At Xconomy’s event yesterday, New York’s Venture Emergence, members of Gilt Groupe’s founding team fascinated a standing-room-only audience with the tale of how, in just four years, they grew from a scrappy startup to one of the most successful e-commerce sites on the Web. Co-founders Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, who is one of our Xconomists, and Alexis Maybank insisted that one of the keys to their success is their close friendship. “Without our very strong relationship, we could have never gotten this business launched so fast,” Wilkis Wilson told the crowd.

But wait, doesn’t that advice run counter to what just about what every business expert says? One should never work with family or friends, right? Wrong, say the Gilt Girls. In fact, they’re so confident in the mixing of friends and business that they co-wrote a book about their entrepreneurship experience, By Invitation Only: How We Built Gilt and Changed the Way Millions Shop, which will be released in April.

The book’s title is partly a reference to Gilt’s business model: It sells fashions, home décor, and travel services in limited-time “flash sales” to people who are invited to be members on the site. But it’s also an apt description of how the co-founders have managed the business from day one—with a strong focus on making sure they have the right people in place to manage a high-growth startup.

Wilkis Wilson and Maybank have been together through both good times and bad. The good: They’ve raised about $218 million in venture capital and are widely expected to pull off a successful IPO later this year or early next year. The bad: Gilt confirmed last week it was laying off 90 people and embarking on a restructuring.

In a chat with Xconomy after their panel presentation, Maybank and Wilkis Wilson downplayed the bad times. “We scaled this business so quickly from zero employees to 900,” Maybank said. “Internal restructuring is part of the normal process in a fast-growing business.” As for how their friendship has helped them endure the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, Wilkis Wilson said … Next Page »

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We’re just a few hours away from the start of Xconomy Forum: New York’s Venture Emergence. But there’s still plenty of time (relatively speaking) to get your tickets. We have nine left and up for grabs, which you can get by clicking here.

We have a great lineup of speakers planned, including Fred Wilson, founder and managing partner of Union Square Ventures, Todd Dagres, founder and general partner of Spark Capital, the Gilt Groupe startup team, and representatives from Armgo, BarkBox, Simulmedia, and other great New York success stories.

New York’s Venture Emergence happens today from 2 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the Apella Event Space at Alexandria Center for Life Science at 450 E. 29th Street. There will be plenty of time for networking, too. We hope to see you at this exciting event.

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“It is the ‘silver’ age of VC/entrepreneurship. It would be the ‘golden’ age if we could fix the liquidity issues.”

Those are the words of Michael Greeley, general partner of Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston and treasurer of the National Venture Capital Association, referring to the very tight IPO market that is limiting capital-raising options for emerging growth companies. It is also an issue Greeley intends to explore this Wednesday afternoon, at Xconomy’s conference: New York’s Venture Emergence.

That’s because Greeley will be the moderator of a keynote chat with Barry Silbert, CEO and founder of SecondMarket, the hot New York broker-dealer that is doing its share to fix the aforementioned liquidity issue, in large part by creating ways to trade shares of privately held companies.

The chat between Silbert and Greeley is just one part of a fantastic afternoon of discussion and stories from some of New York’s—and the country’s—leading venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, including Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, the Gilt Groupe founding team, 1stdibs CEO David Rosenblatt, RRE Ventures’ Eric Wiesen, Internet advertising pioneer Dave Morgan (now CEO of startup Simulmedia), Todd Dagres of Spark Capital in Boston—and a whole lot more.

If you don’t have your tickets already, get them fast—time is running out, and space is limited.

Greeley says he is really looking forward to his chat. Some questions he intends to ask Silbert include:

—What is the future of stock exchanges, and how companies raise capital and generate shareholder liquidity?

—What does Second Market look like in five years?

—What are the greatest risks to the business going forward?

—What regulatory issues do companies like Second Market face, and what should the government do?

And last but not least, says Greeley (who remember is from Boston): Who will win the Super Bowl? (I personally feel it will be the Patriots’ revenge).

There will also be time for you to ask Silbert a few questions of your own. We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday afternoon. Register here.

