They are the deals that slip through the cracks unnoticed. They are worth less than $1 million, but at least $100,000. Though small in size, these investments need to be included along with the bigger deals that get more press, if you want a more complete picture of the funding landscape in the innovation community. And there were at least 16 of these deals in the Northwest in September (see table below), according to ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company tracking VC, angel, and other investments in private companies.

It’s probably too soon to talk about trends, because this is the first month we’ve had access to ChubbyBrain’s data on these smaller deals, which were compiled from regulatory filings, user submissions, and other sources. But here are some quick observations.

About two-thirds of the deals (11 of 16) were equity investments, while one-third (5 of 16) were debt financings. Half the investments (8) were in software companies, while about a quarter each were in biotech/medical (4) and cleantech (3) firms. The majority of the deals were in the Seattle area (10), but a significant number were near Portland or in Oregon (6). Anecdotally, all those breakdowns seem consistent with the deal flow we’ve been seeing and reporting on in the Northwest for the past year or so. The data didn’t include the investors or the stage of the investments.

Without further ado, here are the 16 “under the radar” deals from last month:

Vantos (Seattle)                                            Equity        $873,487
Investigation software

InEnTec (Bend, OR)                                     Equity        $800,000
Cleantech fuels

WA 32609 (Redmond, WA)                           Equity         $800,000
Biotech

Inson Medical Systems (Bellevue, WA)      Equity         $642,536
Biomedical drug delivery

Napera Networks (Mercer Island, WA)         Debt           $600,000
Networking software

Acucela (Bothell, WA)                                    Equity         $439,603
Biotech drugs

Adometry (Kirkland, WA)                               Equity         $400,000
Analytics software

Smilebox (Redmond, WA)                              Equity         $399,999
Consumer software

Asemblon (Redmond, WA)                             Debt            $386,000
Cleantech/materials

Ohio River Clean Fuels / Baard Energy (Vancouver, WA)    Debt            $245,000
Cleantech fuels

Safetec Compliance Systems (Vancouver, WA)                    Debt            $235,000
Software for chemical compliance

Second Porch (Portland, OR)                          Equity         $225,000
Social software

SynapticMash (Seattle)                                    Equity         $200,000
Educational software

Silere Medical Technology (Kirkland, WA)      Debt            $120,000
Medical devices

BallLogic (Portland, OR)                                   Equity         $100,000
Consumer devices

Site 9 (Portland, OR)                                          Equity         $100,000
Web development software

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Some tech companies seem to be at their best when things are at their worst. Those are the ones you really need to keep an eye on, especially in a recession. Isilon Systems is one of those companies.

The Seattle-based data storage firm (NASDAQ: ISLN) is announcing its third-quarter earnings this afternoon, and it will be interesting to see how well its products are selling across a wide range of industries—everything from movie studios and media companies to financial institutions and biomedical research organizations. I recently sat down with Isilon’s founder and CEO, Sujal Patel, for a wide-ranging interview about the nine-year-old company’s technology and business strategy. It makes for a pretty compelling case study of a tech startup’s growing pains, and how it has bounced back from adversity to become a leading player in a crowded and competitive field.

In case you don’t know all the twists and turns in Isilon’s history, here’s a quick recap. Patel, a former engineer at Seattle-based RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK), co-founded Isilon in January 2001. The basic idea was to provide cheaper and more efficient data storage for companies needing to host or deliver video, music, and other multimedia content that requires a lot of storage space. In his previous role as chief architect of RealNetworks’ media delivery software, Patel had seen many customers struggle to upgrade their storage capabilities. So there was a real problem to solve. But the tech bubble had collapsed, so customers weren’t necessarily in the mood to buy. Patel says he “pretty much timed the worst spot of the decade to start a company.”

What’s more, there were already about 250 venture-funded storage companies out there, Patel says, and about 50 of them sounded just like Isilon. Patel says he built his business plan around solving the specific problem Real’s customers had, and “how that problem would be pervasive across all mid-range to large enterprises over the next decade.” To start with, he set an incredibly narrow customer focus on photo-sharing and streaming media websites, and media companies.

