Marcus and the Vatican as customers), now gets about 60-65 percent of its business from healthcare, according to Hussain.

Imprivata set up a healthcare division in early 2010 and that segment of its business helped the firm drive 30 percent growth in revenue last year, Hussain says. (The company is private and he declined to release actual sales numbers.) This growth is likely music to the ears of the firm’s investors, which include General Catalyst Partners of Cambridge, MA, Highland Capital Partners in Lexington, Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners, and SAP Ventures. Hussain says that the company has raised a total of $50 million from investors.

The company says that its technology is now used at 700 … Next Page »

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It was a historic week in the Boston biotech field with big acquisition news, but we also saw headlines on stealthier firms and startup financings.

—Ryan took a closer look at H3 Biomedicine, a cancer research house setting up shop in Cambridge, MA, with the support of Japanese drugmaker Eisai. He compared it to the research efforts of other big drugmakers like GlaxoSmithKline, which has also created a entrepreneurial startup in Cambridge, Tempero Pharmaceuticals, to fuel new drug discoveries. Eisai is providing $200 million, access to its scientists, and research and development support to H3.

—Bedford, MA-based Hologic nabbed FDA approval for its 3-D imaging system for breast cancer screening and diagnostics, which is designed to supplement existing scanning technology. The device is said to be the first of its kind to provide 3-D images of the breast.

—Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) of Weston, MA, announced that its board of directors had given the drugmaker permission to repurchase 20 million shares of its common stock to offset stock issuances under its share-based compensation plans.

—Beverly, MA-based drug developer Cellceutix settled a compensation dispute with its former CEO George Evans. The company will buy 4.6 million shares of stock held by Evans and/or his sons over the past three years, for $1 million. Evan had previously sought $1.7 million in back salary and future compensation.

—Ryan tracked down a few more details from Tillman Gerngross, co-founder and CEO of Lebanon, NH-based Adimab, about his stealthy new spinout Arsanis. The startup is focused on using Adimab’s yeast-based antibody discovery system to find drugs that could serve as an alternative to antibiotics for infectious diseases.

—Healthcare companies accounted for a 60 percent chunk of the funding raised by Massachusetts startups in January, according to … Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based Sermo, provider of the nation’s largest online community of doctors, has received $3.5 million in growth capital funding from MMV Financial, the finance firm announced today. The money comes as part of a $5 million round for Sermo, which will use the funds to expand its physician community, according to the announcement. Sermo launched in 2005 and serves 13 of the top 15 pharmaceutical companies as customers, as well as healthcare institutions, financial services firms, and government agencies, who can tap into the Sermo physician community for market research and insight.

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Boston has a new health IT startup in its midst. Kyruus has quietly formed in the hub and, according to its website, brings “transparency, credibility, and efficiency to physician-industry engagements.”

The startup’s co-founders include Graham Gardner, a principal at Highland Capital Partners in Lexington, MA, and Julie Yoo, an early employee of one of Gardner’s previous companies, Generation Health. Gardner, whose Highland profile says he is the new startup’s CEO, declined requests to be interviewed about Kyruus. He acknowledged in an e-mail last night that his venture firm is supporting the startup, but to what extent he did not say.

While there are scant details on Kyruus, Gardner and Yoo have come to this new company with at least one prior success in the startup game. They were both behind Generation Health, a company incubated at Highland’s offices, which gave its venture backer a nice return in late 2009 when the pharmacy giant CVS Caremark (NYSE:CVS) bought a majority stake in the provider of genetic testing benefits management. Highland had been the only venture investor in the Upper Saddle River, NJ-based firm.

I wrote this piece on Generation Health before CVS scooped up most of the company in December 2009.

Gardner, a physician by training, is a member of the healthcare team at Highland and served as co-founder and chief medical officer of Generation Health. He also co-founded SynapDx, a venture-backed firm that is developing a blood-based test for early detection of autism. At Highland, he works with general partner and co-founder Bob Higgins, who invested in Generation Health on behalf of the firm. Higgins also declined to be interviewed for this story.