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We’re just a week away from Xconomy’s first big New York City event, Xconomy Forum: New York’s Venture Emergence. And the New York Angels have stepped up to sponsor admissions for 50 NYC startups. Most of these free tickets will be distributed through the city’s startup incubators, but we have 10 to hand out ourselves to entrepreneurs who’d like to attend this exciting afternoon conference, which will be held at the Alexandria Center’s Apella Event Space on February 1.

Brian Cohen, chairman of the New York Angels, says his group was inspired by the great lineup we have planned for this event. We’ll have a keynote chat on the future of venture capital in New York with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Todd Dagres of Spark Capital: their interviewer will be former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt, who is now CEO of Istdibs. The startup teams from bitly, Gilt, Simulmedia, and Armgo will share their experiences, and there will be demos from three of the newest members of the New York startup community: HackNY, Gotham Greens, and BarkBox. ”We have an absolute responsibility to help entrepreneurs be as smart as possible, and this is a great opportunity to do that,” Cohen says. New York Angels was launched in 1997 and has since invested $45 million in 70 companies. “As much as we give back to the startup community, we get back far more from the entrepreneurs,” Cohen says.

If you work at a startup and would like a shot at one of the free tickets sponsored by the New York Angels, just write to us at events@xconomy.com and tell us a bit about your company. (Our apologies, if you have already bought a ticket, you cannot substitute it for a free one.) If you don’t work for a startup but would still like to benefit from the wisdom of our great speakers, you can buy your ticket here. We look forward to seeing you soon at New York’s Venture Emergence.

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Attention, procrastinators! If you still have some last minute shopping to do, you’re going to love this offer. The next 20 people to purchase Holiday Special or Startup Special tickets between now and December 23rd for our upcoming New York event—Xconomy Forum: New York’s Venture Emergence—will be entered into a drawing to win one of two $50 gift codes for flash-sales site Gilt.com. The gifts were generously donated by the folks at Gilt Groupe, who also happen to be part of our dynamite speaker lineup for the event, which will take place the afternoon of February 1.

New York’s Venture Emergence will bring together some of NYC’s leading venture capitalists and entrepreneurs for an afternoon of discussions about what it takes to be a hot startup in the Big Apple.

If you were already planning to go, registering early will save you a bunch of money (that you can spend on more gifts) and will get you a one in ten chance of winning $50 to spend at Gilt.com. Register here.

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Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder and chief merchandising officer of Gilt Groupe, knows a thing or two about attracting venture capital. Gilt—which holds limited time, online “flash” sales of clothing, accessories, and travel offerings—was founded in 2007 and raised $80 million in several rounds of financing. Then, in May of this year, Gilt raised an incredible $138 million more.

On February 1, Wilkis Wilson and Gilt co-founder Alexis Maybank will be featured speakers at Xconomy’s New York Venture Emergence Forum, a half-day conference during which entrepreneurs and VCs will share the stage to pass along their startup stories and wisdom about creating great companies. Joining the Gilt duo will be Nick Beim, general partner at Matrix Partners, one of Gilt’s main investors.

We’ll also have keynote chats from the likes of Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Spark Capital’s Todd Dagres, and Second Market CEO Barry Silbert. And there will be brief presentations from recently launched companies, including a website for pampered pooches, BarkBox. Check out the full lineup here.

Xconomy Forum: New York’s Venture Emergence will take place at the Apella Event Space at Alexandria Center for Life Science from 2 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 1. If you act quickly, you can still get the Holiday Special and save on your ticket price. Please join Xconomy to learn all about Gilt’s success and other great NYC entrepreneurship stories.

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What exactly does 6×6 come out to? A half-day of understanding a bit more about how geniuses run companies; listening to innovators share new ways to tackle Web publishing, marketing, travel search, cloud IT, unmanned aerial vehicles, and more; and catching on to new startups. Oh, plus some very high-quality networking. That’s what we saw at the Xconomy Forum last Thursday, called “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas,” hosted graciously by the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in Boston.

Stephen Wolfram (aforementioned genius) kicked off the event with a keynote talk about taking on seemingly impossible projects and making them succeed. The program followed up with presentations from six companies across the Xconomy network with six potentially transformative ideas: Jason Baptiste of OnSwipe (New York); Nathaniel Borenstein of Mimecast (representing Detroit); Dave Icke from MC10 (Boston); Adam Goldstein from Hipmunk (San Francisco); Kabir Shahani from Appature (Seattle); and Bill Walker from Northrop Grumman (San Diego).

