TEDMED had Martha, Goldie, and other celebrity speakers, but San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals broke this week’s big news when it signed up a big Japanese partner to develop its line of obesity drugs. It’s all part of your regular dose of San Diego biotech news, and it’s ready now:

—Amylin Pharmaceuticals, the San Diego-based diabetes drug specialist, announced that it has formed a partnership with Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceuticals, which agreed to carry most of the development costs for Amylin’s weight-loss drugs. In return, Takeda gets a worldwide exclusive license to eventually commercialize Amylin’s experimental obesity drugs, including the combination of pramlintide and metreleptin, and davalintide.

—After a five-year hiatus, TEDMED founder Richard Saul Wurman, and president, Marc Hodosh (who also is an Xconomist), brought the conference on medical technology, entertainment and design to San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado. TEDMED announced during the conference, which included presentations by Boston Scientific co-founder (and Xconomist) John Abele, Martha Stewart, and Goldie Hawn, that the conference will return to the same location next October.

—I only had time to attend a fraction of the presentations at TEDMED last week. One of my favorites talks, though, was delivered by Bill Davenhall, who leads the health and human services marketing team at ESRI, the Redlands, CA, giant in geographic information systems. Davenhall talked about the importance of including patients’ “place histories” as part of their medical records and raised an interesting question: Will the electronic health record systems being created today have the capability to add data in new categories—such as “geo-medicine”–that aren’t typically included in today’s patient records?

—New York-based Xenomics filed a lawsuit against San Diego-based Sequenom that alleges Sequenom misrepresented the progress in its development of a prenatal test for Downs syndrome. Xenomix says it would not have licensed its patents to Sequenom had it known the truth.

—Denise profiled San Diego-based Sirigen, an early stage medical diagnostic company that is developing technology that uses light-emitting polymers to detect bits of DNA. Sirigen founder Brent Gaylord developed the technology at UC Santa Barbara, extending the significance of UCSB physicist and Nobel laureate Alan Heeger’s discovery of conductive polymers.

—The FDA told San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN) and its partner Eli Lilly the companies can now market exenatide (Byetta) as a frontline, standalone therapy for diabetes. The drug was previously approved for use with other drugs, or as a fallback option when other tretments failed.

—Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX), the Cambridge, MA, biotech with operations in San Diego, said the latest trial of its telaprevir treatment for hepatitis C was able to attain the clinical definition of a cure in more than 80 percent of patients who got the drug. The finding is part of the mounting evidence Vertex is gathering on its quest to develop the first-of-its-kind protease inhibitor for the chronic liver disease.

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Stem cells and RNAi were the subject of a couple of interesting alliances announced this week. More on those, and the rest of the week’s New England life sciences news, below.

—Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS), a maker of drugs for central nervous system disorders, addiction, and diabetes, signed a lease to move its headquarters from Cambridge, MA, to Waltham, MA. The move, which should be complete in early 2010, is supposed to save the company $8 million a year starting in fiscal 2011.

—Ryan gave an intriguing look inside Lebanon, NH-based GlycoFi nearly three years after its acquisition for $400 million by drug behemoth Merck. Where such transactions often result in the smaller company’s dismantling and absorption into the larger firm, GlycoFi and its yeast-based technology are now the focal point of Merck’s strategy for taking on the market for generic versions of biotech drugs.

—Stemgent of Cambridge, MA, and Fate Therapeutics of San Diego launched the joint “Catalyst” program to offer new developments in stem (iPS) cell technology to large pharmaceutical companies, big biotech firms, and academic labs for a fee. For Stemgent, the program is an extension of its strategy of selling stem cell technologies from leading academic labs to the research market.

—Luke talked to Al Sandrock, senior vice president of neurology R&D at Cambridge, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ:BIIB), ahead of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology. Biogen planned to highlight its multiple sclerosis products and pipeline at the meeting; yesterday, for instance, it presented a small study indicating that natalizumab (Tysabri) might help the body actually repair damage done by MS to nerves’ myelin coating.

—Cambridge, MA-based Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX) reported more positive data on its experimental hepatitis C drug, telaprevir, at a scientific meeting in Denmark. If the results hold up in ongoing pivotal trials and Vertex wins …Next Page »

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My mental soundtrack the last few weeks has been heavily weighted toward Ziggy Marley’s cheestastic “Tomorrow People,” and I’ll tell you one of the reasons why: I’m getting really excited about our upcoming Xconomy Forum, called Tomorrow’s Biotech—Innovators and Innovations.

I’ll confess to not quite getting what Mr. Marley meant by this idea of tomorrow people (anybody know?), but what my colleagues and I were thinking was there is a group of people who are right now laying the foundations for the future of New England’s life sciences industry, and who are building the technologies and companies that will utterly transform the way diseases are diagnosed and treated in the years to come. We wanted to gather those people together, and to foster a lively and open discussion among members of the local life sciences community about just what tomorrow could—and should—look like.