Based on what it says on its website, Kyruus appears to want to help healthcare companies make inroads with physicians (those prized prescription writers and medical product buyers) even though it’s not so clear how the firm plans to do this. Its website says: “Kyruus brings transparency, credibility, and efficiency to physician-industry engagements through data-driven products based on its underlying profiling and analytics platform.”

Yoo, an MIT alum, was vice president of clinical product strategy at Generation Health, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her online profile says she is now chief product officer and co-founder of Kyruus.

There’s been a lot of activity among health IT firms in the Boston area that are trying to help companies sell products and services to physicians. At Newton, MA-based MedNetworks, for instance, the startup plans to apply its social analytics technology to aid healthcare companies in analyzing and mapping sources of influence within physician communities. Also, Cambridge, MA-based Sermo has found some success in selling market intelligence derived from its online social network of physicians to drug companies. Both MedNetworks and Sermo have found venture firms to back their strategies.

Gardner said in an e-mail that Kyruus was guarding the details of its strategy for now. But we hope to bring you more news about this interesting new venture very soon.

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As an entrepreneur, sometimes it doesn’t matter how much money you raised, from whom, or even what your company is building. Sometimes it just matters that you’re alive.

Meet Gina Ashe, the co-founder and CEO of stealthy Internet startup Krush, based in Cambridge, MA. She isn’t talking much about her new business yet, but a report in Mass High Tech said the company recently raised a Series A round from Boston-area angel investors and outside institutions, and it put the firm’s pre-funding valuation at more than $6 million. Previously, Ashe was part of the founding team at Sermo, the online physician community, and she has senior executive experience in marketing and finance at a number of firms.

But the most important thing about Ashe is that she is a survivor. On the afternoon of August 19, 2010, she had just left an investor meeting and was driving home on Route 2 west of Boston, when an oncoming car crossed the median and smashed into her head-on at 85 mph. The driver of that car, Shannon Gwiazda, died in the crash. Four other people including Ashe were injured in the four-car pileup, which closed the highway for several hours.

Ashe survived—in part because she was driving a Cadillac CTS 4, a car that people had teased her about (who drives a Cadillac?); the mid-size luxury sedan had a huge engine up front and extensive airbags. “It truly saved my life,” she says.

But she sustained serious injuries, including a smashed heel and ankle, four broken ribs, and cuts and burns over much of her body. She spent weeks in the hospital and was told she wouldn’t walk again. But with help from Daniel Palestrant, Sermo’s CEO, she found a surgeon at Brigham & Women’s Hospital who performed a new procedure that she says accelerated her recovery by six months. The surgery involved putting a plate and seven screws in her leg.

Ashe was bedridden for weeks, but progressed to using a wheelchair and then crutches—on which she delivered her financing pitch at the Open Angel Forum in Cambridge in October (which won her some Boston-area investors). Meanwhile, her Krush co-founders, Alexis Kopikis and Alan Osman from Propel Consulting, stood by her and kept the project moving. The site was two weeks away from launching beta trials when the accident happened. “There were days I thought I couldn’t go on, but they said, ‘No you have to think about this [or that],’” she says.

The local business community also provided a lot of support. “Women CEOs rallied … Next Page »

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A Facebook dashboard might be the first thing that comes to mind when we think of social networks. Yet the next big thing in social networking might be technologies that enable businesses to benefit from a deep understanding of existing social networks rather than creating them from scratch like Facebook. Newton, MA-based MedNetworks, for one, is betting on this trend through software that seeks to harness the power of existing social networks in healthcare.

MedNetworks recently spun out of the lab of popular Harvard University professor Nicholas Christakis, who co-wrote the acclaimed book “Connected” and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people last year. The firm, which was incorporated in 2009, recently got off the ground with a $5 million Series A funding round from Boston-based Excel Venture Management announced in early August. Larry Miller—a physician and venture capitalist whose son introduced him to Christakis when his son was a sophomore at Harvard four and a half years ago—is the co-founder and chief executive of the company.

