ScanScout, a Boston-based provider of in-stream online video ads, said it has completed its $8.5 million Series B round of venture capital with an investment from EDB Investments, a firm that invests on behalf of the government of Singapore. ScanScout is also establishing an office in Singapore as part its expansion into the Asian market. The firm’s previous investors include General Catalyst Partners, Time Warner (NYSE:TWX), First Round Capital, and Baseline Ventures, according to its website.

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As cross-pacific partnerships multiply among life science companies in California and Asia, San Diego biotech companies are increasingly interested in learning how to do business in China, India, and other countries. At least 250 representatives of the international life science community are expected to gather for CalAsia, a two-day conference that begins today at the downtown San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina.

This is the first year the event has been hosted by Biocom, San Diego’s life sciences industry association. Those attending include established pharmaceutical companies, startups, investors, and researchers, as well as individuals and delegations from China, Singapore, Korea, Australia, India, and other countries in the Asian Pacific region. Workshops and plenary sessions include an overview of opportunities and challenges for the biopharmaceutical industry in key markets, licensing deals with Asian partners, raising money in Asia, and evolving intellectual property rights in China and India,

In a preview of the event, I asked Dr. Hui Cai to answer some questions about doing business in Asia. She is president and CEO of Inflexion BioPartners, which provides international management and consulting services in the life sciences, and she has been involved in international sourcing of drug candidates, cross-Pacific operations, strategic planning, and strategic partnerships. She also serves as chairwoman of the board at the Sino-American Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Professionals Association, although she notes these are her personal comments.

Xconomy: What does it mean that the FDA has opened an office in China?

Hui Cai: Setting offices in China reflects the shift in the FDA’s prevention-focused approach to ensure quality at the point of manufacture and that U.S.-bound goods are safe before they are exported. It also plays a positive role in facilitating better communications, and in sharing information and best practices with Chinese regulatory authorities and manufacturers. In reality, good cooperation is key to maintaining a mutually beneficial practice, and it’s important to ensure intentions remain true to sharing best practices, rather than imposing standards unilaterally.

X: What are the chief concerns today for U.S. biotechs that want to form partnerships in Asia, and especially China?

HC: Many U.S. biotechs are reaping …Next Page »

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It’s 10:15 pm, and Patrick Ennis is in a taxi bound for the airport in Delhi, India. He’s getting ready for a 1:00 am flight to Beijing. The streets of India are legendary for displaying 2,000 years of transportation history in one place—animals, pedestrians, carts, bikes, cars, buses, trucks—and it sounds like tonight is no different. “I learned to drive in New York, but this is much harder,” says Ennis. Though it’s late at night, he adds, “It’s still 10 times as much traffic as Seattle.”

Ennis is the global head of technology for Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based firm focused on invention. He joined about six months ago; before that, he was a managing director at Seattle-based Arch Venture Partners, where he funded and built technology startups, many coming out of universities and national labs. And before that, he held senior positions in technology and business at Lucent Technologies, AT&T, and Bell Labs. He did his Ph.D. in physics at Yale, and did scientific research for about eight years before joining Bell Labs.

As we reported last week, Ennis is currently part of a high-powered traveling team that includes Intellectual Ventures co-founders Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung. They are on a three-week, five-country tour of Asia to meet with the local communities and launch new offices there. I hope to sit down with Ennis for a more comprehensive discussion after he returns, but in the meantime here are some thoughts he provided by phone—through a dicey wireless connection in Delhi. He touched on some details from the tour, his impressions of the various Asian cities (including the food), and how the VC industry compares with the invention industry.

Ennis said he’d been in Tokyo, Singapore, and Delhi so far, spending three to four days in each city. Next up: Beijing and Seoul. “We’re in the middle of our tour,” he says. “It’s going very well. Our focus on invention is being well-received here, it’s truly a global world now.” Ennis says that in each city, they’ve been putting on events where they have a reception and invite local inventors, university professors, and administrators of research institutions. They’ve also been meeting with local university officials privately. “We have an inventor network we’re building in Asia…We want to get to know the whole ecosystem…and we do presentations. It’s like in Silicon Valley, you invite people who are interested in what you’re doing, to mingle and network.”

Ennis is no stranger to Asia. In the mid-to-late ’90s, he worked in optical networking and sold a lot of products to Asian national carriers like Korea Telecom. And when he was at Arch Venture Partners, several of the firm’s portfolio companies had partners in Asia. So Ennis has worked in places like Taipei, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, and Singapore. “A trend you see more is VCs, even if they don’t have formal offices or deals in Asia, spend more time there,” he says.