So that’s exactly what we’re doing, next Thursday, April 30. Biogen Idec has graciously provided us some beautiful space at its Building 8 in Cambridge Center for the forum. To provide some insight into the world of small-company innovation, this afternoon event will feature case studies on a couple of the most exciting startups in town (Zafgen and Forma Therapeutics), one on an equally interesting startup (Adimab) from New Hampshire, as well as one on Ironwood Pharmaceuticals—a smallish company perhaps on the cusp of some serious bigness. What’s more, three of the region’s most important public life sciences companies—Biogen Idec, Genzyme, and Vertex Pharmaceuticals—have agreed to lift the veil on some of their most cutting-edge programs. And two of biotech’s founding fathers—Wally Gilbert and George Church—will sit down for a chat with BU’s Jim Collins, a MacArthur Genius award winner and, like Church, an Xconomist.

There will be plenty of time during the forum and at the reception that follows it for attendees to mix and mingle with one another. Space, on the other hand, is dwindling—so if you want to register for the event the time for that is probably today. So to register, go here. To see the full agenda, go here. And for more on Mr. Marley’s thoughts about tomorrow and its people, go here—but I’m warning you, it’s sticky, sticky stuff.

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Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) announced that the underwriters of its stock offering have exercised their option to purchase 1.1 million additional shares, bringing the overall size of the deal to 8.6 million shares worth a total of $220.0 million. The Cambridge, MA-based developer of the hepatitis C drug telaprevir last week priced 7.5 million shares at $25.50 apiece, for a total of $191.3 million.

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Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the Cambridge, MA-based developer of telaprevir for hepatitis C, raised $191.3 million from the sale of 7.5 million shares at $25.50 apiece, the company said. Goldman Sachs & Co. is serving as the sole book runner for the offering, and it has an option to buy another 1.1 million shares at the same terms. Vertex said it had $832 million in cash and investments on hand at the end of June, when it last reported quarterly finances.

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Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the developer of telaprevir for hepatitis C, said today it is planning to sell 7 million new shares of stock. Goldman, Sachs & Co. is serving as the sole book-runner for the offering. Cambridge, MA-based Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX) closed at $26.57 yesterday, down 5.6 percent on the day. The company had $832 million in cash and investments on hand at the end of June.

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Vertex Pharmaceuticals is being chased by a couple of deep-pocketed competitors—Schering-Plough and Roche—in the race to develop the next big thing for patients with the hepatitis C virus. Now Vertex, the Cambridge, MA-based biotech company, thinks it has found a way to fend off the challengers. It intends to show its drug—telaprevir—can cure patients who have failed on previous treatments, as well as those who are just beginning therapy.

Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX) unveiled this key element of its strategy last month in the design of a 650-patient clinical trial called Realize. The study will look at whether telaprevir can cure a broad swath of hepatitis patients who didn’t respond to a prior round of treatment, and thus are in danger of serious liver damage later in life. The patients include those who didn’t respond at all to a previous treatment, some who responded partially but not enough, and some who were helped temporarily, but eventually relapsed.

Regulators in the U.S. and Europe allowed Vertex to recruit the hardest cases, known as “null responders” into the clinical trial. Those patients aren’t being allowed into a large trial of Schering-Plough’s competitor, boceprevir. Vertex was able to get those patients included based partly on promising data from a mid-stage study called Prove 3, which has shown that 52 percent of patients on telaprevir had no evidence of the hepatitis C virus left in the blood for at least three months after completing therapy. Standard treatments given a second time do that well for about 15 percent of patients. That kind of difference in effectiveness means big bucks for telaprevir: an estimated 6 million people in the U.S. and Europe have chronic hepatitis C infections, and about 650,000 have failed on the standard treatment. Telaprevir alone could generate $2.6 billion in U.S. sales in 2013 when factoring in patients who failed treatment and those who are new to therapy, according to Rachel McMinn, an analyst with Cowen & Co. in San Francisco.

“Vertex’s telaprevir will show strong data in treatment-failure patients that significantly outshines prior data for Schering-Plough’s boceprevir,” said McMinn, in a note to clients last month, which looks ahead to presentations at the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases annual meeting in November.

Showing a benefit among the toughest-to-treat patients is important to Vertex, partly because it would appeal to the group of patients who are most motivated to seek new treatment options, and because it could enable the company to make claims that Schering-Plough won’t be able to, says Kurt Graves, Vertex’s chief commercial officer. It also could strengthen the overall package of evidence supporting use of telaprevir, which is being tested in a pivotal study among patients new to treatment, called Advance.

There’s much buzz in the medical and investment communities about both new drugs, protease inhibitors, which have been shown to be about twice as effective at curing the disease as the standard treatments. …Next Page »

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The past week has offered a real variety pack of life sciences news from the Boston area. There were some clinical trials, an IPO filing, a venture financing—and a television appearance.