The startup takes a vastly different approach to the social networking business than some prior tech firms. For instance, the Cambridge, MA-based outfits PatientsLikeMe and Sermo have built online communities of people interested in healthcare for several years. MedNetworks, on the other hand, is developing software that maps and analyzes networks of people or clinicians that already exist. The plan is to then sell access to this social network mapping software to life sciences firms, employer-sponsored wellness plans, health plans, hospitals, and governments.

The company wants to enable its customers to use its deep understanding of the networks to improve the outcomes of, say, their efforts to market prescription drugs to doctors or boost the effectiveness of programs to get people to quit smoking. Its technology, not surprisingly, grew from Christakis’s academic studies, some of which have shown how the behavior of people in a network influence the health decisions of others in the network. We might even be making decisions, his work suggests, that are influenced by our friend’s friend’s friend, who we might not even know, Miller says.

In the medical field, a respected physician might have a greater influence on his colleague’s decisions on which drugs to prescribe than a study published in an academic journal. “It’s our thesis that these sources day to day are among the most powerful [influences] on … Next Page »

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[Updated: 1 pm, 11/26/11] Vertex Pharmaceuticals was a pretty audacious place, even by biotech standards, when it was founded twenty years ago. It started when a senior chemist from Merck, Joshua Boger, quit that job and assembled a small band of chemists that aimed to beat the Big Pharma companies at their own game of making small-molecule drugs.

That grand ambition still hasn’t been fulfilled, but Vertex has certainly come a long way. Boger handed over the reins last year to a new CEO whose mission is to to transform Vertex into a big, stable, profitable anchor for biotech in Boston for years to come. Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX) now has more than 1,100 employees in Massachusetts and 1,400 worldwide, a stock market capitalization of almost $8 billion, and a hepatitis C drug in the final phase of clinical trials that could become the elusive billion-dollar molecule. (The quest for such a drug was famously described in a 1994 book.)

While the early days of swagger, clashing egos, and intense late night lab sessions are in the past, quite a few people shaped by that experience have spread through Boston biotech. Many are still pursuing their own big dreams.

“Vertex attracted people who liked fresh ideas, and high-profile situations, and that weren’t afraid of risk,” says Roger Tung, an early chemist at Vertex who is now CEO of Lexington, MA-based Concert Pharmaceuticals.

Now as Vertex graduates from its development phase into a more mature, integrated commercial enterprise, it is also starting to take on some sure signs of age and experience. One of those is a growing network of alumni, like Tung, who gained valuable experience they took with them. I sought to track down many of them to get a better sense of the impact the Vertex network is having today.

The list includes 35 names at last count, and I expect it to grow over time. Thanks to Tung, Aldrich of RA Capital, Justine Koenigsberg of Concert Pharmaceuticals, and Kathryn Morris of The Yates Network for their help getting the ball rolling.

Now I’d like to ask you for some help. If you see any information below that’s out of date or incorrect, please let me know and I’ll fix it. If you are an alumnus yourself and would like to be added to the list, please send me a note or leave a comment at the bottom of the story. If you have any other questions, comments, or new information, ping me at ltimmerman@xconomy.com or editors@xconomy.com.

Rich Aldrich, co-founder RA Capital Management, chairman of the board, Concert Pharmaceuticals

Eva-Lotta Allan, chief business officer, Ablynx

David Armistead, executive-in-residence, Oxford Bioscience Partners … Next Page »

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There’s perhaps no better place in the Boston area to talk about the future use of information technology in healthcare than the modern building in Kendall Square that houses the MIT Media Lab. The abundant windows and glass interior walls allow natural light to spill onto researchers as they advance new technologies to transform healthcare. Visitors can see across the Charles River to renowned medical care facilities like Massachusetts General Hospital, and in every other direction they can see the largest cluster of biotech research institutions on the East Coast.

It was a great setting for “Healthcare In Transition,” Xconomy’s first forum solely focused on the convergence of information technology and healthcare. Frank Moss, director of the Media Lab, entertained the audience  with a clip from an old “Saturday Night Live” skit that satirizes the backward medical practices of the Middle Ages, when bloodletting was thought to be a panacea for all manner of ailments. Moss’s use of the clip underscored his point that patients, not doctors, need to be the agents of change in the broken healthcare system. Then John Moore, a physician and researcher at the Media Lab, gave us a look at several technologies—including artificial caregivers that talk to patients, a touch-screen interface to foster collaboration between patients and doctors, and a device for patients to use in their homes to communicate with caregivers—which are meant to put patients in better control of their healthcare.