Shorter “burst” presentations from emerging Boston-area startups (Krush, Jana, Apptegic, Crashlytics), and an interactive demo of emotion-analyzing tech from Affectiva rounded out the day.

We’d like to extend a special thanks to our event sponsors, Turnstone and Windstream Hosted Solutions, for making this day possible. Thanks also to our event partner, MassTLC, and our design sponsor, Mixtur, and to all of our underwriters and venture capital members.

We can’t fully do justice to the thought-provoking presentations and incredible mix of guests and speakers here, but we’ve boiled it down as best we can with a 25-picture photo gallery. You can click through below to get a glimpse of the presenters and snapshots of our audience.

	NEXT IMAGE >>
	6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas – Audience listens in as the program kicks off
	photo by Keith Spiro of Kendall Press

… Next Page »

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Silicon Valley may get the lion’s share of attention when it comes to tech and biotech startups, but as has been clear since well before we launched Xconomy New York in April, the Big Apple has plenty to brag about, too. Take, for example, Gilt Groupe, the fashion e-commerce site that has raised more than $218 million in VC funding. Or bitly, which shortens, tracks, and analyzes Web links and is backed by a Who’s Who of venture and angel investors from RRE Ventures to Ron Conway and Mitch Kapor. The New York area is also home to dozens of other cutting-edge startups, big and small, including Armgo Pharma, BarkBox, and Simulmedia.

Entrepreneurs from all those companies and more—along with their VCs—will be sharing their secrets to creating innovative new companies at Xconomy’s February 1 half-day conference, New York’s Venture Emergence.

At this afternoon event, entrepreneurs will share the stage with VCs to pass along stories about how they built their startups. There will also be keynote chats with Barry Silbert, CEO of Second Market, and two of the country’s most influential and astute investors—Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson and Todd Dagres of Spark Capital. Moderating the chat between Wilson and Dagres will be former Doubleclick CEO David Rosenblatt, who now heads online luxury marketplace company 1stdibs, and no doubt knows how to bring out the best in VCs. Finally, we will showcase some “burst” presentations from some of the city’s most promising new ventures.

Check out the exciting lineup of speakers we have planned:

Keynote chats featuring:
Fred Wilson, founder and managing partner of Union Square Ventures
Todd Dagres, founder and general partner of Spark Capital
Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of Second Market
David Rosenblatt, CEO of 1stdibs

Featured speakers and storytellers:
Nick Beim, general partner of Matrix Partners
Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, founder and chief merchandising officer of Gilt Groupe
Alexis Maybank, founder and chief marketing officer of Gilt Groupe
Rich Levandov, managing director of Avalon Ventures
Dave Morgan, founder and CEO of Simulmedia
Dennis Purcell, senior managing partner of Aisling Capital
Sapan Shah, CEO of Armgo Pharma
Peter Stern, CEO of bitly
Eric Wiesen, general partner of RRE Ventures

Bonus presentations by:
Carly Strife, co-founder and CEO of BarkBox
Chris Wiggins, co-founder of HackNY

Xconomy Forum: New York’s Venture Emergence will take place at the Apella Event Space at Alexandria Center for Life Science from 2 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 1. There will be a networking reception, too.

You can find more information—plus special discounted ticket prices for super early birds, students, and startups—by clicking here. Please join Xconomy for this exciting review of the New York venture scene.

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What is the 20-year outlook for the life sciences industry in New York City? That’s the topic of our first public event in NYC: Life Sciences 2031.

We have a great panel of experts from across the industry lined up for what’s sure to be a lively discussion. They are: Barbara Dalton, VP of venture capital for Pfizer’s Worldwide Business Development and Innovation unit; Sam Isaly, managing partner of OrbiMed Advisors; Eric Schadt, chairman of Mount Sinai Medical School’s department of genetics and genomic sciences and chief scientific officer of Pacific Biosciences; and Samuel Waksal, CEO of Kadmon. Our moderator is Les Funtleyder, portfolio manager of the Miller Tabak Health Care Transformation Fund.

There are still seats available, including discounted admissions for startups and students. Register here. And catch us on Twitter at #NY2031.