—Shares of Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) had a nice run, boosted by encouraging (if preliminary) clinical-trials results. Last Thursday, the company announced that in an ongoing Phase 2a study its cystic fibrosis drug, VX-770, improved patients’ lung function. This Monday, Vertex said in a conference abstract that a small ongoing study of its much-watched hepatitis C drug, Telaprevir, showed that patients who had failed standard treatments responded to the drug. All in all, Vertex closed yesterday at $25.41, up almost 40 percent from Thursday’s open of $18.24.

—MIT spinoff BioTrove filed for an IPO worth up to $75 million, despite a market that numerous others have deemed too forbidding.

—Newton, MA’s Tryton Medical, a developer of coronary-artery stents, raised $14 million in a Series C round from PTV Sciences, RiverVest Venture Partners, and Spray Venture Partners.

—Neil profiled New Haven, CT’s Ikonisys and its efforts to automate existing medical tests and enable the development of new ones—such as a noninvasive alternative to amniocentesis.

—Waltham, MA-based Repligen (NASDAQ: RGEN) launched a Phase 3 clinical trial of its imaging agent for MRI scans of the pancreas.

—Researchers from Sirtris Pharmaceuticals got their 15 minutes, courtesy of Barbara Walters.

—Oh, and we unveiled our plans for the Xconomy Forum: Boston Life Sciences 2028. Want a chance to help shape the future of the industry with the likes of Phillip Sharp, Noubar Afeyan, and Raju Kucherlapati? This could be it.

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Shares of Cambridge, MA-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) climbed this morning after the company announced some encouraging preliminary results from an ongoing trial of VX-770, a drug for cystic fibrosis. The firm’s stock opened at $18.24 and by about 11:00 was trading around $19.55, up almost 10 percent from yesterday’s close of $17.83.

Vertex’s drug targets a protein called CFTR that malfunctions in cystic fibrosis patients, causing an imbalance of salt and water that results in their lungs becoming clogged with mucus and prone to infection and inflammation. In a planned interim analysis of a Phase 2a study, Vertex found that patients who took the drug orally for two weeks had, on average, a 10 percent improvement in a standard test of lung function. Vertex called the results clinical proof-of-concept; the company plans to begin the second part of the trial in the second quarter of this year, and to meet with regulatory authorities to choose the fastest way to move the drug to market.

The CFTR-targeting approach is part of a decade-long collaboration between Vertex and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. All told, the foundation has given the company $79 million, including a $13.3 million award in March 2006 to support the accelerated development of VX-770. Vertex retains the rights to commercialize these drugs discovered through the collaboration.

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Back in July, Bob had an intriguing conversation with Rainer Fuchs, a Biogen Idec VP on a mission to find new ways for the Cambridge, MA-based biotech giant to tap into ideas that could help fill its pipeline. Fuchs’ answer was the Biogen Idec Innovation Incubator, a quirky spin on the incubator model that doesn’t aim to create new companies. Instead, as Bob put it: “It’s more like a farm system, backing promising ideas that might some day be called up to the big leagues: namely, Biogen.”

Well, today Biogen (NASDAQ: BIIB) is announcing the first player in its farm system—a company called Escoublac that’s working on turning science from the Columbia University Medical Center into treatments for diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic disorders. As Fuchs explained this summer, the incubator will supply such companies with office and lab space, equipment, business and financial help, advice from Biogen’s own scientists, and up to $10 million in funding. In return it will take no more than a 50 percent equity stake. But, unlike in traditional venture deals, the home run for Biogen isn’t making a big exit via an acquisition or IPO—it’s getting a big bolus of new drug candidates to keep Biogen’s pipeline flowing.

That’s one way to play the game, but a story in today’s Boston Globe points to a couple of other tacts currently being taken by local biotech leaders. Cambridge’s Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ), for instance, which already has a venture arm that makes traditional investments in startups (as does Biogen, through its San Diego-based New Ventures group ), has been considering creating a “virtual incubator” that would provide seed funding and technical support but allow companies to remain physically independent of Genzyme. The idea here, Alan Walts, managing director of Genzyme Ventures, told the Globe, is that being housed within the confines of a particular company might hinder new firms’ abilities to forge collaborations with others.

Cambridge neighbor Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX), meanwhile, is evidently looking more directly to academia for new science that could translate into valuable drugs. According to the Globe, Vertex is set to announce that it has forged a relationship with Harvard University in which the company will fund research into a host of disease areas—without limiting the university researchers’ abilities to publish their work or making them sign away rights to the technology they develop with Vertex money. (Vertex gets first dibs on licensing the technology if Harvard decides to go that route.) Vertex CEO Joshua Boger told the Globe that Vertex has already committed several millions of dollars over the next three years to five Harvard projects under the agreement.

Having spent a speck of time in academic research myself long ago—and having seen first-hand researchers’ hand-wringing over the strings normally attached to corporate money—I’m most curious to see how the Vertex plan shapes up. But I suspect that what these companies will ultimately discover is that there’s more than one way to skin the innovation cat.

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