Our presenters dazzled with their inventions to solve problems in healthcare. And there are plenty of problems: the $2.5 trillion dollars spent on healthcare in the U.S. last year accounted for nearly 20 percent of our country’s gross domestic product (GDP), and there is no sign that the gargantuan costs will level off. In the midst of this morass are people who are treating their bodies like dumpsters and taking no responsibility for the expensive results, doctors whose interests are to see lots of these sick people rather than spend more time to keep them healthy, and health insurance outfits that are profiting from the general disarray in this system. Still, the raft of bugaboos in healthcare has given rise to new companies and ideas bent on putting out these fires. And we tried to feature as many of them as we could on Monday.

“We’re headed for disaster,” Moss said. “We have to look at a … Next Page »

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The question of how we pay for healthcare has been under the microscope in recent months, but what can we do to radically improve the care itself? Examining how information technology can help with that challenge is the whole point of Xconomy’s Healthcare in Transition forum, which will be held on Monday afternoon at the MIT Media Lab. And we’ve just added two new speakers—and one very cool demo—to the lineup.

There are just a few seats remaining—you can register and see the entire program here. As you’ll see, we have an incredible roster of speakers, kicked off with a keynote talk by Media Lab director Frank Moss and—just added yesterday—a demo by John Moore, a physician who heads the lab’s New Media Medicine initiative (pictured above with Moss for a profile late last year above, as well as one offering a bird’s eye view of the New Media Medicine lab, below). One of the big points of that effort is to use information technologies—including new computer interfaces and social media—to find new ways of treating illness and, ideally, keeping people healthy in the first place.

We added another speaker yesterday as well—Ed Park, CTO of Athenahealth. Park, whose brother Todd is the chief technology officer of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, will join an incredible panel moderated by Wired executive editor Thomas Goetz (who authored a book on personalized medicine called The Decision Tree). That panel includes Paul Bleicher, chief medical officer of Humedica and founder of Phase Forward; Daniel Palestrant, founder and CEO of Sermo; American Well CEO Roy Schoenberg; and Joe Kvedar, founder and director of the Center for Connected Health in Boston.

We have rounded out the day with health IT case studies from two public companies, Microsoft (and its Healthcare Innovation Lab) and EMC, and two startups, Newton, MA-based Life Image and Keas, a Bay Area company funded in part by Boston’s Atlas Venture. The program will close with short “bursts” from four pioneering companies out to transform medicine in unique ways—which should provide plenty of fodder for conversation during the networking reception to follow.

Again, we have very few seats left for a very exciting and information afternoon. Register here. We hope to see you there.

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When we came up with “Healthcare In Transition” as the title of our next Xconomy Forum on April 26 (register here), we were thinking of a way to crystallize in a few words the changes and progress being made in the digitization of healthcare for the benefit of humanity. (There were similar discussions here prior to the launch of our Health IT news channel.)

Before coming up with the right name, we had recruited several of the country’s top healthcare entrepreneurs and practitioners to share their stories at the forum, including Paul Bleicher, Daniel Palestrant, and Roy Schoenberg. And Frank Moss, the director of the MIT Media Lab, had already stepped up to host the forum at his renowned research center and speak to everyone in attendance about his efforts to develop technologies that empower patients.

Still, we soon encountered the difficulty in putting into a few words what all these pioneers in their respective fields are doing. One could say that Schoenberg’s American Well, of Boston, is revolutionizing the way we think about how patients visit with doctors. The same could be said about how Palestrant and his team at Cambridge, MA-based Sermo are impacting the way physicians interact with each other and share their insights from the front lines of medicine. There are more than a dozen other speakers like them, each looking at healthcare from different angles.