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Xconomy’s first public event in New York City—a look ahead at the biotech scene over the next 20 years—is coming up this Thursday, October 13. We’ve been chatting with our panelists over the last few weeks, and the consensus is clear: There are a lot of great topics to cover, and the diverse set of experts we’ve convened will be sure to bring a range of experience to the discussion.

The after-work panel event will be moderated by Les Funtleyder, manager of the Miller Tabak Healthcare Transformation Fund (MTHFX) and author of Health Care Investing (McGraw Hill, 2009). In September, Funtleyder told Xconomy he’s looking forward to a lively discussion about what it’s going to take to increase R&D productivity in the pharmaceutical industry. “We had Genomics Part 1—the sequencing of the human genome,” he says. “Now there’s Genomics Part 2. The cost of sequencing a genome has come down from $3 million to $1,000 and the speed has gone up. Is this going to lead us into better drug discovery in the next decade? Or are we having another fad and nothing will ever come from it?”

Panelist Sam Isaly, founder and managing partner of OrbiMed Advisors, told us he’s sure genomics is anything but a fad. Isaly is a big believer in personalized medicine—the use of genomic discoveries to tailor drug therapies to the people they’re most likely to help. “There are now more and more therapeutics that are becoming associated with a diagnostic test,” he says. “It could be decades before we can declare it a revolution, but it is surely promising right now.”

Barbara Dalton, Pfizer’s vice president of venture capital, will bring two valuable perspectives to the panel: that of a VC and that of a representative of Big Pharma. She told Xconomy that Pfizer’s venture group invests in therapeutic areas that match what’s in the company’s pipeline, but that it is also looking ahead to what may be important several years from now. “We would do an ophthalmology investment, for example, if we thought it had the potential to be a significant game changer in the marketplace,” she says. “Another area I like to use as an example is hearing. Pfizer does not have any activities at all in the hearing area. But we all know if somebody could identify something for age-related hearing loss there would be a significant market opportunity.”

Another big topic at New York Life Sciences 2031 will be the city itself, and what local leaders need to do over the next 20 years to built it into a biotech powerhouse. Panelist Eric Schadt—CEO of Pacific Biosciences and the new director of Mount Sinai Medical Center’s Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology—says he’s already seeing some progress on that front. “I think we are beginning to see transformations already in NYC regarding biotech, as the city comes to appreciate that it is home to eight amazing medical centers, top-tier universities, and a very large population that stands to benefit from all of the progress in the life and biomedical sciences,” he says. “I have felt tremendous energy in the city to transform it into a major player in the biotechnology world.”

Here is the roster for the evening:

Opening Remarks:
Joel Marcus, CEO, Chairman, and Director, Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc.
Seth Pinsky, President, New York City Economic Development Corp.

Panelists:
Les Funtleyder (moderator), Health Care Strategist and Portfolio Manager, Miller Tabak Health Care Transformation Fund
Samuel Waksal, CEO, Kadmon
Barbara Dalton, VP of Venture Capital, Worldwide Business Development and Innovation, Pfizer
Sam Isaly, Founder and Managing Partner, OrbiMed Advisors; Manager, Eaton Vance Worldwide Health Sciences Fund
Eric Schadt, Director, Mount Sinai Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology; Chief Scientific Officer, Pacific Biosciences

Please join us on October 13 at 6 p.m. at the Apella Event Space at Alexandria Center. To register, click here.

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Eric Schadt’s career as a scientist has been focused on unlocking genetic cues to common human diseases such as diabetes and obesity. He is the chief scientific officer of Pacific Biosciences, a Menlo Park, CA, company that develops gene-sequencing technologies. He recently joined Mount Sinai Medical Center as the director of the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology—a wide-ranging effort to create disease models based on genetic data collected at Mount Sinai and other institutions.

On October 13, Schadt will lend his genomics and entrepreneurial expertise to Xconomy’s first public New York event: Life Sciences 2031. We’re excited about our diverse panel—which also includes Pfizer’s Barbara Dalton, Kadmon’s Sam Waksal, and OrbiMed’s Sam Isaly. We asked Schadt about his new role at Mount Sinai, as well as his views on personalized medicine, genomic research, and the future of life sciences in the Big Apple. Here’s an edited version of our e-mail exchange with Schadt.