Isilon’s technology approach was to cluster together a large number of storage “bricks”—each one includes disks, memory, processing, and networking—into a single storage unit. It was a novel approach in the field of network-attached storage, which today is a $4 billion industry with big players like NetApp, EMC, and Hewlett-Packard. Isilon’s technology requires solving some very tough software problems, but the payoff is better storage performance that is also cheaper and easier to manage, for companies dealing with huge amounts of unstructured data. “We can build one gigantic network drive, and we can scale it as the customer’s needs change over time,” Patel says.

Venture capitalists were sold. In August 2001, Isilon closed an $8.4 million funding round …Next Page »

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Boston is an international hotbed of biotech research. So why would a company called Boston BioCom specialize, as it does, in bringing biomedical discoveries to the Hub from Russia?

To hear the folks at Boston BioCom tell it, Russia has some biotech brawn of its own. New York-based drug giant Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) invested $10 million in the Boston-based firm in summer 2008 to help it tap Russia for life sciences discoveries that could be commercialized in the US and elsewhere. And the company has already established two programs to bring science from Russian institutions to market.

Why Russia? Jeffrey Gelfand, chief scientific officer of Boston BioCom and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, said that the U.S. State Department began pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into Russian institutions after the fall of the Soviet Union to redirect the efforts of former weapons scientists to medical and non-defense pursuits. Though the U.S. has wound down this funding as the Russian economy has strengthened, the resulting biomedical discoveries from the research makes Russia a viable source of medical technology.

Gelfand isn’t making this up. In San Francisco, a biotech called Medivation (NASDAQ:MDVN) is in late-stage clinical development of an antihistamine drug from Russia to treat Alzheimer’s disease. Also, ProTom International, based in Flower Mound, TX, is developing next-generation proton therapy systems for cancer treatment based on technology licensed from the Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow. ProTom researchers have collaborated with scientists from MIT’s Bates Linear Accelerator Center in Middleton, MA, to enhance the system.

“I think [ProTom] is a perfect example of what we hope to do ourselves,” Gelfand said.

Boston BioCom has three main biomedical technologies in development, two of which stem from discoveries in Russia, while the third is from Gelfand’s own lab at MGH. The Russian-born technologies include a laser energy system, which is designed to boost immune responses in the skin, and an antibacterial therapy program, which is focused on using molecules called bacteriocins as drugs. (In nature, bacteria produce bacteriocins to fend off attacks from other bacteria.) The firm’s program from Gelfand’s lab involves the use of engineered antibodies—in this case, monoclonal antibodies fused with recombinant heat shock proteins—to treat cancer and infectious diseases.

The firm licensed the bacteriocin technology from …Next Page »

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Follica, the Boston-area startup out to bring a scientific approach to helping hair-loss sufferers re-grow their locks, is preparing for some new growth of its own. The firm, run since its late 2006 inception by founding CEO Daphne Zohar of Boston’s PureTech Ventures, announced today the hiring of a new president and CEO, William Ju, a biopharmaceutical veteran with experience in an array of therapeutic arenas, including dermatology (he is a board certified dermatologist). The selection of Ju seems to position the firm to move out of the purely research-focused stage and closer to becoming a drug development company.

“There’s just a lot of excitement with regard to the science, and to the progress that’s been made,” Ju says of Follica’s work to date. “When I heard about the opportunity, I was really delighted with it, given my background as a dermatologist, given what I think is really breakthrough research.” And he says he looks forward to “bringing the company through to its next developmental stages.”

For her part, Zohar put it this way in a statement: “We are thrilled to welcome Bill Ju as the CEO of Follica. He brings the ideal blend of dermatology and drug development experience, creativity and leadership skills to Follica in this next exciting phase of development.”

What, exactly, Follica’s next step is—and when it will occur—is of intense interest to many of Xconomy’s readers, who struck up an often-spirited conversation on the site after we reported Follica’s $5.5 million Series A round in January 2008 and continued the discussion after the startup’s $11 million Series B funding last August. A lot of the talk in these comments has been centered on a 15 to 20 patient proof of concept study that Follica launched to put its follicle-generating approach to the test. Zohar confirmed the study’s existence last August, but the company has not provided other details on its progress—other than to stick to a general timeline laid out in January 2008 that no results would be available for at least a year. Depending on how you count, and when exactly the trial began, that year is either up or close to being up.