He didn’t give details of his meetings this week, but he provided some general impressions. “Asia is so dynamic in terms of growth, innovation, and optimism,” Ennis says. “The energy here is palpable, it’s similar to the energy that exists in places like Seattle and Silicon Valley, both in the technology …Next Page »

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When I visited Nathan Myhrvold in the summertime, he lamented that he wasn’t able to attend the Olympics in Beijing (though he did provide some insight into the physics of ping-pong matches). But this week and next, Myhrvold is taking a grander tour of Asia, as his Bellevue, WA-based invention company, Intellectual Ventures, opens a series of new offices in the region. It is the firm’s first major foray into the global market, with the goal being to amplify its focus on investing in technological invention as a key commodity and driver of innovation.

To that end, Myhrvold (an Xconomist) and Edward Jung, the founders of Intellectual Ventures, are in the midst of hosting office launches and events this month in five Asian countries. The company’s new regional headquarters is in Singapore, with additional offices located in Tokyo, Japan; Bangalore, India; Beijing, China; and Seoul, South Korea. Each office will be staffed by roughly seven to 10 people. “I am struck by the gap between Asia’s collective, innovative talent and the lack of resources for Asia’s greatest inventors. IV is working to fill this gap,” said Jung in a statement.

So what exactly will Intellectual Ventures be doing there? As Myhrvold told me previously, “Most inventing organizations like universities and nonprofits have a tech transfer office or a technology licensing office. Most institutions in Asia don’t.” Intellectual Ventures, he said, wants to “be an outsourced tech transfer agent for inventing institutions that don’t have one. We can provide the same functionality that you’d get from a technology licensing office. We evaluate ideas, we pay for them to be patented, we provide a little bit of funding for them, and then we license them. There’s no reason that smart people in Asia shouldn’t be able to get the same traction that Stanford provides.”

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Acucela has struck another big deal with its Japanese connections. The Bothell, WA-based biotech company said today it has agreed to form a partnership with Tokyo-based Otsuka Pharmaceutical to develop its lead drug candidate for the top cause of blindness among the elderly—the “dry” form of macular degeneration.

The deal has sweet terms for Acucela. It will receive $5 million in upfront cash and milestone payments worth $258 million from Otsuka if the drug, ACU-4429, reaches certain goals in drug development. Otsuka has agreed to pay all the drug development bills through the beginning of Phase III clinical trials, and then it will split the future expenses for development equally. The companies will also equally divide the expenses and profits from sales of the drug in North America, while Acucela keeps all rights in Europe and Otsuka gets exclusive rights in Asia and the rest of the world.

The partnership is a coup for Ryo Kubota, a native of Japan and a former University of Washington ophthalmologist who left to start Acucela in 2002. It brings a new level of resources from a company with $9.2 billion in annual revenue last year, and experience marketing big products like Abilify, a $2 billion-a-year drug for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The deal also could provide a lift for patients with the “dry” form of macular degeneration, a gradual loss of vision caused by yellowish buildups and a loss of pigment in the retina. The dry form of the condition has no approved treatment, and damages the eyesight of more than 20 million people worldwide. That number is expected to double in the next 20 years, as populations age around the world.

“Otsuka and Acucela have a similar vision and commitment in development of opthalmic drugs,” Kubota said in an email from Japan. “Otsuka has a strong and successful history of marketing opthalmic drugs in Japan and now they are expanding their opthalmology franchise globally. Having a common vision is critical for the success of a long-term collaboration.”

Acucela’s experimental drug is meant to be taken as an oral pill. It’s unlike other treatments for the “wet” form of macular degeneration in which leaky blood vessels damage eyesight. That form of the disease is treated with Genentech’s Lucentis and Avastin, drugs that block the growth of abnormal blood vessels, yet need to be given with injections behind the eye. …Next Page »

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Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick stole the show at last year’s gathering of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. In front of a crowd of 20,000 global biotechies meeting on home turf in Boston, he broke news that he planned to invest $1 billion over 10 years to strengthen the state’s position as a leading hub for life sciences companies. Tomorrow, he reports back at this year’s BIO conference, in San Diego. The headline: his life sciences plan has been officially signed into law.

Patrick will use a keynote speech Tuesday to discuss the plan in more detail. He’s sure to get an adoring reception from a pro-industry crowd, which loves to hear the words “cures” and “jobs” listed as payoffs in the same sentence. In fact, the organization is expected to recognize Patrick as “Governor of the Year.”

It took a while for the Patrick administration to agree on specifics of the life sciences bill with the Massachusetts Legislature, although the House ultimately voted 134-13 in favor of it and the Senate gave the final go-ahead in a 31-7 vote last week.