Xconomy: What are your main priorities as the director of the Mount Sinai Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology?
Eric Schadt: The short-term priorities are to get the institute going, which involves very intense planning, recruiting, and infrastructure-building. The mission of the institute is to become the main data-interpretation hub at Mount Sinai, collaborating deeply with 12 disease-oriented institutes so that we can better understand how to diagnose and treat disease. To pull this off we need a multidisciplinary team, comprised of computer engineers and scientists, data modelers to build predictive models, data analysts to recognize patterns, and biological data miners and experimentalists to generate and validate hypotheses about common human diseases and drug response.

X: How is PacBio contributing to this effort?
ES: The partnership between PacBio and Mount Sinai relates to the development and applications of the single molecule real time (SMRT) sequencing technology to enable better diagnosis and treatment of disease. While Mount Sinai will use many different types of technologies, including next generation DNA sequencing technologies, there are a number of advantages SMRT sequencing provides in comprehensively characterizing genomic variation. For example, we have demonstrated a fast turnaround time, which can enable very rapid characterization of pathogens during active outbreaks.

X: Many of the panelists speaking at our Oct. 13 event, New York Life Sciences 2031, are big believers in the future of personalized medicine, but they say the regulatory uncertainties may impede its growth. Do you agree?
ES: I absolutely agree. I am already experiencing this in an amplified way in New York, which has very extensive regulatory rules on carrying out any kind of test, even in a hospital setting. I believe [personalized medicine] goes well beyond the development of companion diagnostics. It includes, for example, having the ability … Next Page »

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As Pfizer’s vice president of venture capital, Barbara Dalton will bring two valuable perspectives to Xconomy’s Life Sciences 2031 panel discussion on October 13: that of a VC and that of a pharma executive. Dalton, who was trained in immunology and virology at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, began her career as a research scientist at SmithKline (now GlaxoSmithKline). While there, she was a founding member of EuclidSR Partners, a private New York-based VC firm where SmithKline was a leading limited partner.

Dalton joined Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) at the end of 2007, a few years after the drug giant started up a venture capital unit. At first, Pfizer’s fund was housed in its finance department, and most of its investments were in technologies and services that supported Pfizer’s already-marketed products. Then Pfizer moved the venture group into the worldwide business development organization, and gave it a mandate to invest in ways that support all of Pfizer’s pursuits—not just its marketed products.

Today, Pfizer devotes a $50-million-a-year budget to investing across a wide range of areas, including healthcare IT, health services, and medical devices. About one-third (32 percent) of the portfolio is invested in drug development, while one-fourth (24 percent) is in companies developing diagnostic and imaging products. Healthcare IT is also a big focus: 12 percent of Pfizer’s venture funds are supporting startups in that area.

Xconomy chatted recently with Dalton about Pfizer’s venture investments, and what she hopes comes out of the discussion at Xconomy’s Life Sciences 2031 event.

Xconomy: What’s the reasoning behind the diversity of Pfizer’s portfolio?
Barbara Dalton: They are all products and technologies that in some way or another support our future. Pfizer is a large organization with a diverse set of businesses, from nutritionals to animal health, to consumer brands, vaccines, biologics, and small molecules. I believe the venture capital group should mirror those businesses.

X: How does healthcare IT fit into that mission?
BD: Healthcare IT relates to all of our businesses, because it can be defined quite broadly. There are technologies that, for example, our sales force may use. There are technologies we may use to monitor clinical trials, monitor patients, track a drug product, or manage manufacturing processes. So healthcare IT in its broader definition—and I include pharmaceutical business IT—is part of that.

X: I imagine part of the mission is also to invest in early-stage drugs that Pfizer may someday be interested in developing. How much does that play into investing decisions?
BD: These are investments that are purely investments. We are ahead of the corporation in terms of their [research] interests. We like products that have been demonstrated in humans, but we may invest in a novel product a couple of years ahead of when the corporation would be interested in it. We look for opportunities in the five or six therapeutic areas that Pfizer is working in these days. But we’re also opportunistic, because … Next Page »

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Much of the life sciences news out of San Diego over the past week concerned new technologies and treatments for diabetes and obesity. We’ve got it covered.