Which might or might not have something to do with Ju’s hiring. When I asked him about the trial, Ju, who started on May 1 and is still getting up to speed, was understandably vague. “The trial is …Next Page »

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Chandigarh, Sunday, December 7—I drove straight north from Delhi to Chandigarh about 300 km, on a much improved four-lane highway. Chandigarh is a planned city that was designed by the French architect Le Corbusier in the late 1950s. It remains a delightfully livable city that the rest of India has failed to emulate. I am attending the wedding of my cousin’s daughter, a recent dental school graduate, to a young engineer who works with Tata. The local TiE chapter has also invited me to speak to their members tomorrow.

I have met several entrepreneurs who have returned from the U.S. to take care of aging parents and then set up businesses here. Chandigarh is considered to be a tier 2 city (tier 1 being Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, and Chennai), in the same league as Pune and Ahmedabad. In reality those cities are far more industrial, including technology-related industry, than Chandigarh. There is a nascent life sciences industry forming, especially around agricultural products: Chandigarh is the capital of Punjab, India’s bread basket. However, most of the entrepreneurs I met had small outsourced information technology businesses with customers primarily from the U.S..

There is an excellent engineering college in Chandigarh, and I had the chance to meet with the director of the college, Manoj Datta. He is busy setting up new degreed programs to respond to industry needs. For example, he was evaluating a graduate program in biomedical instrumentation in conjunction with a local biological institute. We had a vigorous debate about the viability of that degree, along with the head of Philips Labs from Delhi. Philips Labs are creating new products for emerging markets by launching them first in India; they support all Philips divisions, including the medical division in Andover, MA. For instance, they recently launched a UV water purifier that is more effective than charcoal filters. Tainted water is a big problem in India, as many tourists have found. The public water supply is invariably contaminated and almost everybody has a water purifier at home. Boston University has a world-renowned public health department that has projects in India; I need to connect them to Philips Labs and Punjab Engineering College.

I had an interesting conversation with the CEO of the Usha Group, which has been making ceiling fans and air conditioners for many years. He showed me a cell phone that they have launched in tier 3 and 4 cities in India. The cell phone is manufactured by an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) in China to their specifications and distributed via thousands of cell phone retail distributors. Usha has been struggling to differentiate itself on grounds other than price. To illustrate how powerful this can be, the CEO told the story of an upstart competitor that had inferior products but had stumbled onto a need in the rural marketplace for phones that had long battery life. Electricity is not readily available in most India villages and is unreliable when it is.

I asked him if he had considered differentiating on the cell phone user interface, perhaps by using the Google Android operating system and then customizing the UI for rural India consumers. I will discuss this further with him when I return to Delhi.

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Earlier this month, I had the tremendous honor of being asked to discuss Senator Ted Kennedy’s remarkable contributions to biomedical science at an event celebrating The Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate that was organized by The Massachusetts healthcare and life sciences communities. Following are my comments:

As I studied the record of the Senator, it became apparent that few national leaders have had as significant impact on the current state of biomedical science and healthcare delivery. He has been foresighted in his leadership by championing inclusion of the disadvantaged into the healthcare system and at the same time strengthening biomedical research that advances the range and quality of treatments available.

Senator Kennedy was first elected to the Senate 46 years ago in 1962. Relating this tenure to my own experiences in science, he was a Senator when I graduated from high school and has shaped many of the opportunities in my life, even though at the time I was unaware of it.

The center of biomedical research and innovation in healthcare in the world is now in Massachusetts. This epicenter has grown over the 40 years of Senator Kennedy’s tenure and will create a large part of the future of healthcare. The foundations of this epicenter, with the addition of biotechnology in the 70s, were the universities such as Harvard, MIT, BU, Tufts, BC, and others—and the great hospitals such as MGH, Brigham and Women’s, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Children’s Hospital, and many others.

Senator Kennedy’s leadership in encouraging advances in biomedical research began with his election as Chairman of the Senate Health Subcommittee in 1971. In this capacity, he helped pass the National Cancer Act that established the modern National Cancer Institute and quadrupled the funds supporting cancer research. Senator Kennedy stated his support of biomedical research at the time as: “The conquest of cancer is a special problem of such enormous concern to all Americans.” In relating his feelings to those of the country, he further stated, “We can quote statistics. But I think every one of us in this body, and most families across the country have been touched by the disease one way or another.” I am sorry to say that this has certainly been the case for the Senator’s family.