“This is a big deal for Massachusetts and for the country,” said Cyndi Roy, a spokeswoman for Patrick. “The Governor is absolutely excited about this. It’s been a long time coming.”

The final bill contains $500 million for infrastructure to support the industry, $250 million in science grants and small business assistance and another $250 million in tax credits, according to a summary on the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council’s website. The plan is designed to help the state remain strong versus the likes of California, which is sinking $3 billion into a stem cell research plan, and hungry competitors from overseas, such as Singapore and Ireland.

Besides Patrick’s appearance at BIO, the state hopes to impress conventioneers with a pavilion on the trade show floor. The goal will be to recruit new companies to the Bay State, and convince others to expand operations they already have, Roy said. The state’s economic development boosters say they can’t afford to skimp on marketing this year, or any year.

“Since it’s not in Boston, we won’t have the same kind of presence we had last year, but the state understands that to attract business to Massachusetts and show it is a place to grow your business, as with any marketing effort, there needs to be money for it,” said John Heffernan, vice president, policy and external affairs for the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. “This isn’t Massachusetts versus just any state. This is a global economy. We need to demonstrate we have the talented people.”

The Massachusetts plan has sparked curiosity from officials around the world, said Linda McGoldrick, worldwide director of the Drug Information Association, a non-profit group of 30,000 regulators, scientists and industry officials based outside Philadelphia. It’s likely that other regions will want to form collaborations with Massachusetts institutions now, rather than try to build from scratch what has been growing in Massachusetts for decades, she said.

“Boston has been in the sights of the U.K. and Western Europe for some time, and in Japan and across Asia, the appetite is growing for more life sciences investment,” McGoldrick says. “China is building facilities fast, and they have been shopping, if you will, for opportunities and resources.”

While it may take years for the payoffs to show up, it will be interesting to watch whether Patrick’s investment sparks further investments and collaborations with other governments and institutions from around the world. You can bet some of those discussions will be happening this week at BIO.

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All fall I’ve been trying to free up time to attend Boston PostMortem, a gathering of Boston-area video game developers held once each month at The Skellig, an Irish pub in Waltham. When it turned out that a team from MIT’s GAMBIT video game program would be presenting at PostMortem this Tuesday, I persuaded Bob and Rebecca to unchain me from my Mac for a few hours, and braved the freezing drizzle for the drive to the western ‘burbs.

I arrived half an hour late, but it was okay—the drinking hadn’t yet given way to the speechmaking. The Skellig, it turned out, is about as authentic as Irish pubs get on this side of the pond, with real red-headed Irish bartenders and a real flute-and-fiddle ensemble belting out Celtic dances in the front room. I ordered a Harpoon and settled back to listen to Philip Tan, Matthew Weise, Clara Fernández-Vara, and Eitan Glinert talk about GAMBIT’s first year in operation.

GAMBIT is one of those freaky acronyms that pertains only indirectly to its namesake group’s mission, which is to study game-related subjects and foster fresh, cross-cultural innovation in game design by bringing students from Singapore to MIT for an intensive, hands-on, nine-week course in game development. (It stands for Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, and Technology. Believe me, it’s better than the Tolkienesque alternatives the group considered, including SMIGIL, for Singapore International Games Innovation Lab, and GOLLUM, for Games, Online Learning, Large, Utterly Massive.) As Tan, the group’s U.S. executive director, explained, GAMBIT is a five-year project sponsored by Singapore’s Media Development Authority (yes, the government of Singapore has an entire Authority devoted to promoting the city-state’s video game industry) and MIT’s Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program.

Under co-directors Henry Jenkins and William Uricchio, who are also the lead principal investigators on the GAMBIT project, CMS has evolved into the closest thing the U.S. videogame industry has to an intellectual headquarters and rallying ground. In an interview with Wired reprinted on his blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, Jenkins argued that innovation has stagnated at the giant U.S. and Japanese game studios amidst the pressure to churn out predictably marketable franchise games. (The best-selling video game of 2006 in the United States was Madden NFL 07, which is, mind-bendingly, the 17th iteration of that game). He believes that academia can help inject new ideas.

“Studio-based production, across all media, has had two effects: insuring a relatively high standard of production and capping opportunities for innovation and individual expression,” Jenkins told Wired. “As the costs of games get pushed higher and higher, many wonder where fresh new ideas will come from…University-based games programs can be the place where the next generation of game designers stretch the medium.” He called GAMBIT “a space where we can move swiftly from pure research into compelling applications and then partner with the games industry to bring the best ideas to emerge to market.”

From Listening to Tan, Weise, and his colleagues Tuesday night, it wasn’t clear that any of the games produced by the first batch of GAMBIT students this summer have the potential to …Next Page »

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