—Switzerland’s Novartis AG agreed to pay $470 million to buy Genoptix (NASDAQ: GXDX), a Carlsbad, CA-based company that centralized the business of providing specialized diagnostic services for cancers in bone marrow, blood, and lymph nodes. Novartis is already a leading developer of certain cancer drugs, and the acquisition will help Novartis speed development of so-called companion diagnostics, tests that are designed to identify who may benefit most from a specific anti-cancer medication.

—San Diego-based Elcelyx Therapeutics has raised just over $6 million to develop new therapeutics for treating diabetes and other metabolic diseases, a regulatory filing revealed. Elcelyx was founded by Alain Baron, a Morgenthaler Ventures entrepreneur-in-residence who was previously a senior vice president for research at San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN).

—Venture capital investing in San Diego fell by 43 percent during the fourth quarter that ended December 31st, with venture firms sinking $193.1 million into 26 startups, according to the MoneyTree Report. The top life science deals included aTyr Pharma ($23 million), Aires Pharmaceuticals ($20 million), and Ceregene ($11.5 million).

—Luke profiled Redwood City, CA-based Calibra Medical, which is developing technology that falls between the cheapest and easiest options for delivering insulin (syringes, pre-filled pens) and more complex and expensive alternatives (insulin pumps). Calibra CEO Jeff Purvin is among the speakers we’re expecting at tonight’s Xconomy Forum: San Diego’s Fight Against Diabesity.

—At the recent JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN) CEO Dan Bradbury discussed the importance of keeping the company steady while Amylin works to satisfy FDA concerns about its diabetes drug, exenatide once-weekly (Bydureon).

—The foundation of U.S. strength in medical device technologies is weakening, although the U.S. is still the undisputed leader, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

—SAIC, the Virginia-based government contractor, awarded San Diego-based Pfenex a $3.1 million subcontract to help develop a scalable production process for a key Malaria antigen.

—Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX), which has operations in San Diego and Cambridge, MA, said the FDA granted its request for a priority review of its application to market telaprevir as a new treatment for hepatitis C. That means the FDA will review the application in six months instead of 10.

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With less than two weeks before we convene the Xconomy Forum on Health IT, I’m happy to report that our final arrangements have fallen into place. Lisa Suennen, a co-founder and managing member of the Psilos Group, is now officially in our lineup—which ensures that our consumer-centric discourse will be an insightful and entertaining evening. Lisa has extensive expertise in healthcare information technology and healthcare services sectors, (she also is a San Francisco Xconomist) and she writes a blog—Venture Valkyrie—that is both fun and informative.

Our forum is set for the evening of Nov. 17 at the Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D Center atop Torrey Pines Mesa. (More information and online registration is available here.)

The Psilos Group, which has more than $577 million under management, is a healthcare-focused venture capital firm that believes successful healthcare innovation “must reduce cost, improve quality, and align incentives across payers, providers, and patients.”

Now there’s a novel concept! We’ll have to ask Lisa just how often those interests manage to get aligned under our current healthcare system. I also must express my gratitude, though, by noting that Lisa graciously agreed to fly in for our forum from the Psilos office in Corte Madera, CA. She is a director at several Psilos portfolio companies, including Fremont, CA-based AngioScore, Cambridge, MA-based OmniGuide, and San Diego’s PatientSafe Solutions.

I’m excited about the impressive lineup we’ve pulled together for this event, but I’m especially looking forward to a robust and provocative (dare I say even heterodoxical?) discussion about how innovations in health IT could benefit consumers. Consumerism is not a word often heard in the lexicon of healthcare payers and providers, but it should be. For example, does anyone think it’s conceivable to develop a healthcare application for consumers as compelling as Facebook?

One expert in a position to address that question is our leadoff speaker, Dr. Kevin Patrick, a preventive medicine specialist at UC San Diego and director of the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Dr. Patrick’s research focuses on using innovations in mobile communications, online social media, games, and other technologies to encourage … Next Page »

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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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It was a lighter life sciences news week, but we did see a new biotech company surface, while a major pharma continued its pursuit of a local biotech giant.

—French drug giant Sanofi-Aventis made another move in its quest to acquire Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ), with a $18.5 billion hostile takeover bid. It was the same price—$69 per share—as an earlier offer from Sanofi that the Genzyme’s board had unanimously rejected.