The National Cancer Act has been important for biomedical research across the country and particularly here in Boston. It greatly strengthened the already-strong cancer research and treatment programs at the Dana Farber, MGH, and Children’s Hospital. In addition, this act radically changed the course of research in life sciences at MIT. For example, Professor Salvador Luria, subsequently a Nobel Laureate, convinced MIT to support his application to NCI for funds to establish a new center dedicated to research into fundamental aspects of cancer. David Baltimore took leadership in recruiting the staff of the center; this included yours truly, who joined MIT in 1974.

Research from the Center has been important in the development of several highly successful new targeted therapies. Perhaps more important in terms of the region, the success of MIT’s Center for Cancer Research either directly or indirectly led to the establishment of the Whitehead Institute, the Broad Institute, and the Koch Institute. These institutes, along with MGH and Harvard, have shaped the Kendall Square area with a large concentration of biotechnology companies. There are similar stories about the importance of the National Cancer Act at other universities and hospitals in Massachusetts. This act passed with Senator Kennedy’s leadership clearly initiated a revolution in cancer research and treatment across the country.

Funds for cancer research have grown over the intervening years with Senator Kennedy’s support ,and we pray that he will benefit from these advances in his current struggle. Although no one is satisfied with current treatments of cancer, significant progress has been made. The rate of age-dependent death due to cancer has fallen over the past decade by 25 percent. There are more promising new drugs and treatments under development now than at any time in history. We are making significant …Next Page »

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The nascent New England Biotech Association, an umbrella group comprised of trade associations from all six New England states, held its first board meeting yesterday, the Boston Globe reports. The group is chaired by Paula Newton, President of the New Hampshire Bio/Medical Council. According to its website, “NEBA is committed to ensuring the region remains a global leader in biotechnology and the life sciences.”

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Heading into Election Day (have you voted yet?), the deal flow has really picked up in the Northwest. Cleantech and energy were the big winners this week, followed by Web software and biomedical hardware.

—Xconomy broke the news of Seattle-based EnerG2, a startup out of the University of Washington, raising an $8.5 million Series A round led by Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners and Palo Alto, CA-based Firelake Capital Management. EnerG2 is an advanced materials company focused on energy storage technologies. We plan to bring you the full story when the parties agree to talk.

—Mercer Island, WA-based Napera Networks closed a $6 million round led by OVP Venture Partners, which had provided seed financing for the company as well. The terms of the deal had not been announced previously. Napera develops network-security technologies for businesses.

—Ascentium, a Bellevue, WA-based Web design and marketing firm, raised additional funds from WestRiver Capital, based in nearby Kirkland. The amount of the funding was not disclosed, but Ascentium said it’s continuing to invest in talented workers and business expansion worldwide.

—Kashless, the Seattle-based startup from ex-Imperium Renewables CEO Martin Tobias, raised a $5 million Series A round from RRE Ventures. Tobias hasn’t said much about what Kashless is doing, but it seems to involve recycling, reuse, and sharing online. He emphasized RRE’s forward thinking in cleantech-meets-software, and said we’re heading into a “nuclear winter” for funding.

—Not technically a Seattle deal, but Kissmetrics, a Web analytics startup founded by Neil Patel, raised $800,000 from Silicon Valley-based True Ventures and other investors. Patel, who’s based in Orange County, CA, is an investor in several Seattle-area companies and is on the board of BuddyTV, ICanHasCheezburger, CultureMob, LiquidPlanner, and Optify.

—Sonosite (NASDAQ: SONO), a Bothell, WA-based maker of portable ultrasound machines, bought back $60.3 million worth of convertible notes it owes investors, as Luke reported. The notes give investors the option of getting their returns through debt payments from the company, or by converting the notes into stock.

—NxtGen Emission Controls, a Burnaby, BC-based “syngas” company focused on reducing emissions and optimizing the burning of fuels, closed a $15.4 million Series B round led by the Altira Group. Other investors included Itochu, an unnamed Japanese auto maker, and returning investors Yaletown Venture Partners, GrowthWorks Capital, BC Advantage Funds, and Polygon Financial Investments.

—Seattle-based Second Avenue Partners participated in a $33 million Series B funding of Ice Energy, a Colorado-based cleantech company that helps manage air-conditioning electricity usage. Second Avenue was an original investor in the firm. The Series B round was led by Energy Capital Partners, based in Short Hills, NJ, and San Diego, CA.

