We had an eclectic news mix this week, with features on medical devices, open source biology and an innovation story from the East Side of the Cascades.

—Sage Bionetworks, the Seattle-based nonprofit seeking to light a spark for open source biology, is gearing up for its second big annual conference, which is expected to draw more than 200 people to UC San Francisco to talk about how to pull of this ambitious task. I made a case for why it deserves a shot in this week’s BioBeat column.

—Versant Ventures‘ Beckie Robertson, a leading medical device investor, made some interesting observations at a WBBA event about four new business models for entrepreneurs seeking to survive arbitrary decisions of the FDA, and cost-based clampdowns from insurers. One of these models, which she called “small ball” is about taking small amounts of capital for smaller opportunities than VCs traditionally like. A few days later, as if on cue, one of these “small ball” companies from Seattle was rewarded with $1.5 million in a Series B financing. Seattle-based Mirador Biomedical won that vote of confidence after it earned FDA approval for a couple devices on a shoestring budget of about $1 million.

—Xconomy’s next big public event is one that straddles a couple of the innovative fields we cover—biotech and cleantech. This event, called “Separating Hype from Reality in Alternative Fuels” will feature a keynote chat I will moderate with Kristina Burow of Arch Venture Partners (a co-founder of San Diego-based Sapphire Energy) and Margaret McCormick, the chief operating officer of Targeted Growth and the CEO of a new startup called Matrix Genetics, which is modifying algae to make it an optimized source of biofuels. The event will be on May 19 in Seattle, so mark your calendars and scoop up a ticket if you are curious about what it will take to wean the world off its addiction to fossil fuels.

—I spent a couple days this week on the other side of the mountains for a speaking engagement at Launchpad Inland Northwest in Spokane. The folks in Spokane made it abundantly clear they want some of the biotech action they see in Seattle, and one of the key ways to they want to make it happen is through building out a medical school. We’ll see if this idea makes it through our cash-strapped legislature, but the folks in Spokane are buzzing about the possibility.

—The Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Seattle-based nonprofit research center founded by billionaire Paul Allen, made a big splash this week when it publicly released the first genomic and anatomical human brain map. One of the key early findings was that two adult human brains were found to be about 94 percent similar. Scientists are surely going to learn a lot more in the months and years to come.

—Kineta, the Seattle-based drug developer, said this week it scored a $1 million contract extension from the National Institutes of Health to mine existing databases to find new molecular targets and drug candidates. This project is being done in collaboration with the University of Washington, University of Oregon, UC Irvine, and the University of Utah.

—Lastly, my colleague Curt chimed in with some short sketches on startups that appeared at the First Look Forum organized by the Northwest Entrepreneur Network. This event covered the gamut of innovative industries, but the winner came from the biotech world. As Curt put it, Guide Analytics is a mobile-connected bracelet and monitoring system that keeps track of edema, a swelling that can lead to hospitalizations, particularly in heart patients. This company is led by Deborah Kessler, a veteran of Merck/Rosetta Inpharmatics.

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The Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Seattle-based nonprofit founded by billionaire Paul Allen, is announcing today it has released what it says is the first comprehensive anatomical and genomic map of the human brain. The Allen Human Brain Atlas, based on two normal adult brains, showed about 94 percent similarity between the two specimens, the Institute said in a statement. The map is being made available as an online public resource to researchers around the world, the Institute said. The Allen Institute, founded in 2003 with a $100 million pledge from Allen, has previously released a map of the mouse brain.

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Paul Allen gave researchers a map of the mouse brain first, and now comes the spinal cord. The Allen Institute for Brain Science, a Seattle-based nonprofit backed by the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, said today it is releasing a cellular map on its website that shows 2,000 genes at work in the mouse spinal cord for the first time.

The full map, of an estimated 20,000 genes, won’t be available to researchers until year’s end, says Allan Jones, the Allen Institute’s chief scientific officer. So, why exactly is it making such a big deal with a press conference on Capitol Hill with Washington state’s senior U.S. Senator, Patty Murray?

Sometimes innovation needs strong financial partnerships to thrive, even when one of the world’s richest men is involved—that’s why.

Standing alongside Murray, who has an interest in veteran’s issues, will be representatives from the Paralyzed Veterans of America and the ALS Association, who all want to see progress in spinal cord research, and are contributing to it. Along with other groups who want the groundbreaking tool to become a reality—including Wyeth Research, Pemco Insurance, and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society–have agreed to kick in about $600,000 of the estimated $2.3 million cost of the project, Jones says.

It’s the first time the Allen Institute has brought such a group together to fund a project, and a model that the Institute hopes to duplicate in the future, to become like other research institutions that depend on a mix of philanthropy, government grants, and corporate sponsorship to sustain their work. The message: Paul Allen isn’t going into poverty anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean he should have to write all the checks himself either.

“If you look at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, which is affiliated Weill Cornell Medical College, Sandy Weill gave them a mountain of money,” says Elaine Jones, the Allen Institute’s chief operating officer. “Did they still go out and fund-raise for more? You bet. No one person can do it all. If these projects are useful, others really should step up to the plate.”

Allen committed $100 million of his fortune to start the Institute in 2003, and personally anted up for the full $41 million cost to start up the Institute and put together the 3-D cellular map of the mouse brain by 2006. Yet the Institute, with 120 employees along the ship canal in Fremont, has made it clear that it needs other sustainable sources of cash to accomplish its future goals. That includes a cellular map of the human brain that’s estimated to cost $55 million over four years. Another project moving in parallel will provide cellular snapshots of mouse brains at various stages of development. That’s estimated to run two years and cost $15 million.

No one can say for sure what discoveries will come from assembling a genetic map of the spinal cord, although at least a few researchers are eager to get their hands on the full data set. “We know very little about the genes that control different functions in the spinal cord,” said Jane Roskums, a spinal cord researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, in a statement. “This atlas will help researchers advance their work in quantum leaps.”

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