—Biotech startup ModeRNA Therapeutics, launched out of Cambridge, MA-based Flagship VentureLabs, announced that it has developed technology that uses synthetic RNA to reprogram adult stem cells to function like embryonic stem cells, while avoiding detection by cells’ anti-viral defense systems. ModeRNA, whose technology comes out of Children’s Hospital Boston, has also received an undisclosed amount of funding from Flagship and another unnamed investor.

—Luke introduced readers to some of the cancer-fighting biotech companies we’ll be featuring in our “Xconomy Forum: Boston’s War on Cancer” event later this month. Going beyond chemotherapy and other targeted treatments, speakers will cover how RNA interference, epigenetics, and molecular diagnostics are playing their part. The event will also feature a panel on the process of garnering FDA approval for cancer drugs, moderated by our life sciences columnist Sylvia Pagán Westphal.

—In case you missed it, Ryan wrote a recap of the inaugural Xconomy Xchange, featuring Jonathan Bush, CEO of Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN) and Westborough, MA-based eClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani. Cambridge Consultants president Pam McNamara moderated as the two executives dished on their firms’ approach to electronic medical records, their respective business models, and what to make of the government’s incentives for physicians to adopt the technology.

—Speaking of health IT, Boston-based mobile app company FitnessKeeper added some features to its run-tracking app to simulate the group workout class experience, says CEO Jason Jacobs. The RunKeeper app is now integrating race training plans designed by running experts and tools for searching for upcoming events and connecting with other RunKeeper users who are planning to run the same race.

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We’ll be turning on the lights soon for our big afternoon event, the Xconomy Forum on smart energy. On the other hand, we might not need the lights inside Atkinson Hall, where we’re gathering at Calit2, because we’ve recruited some of the brightest minds from San Diego and beyond to discuss energy and innovation.

After months of planning, I’m especially looking forward to the late afternoon demonstration of wireless energy transmission by Eric Giler, the CEO of Watertown, MA-based WiTricity. It sounds like something Nikola Tesla might have dreamed up in 1891. But it’s technology that might be ideally suited today for safely recharging electric cars, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of those around town over the next year.

Our agenda is focused on innovations in smart energy, and I’ve asked our speakers to talk about both the innovations that are underway and the innovations that are needed to make us smarter about the ways we use energy.

Kicking off that discussion will be Internet pioneer and green energy strategist Larry Smarr, who advocates the “greening of the Internet” and who is observing his 10th anniversary this year as founding director of Calit2—one of our event co-sponsors that is more formally known as the California Institute for Information Technology and Telecommunications. Our plenary panel, which is focused on smart grid innovations in sensing, IT, and analytics, will be moderated by Roth Capital Cleantech analyst Brian Kremer and includes UCSD assistant professor Jan Kleissl, Balance Energy Solution’s Terry Mohn, and software analytics expert Alex Guazelli of Zementis. He’s subbing for Zementis CEO Michael Zeller, who expects to be a father today, if he isn’t already. Congratulations Michael!

We also have arranged for case studies by Ron Pitt of EcoDog, Jonas Olsen of On-Ramp Wireless, David Johnson of Achates Power, and Manuel Jaime of Qualcomm. And we have invited Richard Brody of PowerGenix and startup CEOs Stephanie Rosenthal of Pyron Solar and Cheryl Bostater of 5th Generation Energy to make short “burst” presentations.

After the event, Calit2 is hosting a networking reception that’s also intended to showcase several UC San Diego research projects that are focused on sustainability and smart grids, including work related to the National Science Foundation’s GreenLight project.

Thanks to the many people who have helped make this happen. The list includes the event host, Calit2; and event sponsors Roth Capital Partners, Latham & Watkins, and Calit2. Of course, we’re grateful for help from our event partner, CleanTECH San Diego. And we can’t forget the support from our underwriters: Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Latham & Watkins, and the Science & Technology Directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

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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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Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day in the United States, an occasion that is now observed by just about every country on the planet. Within the past four decades, we have witnessed the price of crude oil careen from about $3 a barrel in the early 1970s to almost $148 a barrel in the summer of 2008. Yeah, prices have fallen since then. But the experience of paying more than $4 for each gallon of gasoline had a widespread and galvanizing effect on all of us. We all know which way this trend is headed, regardless of political wrangling over the science underlying projections of global warming.