—InEnTec, a waste-to-fuels company based in Bend, OR, received a $150 million equity commitment from Lakeside Energy and American Securities to build a waste gasification plant in Michigan, as Luke reported. InEnTec’s technology originally comes from MIT and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

—Luke also reported that Vancouver, BC-based Yaletown Venture Partners raised $65 million in the initial close of its second fund (which it says will grow to $100 million in the next 12 months). The money will be used for cleantech and info-tech investments in Canada and the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

—Glassdoor, the Sausalito, CA-based online job site co-founded by Zillow CEO Rich Barton, raised $6.5 million in Series B funding from Sutter Hill Ventures and Benchmark Capital.

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Redmond, WA-based Micronics, a maker of tools for molecular diagnostics and monitoring, announced today it has closed a Series C financing round led by the Southwest Michigan First Life Science Fund. The latest round, combined with a Series B round raised earlier this year from private investors, brings a total of $9 million in capital to Micronics, whose disease detection and diagnostic products are based on microfluidics technologies.

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If only hair could grow as fast as Follica’s pot of money. Just seven months after its $5.5 million Series A financing round, the Boston-based startup today announced it has raised an additional $11 million to bolster its efforts to develop new methods of treating male- and female-pattern baldness and other hair-follicle disorders such as excessive hair growth and acne. Follica, which confirmed a human pilot study of its hair-regeneration technique is underway, also added several new team members, including veteran life sciences and biotech executive G. Kirk Raab, former CEO of Genentech, who joined the company’s board as chairman.

The Series B round was led by Polaris Venture Partners of Waltham, MA (Polaris partner Kevin Bitterman also took a seat on the board), and joined by existing investors Interwest Partners of Dallas and Menlo Park, CA, (which led the Series A round); and founding investor PureTech Ventures, in whose offices Follica is headquartered.

Follica’s main initial focus is developing a treatment for the extremely common form of hair loss called androgenic alopecia—better known as male pattern baldness or female pattern baldness. “This financing will enable us to build out the company and move well down the path towards [regulatory] approval,” says Daphne Zohar, managing director of PureTech Ventures (and an Xconomist). “Our research has been progressing in a very positive way. We have had significant interest from the venture community and while we just closed the Series A round a few months ago, and weren’t planning on bringing in more money for a couple of years, we recognize that additional funds enable us to move more quickly. We have worked with Polaris before and they have been a great partner to us which is why we accelerated the Series B round.” Zohar added that Follica is in the process of transitioning to its own office space, and that it already has independent lab space.

My story about Follica’s debut last January and its quest for a baldness cure sparked a long-running (440 comments and counting as of this writing) conversation among the startup’s would-be customers that’s still quite lively all these months later. This highlights the intense interest in—and vast potential market for—an effective treatment for hair loss. Follica, for its part, claims treatments for conditions of the follicle represent a $10 billion-plus annual market. As Zohar said of the general field of aesthetic medicine back in January: “There’s huge markets, and most of the technologies and things that are out there don’t come from real academic science. A lot of them are this late-night infomercial type of thing.”

Aiming to inject some credible science into the field, Follica was formed in late 2006 by PureTech and a roster of leading researchers that includes University of Pennsylvania stem cell biologist George Cotsarelis, Harvard Medical School dermatologist Rox Anderson, and Vera Price, director of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Hair Research Center. As part of today’s announcement, Follica said it has bolstered this scientific firepower with the addition to its scientific advisory board of Samir Mitragotri, an expert in transdermal drug delivery at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

At the root of Follica’s approach to hair loss is Cotsarelis’s discovery (made after the company was formed) that when the skin’s uppermost layers are removed some cells within the wound revert to a more basic state from which they can develop into either skin or hair—and that he could actually direct cells in this “embryonic window” to form new …Next Page »

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In March, we wrote about local investment firm Allied Minds, which has a strategy of investing very early in technology developed in university research labs. Today, Allied Minds announced that it has invested in CryoXtract, a startup launched by researchers from Harvard University and Northeastern University.

The inventors of the technology around which CryoXtract was formed, Dale Larson and Jeffrey Ruberti, have developed a new way to take out small portions of frozen liquid biological samples like whole blood or sperm. Instead of first thawing the liquid, withdrawing a part of it, and the refreezing it, Cryoxtract uses a very small, hollow drill to extract a frozen core. This avoids the risk of degrading the samples by repeated thawing and refreezing and takes less time to carry out.