In large part due to the efforts of our speakers and their colleagues, it soon became clear at least to me that our conventional ideas or definitions of healthcare are in flux or transition. Our children may grow up picturing their doctor looking down on her iPhone to view medical information, the same way earlier generations might think about family physicians poring over paper records from overstuffed file folders. (And if American Well has its way, kids will think of their physicians as the people with whom they interact over the Internet when they get sick.) We also wanted to account for advances like we’re seeing at other of our speakers’ companies, such as Keas, SmartBeat, and Vitality, that are advancing technology-enabled products and services to promote wellness and keeping people healthier without having to be admitted to a hospital—or even visit their doctor. (Here’s a full list of our speakers on tap for the forum.)

We’re expecting the talks and discussions among our presenters to provide our attendees with a clearer vision of the evolving healthcare landscape, far above and beyond what we’re seeing with the adoption of electronic health records. There are opportunities for all of us in this future, whether you’re an investor, entrepreneur, inventor, or a patient (we’re all patients, of course). We’re really happy to be able to help bring these efforts to the fore, and we’re hoping to see you on April 26th at the MIT Media Lab.

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Stories of drugmakers, deals, health IT companies, and even some nonprofits made it a busy life sciences news week for us.

—Waltham’s Avila Therapeutics is on a quest to outdo well-known Boston drugmaker Vertex Pharmaceuticals when it comes to treating hepatitis C, Luke wrote last week. The company’s drugs rely on forming covalent bonds to shut down targets on virus-infected cells, preventing the virus from mutating and escaping, which could give it an edge on the Vertex drug that has varying degrees of effectiveness on different mutations of hepatitis C, Avila’s CEO said.

—Dossia, a Cambridge, MA-based nonprofit electronic health records provider, rolled out its system to another two of its founding companies. Computer chip maker Intel and mail system provider Pitney Bowes will offer some of their workers the Dossia system, which is sustained by subscription fees and is designed to lower overall healthcare costs for corporate clients.

—Speaking of electronic health records, Athenahealth is looking for some opinions on the matter and announced a partnership with Cambridge’s doctors-only social networking site Sermo to get just that. Financial terms of the partnership between Sermo and Watertown, MA-based Athena (NASDAQ:ATHN), a maker of Internet healthcare software, weren’t revealed.

— Millipore shook things up this week when it announced plans to accept a bid from Germany’s Merck KGaA, which offered to buy the company for $107 a share, or $7.2 billion. Thermo Fisher had previously made an unsolicited $6 billion bid for the Billerica, MA-based life sciences equipment supplier, according to media reports.

—Stealthy Guilford, CT and San Francisco-based startup Ion Torrent Systems opened up a bit to discuss its digital DNA readout technology, leaving plenty of genomic science bloggers buzzing. And the machine from Ion Torrent, which is advised by a Harvard genomics pioneer and supported by a Seattle partner, costs … Next Page »

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Early round venture funding dominated the deals news this week, but there were still announcements of partnerships, acquisitions, and IPOs to mix it up.

—Newton, MA-based energy storage company General Compression announced it had closed more than $17 million in commitments to its Series A round, but did not reveal how much of that money was in new equity investments. The funding came from U.S. Renewables Group and Duke Energy, and will go to building the company’s first commercial-scale wind power storage unit.

—Marathon Technologies, a Littleton, MA maker of fault-tolerance software, brought its Series B funding round up to $13.5 million, thanks to a third close, a regulatory filing revealed last week.

—Stealthy life sciences startup Ra Pharmaceuticals raised $10.3 million of a planned $27.6 million round of equity-based financing, according to an SEC filing. The company is incubated at the Boston office of Morgenthaler Ventures and is lead by Doug Treco, who co-founded former Transkaryotic Therapies, a Cambridge, MA company acquired by Irish drugmaker Shire in 2005.

—Intrinsic Therapeutics raised $18 million of a $20 million round that included equity, options, and warrants. An SEC filing listed New Enterprise Associates, Spray Venture Partners, and New Leaf Venture Partners as directors of Woburn, MA-based Intrinsic, which develops spinal implants to treat disc herniation.