That’s why I am excited to announce our next Xconomy event in San Diego, an afternoon forum on “smart energy” set for Tuesday, June 8. What is smart energy? It begins, in the broadest and most pragmatic sense, with the realization that we can be smarter—we must be smarter—in the way we use energy. For us at Xconomy, smart energy is especially about technology innovation, and we have pulled together a group of energy visionaries, industry veterans, startup CEOs, and other experts to help explain the innovations that are already underway—and also will be needed—in every sector of our energy economy.

Along with incisive keynote talks and case studies, we have organized a discussion focused on the future power grid. That will include Terry Mohn, the chief innovation officer at Balance Energy, a micro grid energy business started in San Diego by the British aerospace contractor BAE Systems; Jan Kleissl, assistant professor of environmental engineering at UCSD; and Michael Zeller, the CEO and co-founder of San Diego-based Zementis, a startup developing software analytics for the grid. Brian Kremer, the cleantech and energy analyst at Roth Capital Partners, will moderate.

The stage for this afternoon session is the 200-seat auditorium in Atkinson Hall, home of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, where we held our successful forum on biotech innovation in December. Calit2, which is an event co-sponsor, also has graciously lent us its founding director, Internet pioneer (and San Diego Xconomist) Larry Smarr, to serve as a keynote speaker. Among other things, Smarr is a co-principal investigator of the National Science Foundation’s GreenLight project, which is intended to develop new green energy strategies for an IT industry that is estimated to consume as much energy as the airline industry.

As it turns out, many of the technological advances that are needed to make us smarter about using energy—including new capabilities in our IT infrastructure, sensors, wireless communications, data warehousing, and software analytics—represent new market opportunities for many of San Diego’s renowned innovation clusters.

So, to round out the agenda, we have scheduled case study presentations about … Next Page »

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Leave it to the Greeks to provide an epic mythology for interpreting the essence of biotech innovation.

As John Maraganore of Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals puts it, drug development is a voyage of Odysseus that requires wily and ingenious problem-solving and extraordinary seamanship. Put another way by Kleanthis Xanthopoulos of Carlsbad, CA-based Regulus Therapeutics, the quest of biotech innovation boils down to a succinct question: “How do you build business in an environment that has been challenging and is likely to continue to be challenging in the future?”

We got some answers to that question, and much more, yesterday afternoon during our Xconomy Forum event on biotech innovators and innovations, which was held not on a wine-dark sea, but in the Calit2 auditorium at UC San Diego’s Atkinson Hall. (Maraganore announced his Greek heritage at the outset of his opening keynote presentation, which included a brief digression on the Greek origins of “innovation” and “risk.”) One solution voiced by several speakers is that new ideas and synergies arise through collaborations—which have become a hallmark of San Diego’s life sciences community.

We also heard leading experts talk about the importance of identifying unmet clinical needs, the ingredients of a corporate culture that encourages innovation, and the need to develop multiple drug candidates to increase the number of “shots on goal.”

Xconomy’s national biotech editor Luke Timmerman, who served as the master of ceremonies for the afternoon event, also organized a series of presentations that we billed as case studies in innovation: Fate Therapeutics CEO Paul Grayson on the development of technologies that rely on adult stem cells; Intellikine CEO Troy Wilson on the potential fusillade of new drugs targeting PI3 kinase pathways; and Regulus CEO Xanthopoulos (uh, he’s also Greek) on its approach to a host of new micro-RNA-based therapies.

The audience at Xconomy Forum Monday

The presentations and discussions culminated in a conversation with David Baltimore, the Nobel laureate and Caltech president emeritus, who says his favorite model for biotech innovation “is to keep it in the academic world until a clear path forward is apparent, and we see a way to bring it to commercialization.”

Alnylam CEO Maraganore charted the route that Alnylam followed in its development of RNA interference drugs, which included raising more than $900 million over the past seven years, including roughly $660 million raised through partnerships with Big Pharma.

Maraganore says several large pharmaceutical companies have turned to a younger generation of scientific leaders because the industry is both starved for new drug candidates and constipated by its inability to bring new drugs to market. In building an environment to … Next Page »

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