“We are looking for cutting-edge technologies, and this one is quite enabling, there’s nothing remotely similar in the market,” Allied Minds director Vincent Chung told Xconomy. “The market opportunity includes any organization that has a need to take aliquotes [small portions] from frozen samples.”

According to CryoXtract’s webpage, there are more than 500 million stored frozen biological samples in the U.S.. So while the samples are small, the market seems big.

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Medical device and diagnostics company Hologic (NASDAQ: HOLX) of Bedford, MA, hopes to accelerate its growth in the diagnostics market. To that end, the company today announced an agreement to put up $580 million to buy Third Wave Technologies (NASDAQ: TWTI), which develops molecular diagnostics, especially for HPV, human papilloma virus.

Hologic specializes in women’s health products, including mammography systems, instruments for gynecological surgery, and diagnostic tests for cervical cancer—so called Pap smears. This is also where the Third Wave acquisition fits in, as infection with human papilloma virus can lead to cervical cancer. At present, the Wisconsin-based company has two HPV tests waiting for approval.

“If and when Third Wave’s HPV tests receive FDA approval, expected sometime in the first half of calendar 2009, we will be well-positioned to take these products quickly and effectively to market. We expect the integration process to be smooth and seamless,” Hologic CEO Jack Cumming said in a statement.

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HyperMed, a medical imaging company based in Burlington, MA, announced it has completed a $4 million round of funding from Greenwich, CT-based GBP Capital. The proceeds will support marketing and sales of HyperMed’s lead product, a spectroscopic imaging device that probes tissue metabolism.

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Research into the use of RNA interference (RNAi) to “silence” gene activity is picking up steam (see our story two weeks ago about Alnylam’s RNAi-based treatment for RSV), but it’s still very difficult just to get RNAi agents inside cells, where they can actually do their jobs. Today Waltham, MA-based Thermo Fisher Scientific unveiled a new agent that it says can be absorbed by cultured cells directly “without the use of conventional delivery methods such as transfection reagents, viruses or electroporation.” Such an agent could significantly speed any biomedical or pharmaceutical research project in which RNAi is used to shut off specific genes, according to Thermo.

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Call it a hair-raising event. Follica, a Boston startup out to develop novel ways of treating and even curing baldness and other hair-follicle disorders, today announced it had completed a $5.5 million Series A financing round. The round was led by Interwest Partners of Dallas and Menlo Park, CA, and joined by founding investor PureTech Ventures, in whose offices Follica is currently housed.

Follica was founded in late 2006 by PureTech and a group of leading academics who include Harvard Medical School dermatologist Rox Anderson, University of Pennsylvania stem cell biologist George Cotsarelis, and Vera Price, director of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Hair Research Center. Its primary initial focus is an extremely common form of hair loss called androgenic alopecia—aka male pattern baldness or female pattern baldness.

Follica has targeted a, shall we say, growth industry. According to PureTech’s website, treatments for conditions of the follicle—chief among them hair loss, acne, and pigmentation issues—represent a $10 billion-plus annual market. It’s all part of the even broader category of “aesthetic medicine,” which also includes things like plastic surgery and many obesity treatments. And it is really in the recognition of the potential of aesthetic medicine that the, um, roots of Follica’s story lie.

Daphne Zohar, PureTech’s founder and managing partner (and an Xconomist), says the firm began thinking seriously about aesthetic medicine in early 2006. “There’s huge markets, and most of the technologies and things that are out there don’t come from real academic science,” she says. “A lot of them are this late-night infomercial type of thing.” But the market potential is undeniable, and it wasn’t lost on Zohar that people pay out of pocket for aesthetic treatments, meaning no health insurance reimbursement issues for manufacturers to contend with.

PureTech put together a team of expert advisors to begin looking at different aspects of aesthetic medicine. Their survey spanned everything from skin rejuvenation approaches to fat melting techniques, perhaps more than 100 different ideas in all, Zohar says. “As we were looking, we noticed the most interesting things …Next Page »

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Cambridge’s T2 Biosystems, a developer of portable medical diagnostic products combining nanotechnology and miniaturized magnetic resonance imaging technology, today announced that John McDonough has been named its new CEO. McDonough, previously president of medical diagnostics and devices company Cytyc Development, will also join T2’s board of directors.

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