—-Athenahealth, a Watertown, MA-based maker of Internet software for medical practices, and doctors-only social networking company Sermo announced a partnership early this week, but didn’t disclose financial terms of the deal. Athena plans on … Next Page »

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What do doctors think about electronic health records? That’s a question at the heart of a newly announced partnership between Athenahealth and Sermo, according to the companies’ press release this morning.

Athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN), the Watertown, MA-based provider of Internet software and services for medical practices, is tapping Cambridge, MA-based Sermo’s online community of physicians to get their views on electronic health records (EHRs) and other issues impacting their practices. Financial terms of the partnership weren’t disclosed.

This deal shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sermo CEO Daniel Palestrant told Xconomy last month that part of his doctors-only social networking firm’s sales growth in early 2010 was because of new business from electronic health records vendors. Athena, meanwhile, has been pushing for doctors to adopt its electronic records product, athenaClinicals, as U.S. physicians deploy records systems to qualify for $17 billion in Medicare incentives beginning in 2011.

Athena, which is known mostly for managing billing and collections for physician practices with an online system called athenaNet, added its EHR application to the system in late 2007. As of the end of the third quarter of 2009, there were 1,270 physicians using Athena’s EHR. By comparison, companies that have been in the EHR business much longer than Athena say they each have tens of thousands of physicians using their electronic health records software.

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Another eventful week for New England’s life sciences companies, with big changes potentially in store for two of the biggest firms.

—Biogen Idec’s new board chairman, Bill Young, told Luke that the committee tasked with finding a replacement for outgoing CEO Jim Mullen is first and foremost looking for somebody “who has managed and understands the role of science in a biotech company, and how that needs to be bridged to the commercial side of things.” Mullen, who announced last month that he would step down after a decade at the helm of Cambridge, MA-based Biogen (NASDAQ: BIIB), has a business background rather than a scientific one

—Billionaire investor Carl Icahn nominated four candidates, including himself, for election to the board of Cambridge-based drugmaker Genzyme (NASDAQ:GENZ), which has been under fire following manufacturing problems, supply shortages, and other troubles. Genzyme indicated that it would evaluate Icahn’s nominees and announce its own slate; all nine seats on the company’s board are up for re-election this spring.

—Hamid Tabatabaie, the CEO of LifeImage, told Ryan that the Newton, MA-based health IT startup is partnering with Hopkinton, MA-based storage giant EMC (NYSE:EMC) on a cloud-based service for sharing medical images over the Internet. Dubbed “Time,” for Trauma Image Management and Exchange, the system is set to be unveiled early next month and has built to run on the EMC “Atmos” cloud storage and computing platform.

—Luke chatted with Celldex Therapeutics CEO Anthony Marucci about what it takes to run the small public company (NASDAQ: CLDX), which began as a spinoff from a Medarex division near Phillipsburg, NJ and grew through the recent acquisitions of Needham, MA-based Avant Immunotherapeutics, and Branford, CT-based Curagen. Chief among his tactics for building up the firm’s antibody drug business: an every-other-week commute by car between New Jersey and Needham.

—Sermo CEO and founder Daniel Palestrant told Ryan about his Cambridge-based firm’s plans to revamp its social networking website for doctors, shifting from the Java-based approach it has always used to the Ruby on Rails open source Web programming language. The move, aimed in part at helping Sermo cut its operational costs, combined with layoffs that Sermo made in December, should help the startup become profitable “very soon,” Palestrant said.

—Ryan profiled the efforts of Westborough, MA-based GenomeQuest to become the Google of DNA data searches. CEO Ron Ranauro explained how the unprecedented rate at which researchers are generating genetic data and life science companies’ growing reliance on cloud computing are coming together to boost demand for GenomeQuest’s technology, which researchers use to analyze and manage the genetic information during drug development and other biomedical research.

—Ra Pharmaceuticals, a stealthy startup in Boston, reported in an SEC filing that it had raised $10.3 million of a planned $27.6 million round of equity financing. The firm’s CEO, Transkaryotic Therapies co-founder Doug Treco, is an Entrepreneur-in-residence at Morgenthaler Ventures, where Ra is being incubated, according to the venture firm’s website.

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