Stephen Wolfram is not one to be summed up in a few pithy quotes. Well, too bad.

Here is his life in a nutshell:

“I grew up in England and went to all sorts of good schools that I thought were completely irrelevant.”

“By the time I was 20 years old, I was a physics faculty member at Caltech, and I was building a big software system that was a forerunner of Mathematica.”

“Along the way, I learned a lot about what not to do in starting a company.”

“For about a decade I was almost a complete recluse, running the company from a distance, and spending every night working on basic science.”

“I don’t really have a boss. I just do what I want to do. The trick is not to have a private company that gets too weird and too pathological.”

That was a sampling of what the distinguished and controversial Wolfram had to say at our Xconomy Forum in Boston last week, called “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas.” For those who don’t know, he is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, and the author of A New Kind of Science. He is also a recently minted Xconomist.

Wolfram, 52, set the table for the theme of our event, which involved some of the biggest ideas in technology and business from entrepreneurs and executives around the country. As only he could, the physics and software guru reflected on his 30 years in the tech industry and his contrarian approach to running big projects and building companies.

A few things really stood out to me in his talk. One was the importance of making mistakes early in his career. While at Caltech in the early ‘80s, Wolfram got into a “grisly early-IP-meets-university” battle over his software tools, he said.

“I ended up deciding I had to start a company around the software system I’d built, and of course I was just a physics kid. I didn’t know anything about starting companies,” he said. “I made lots of mistakes, like not running the company myself, hiring a CEO who was twice my age, and so on. The company quickly started doing things that I thought were silly and boring. In the end, after many trials and tribulations, it did in fact survive and finally went public and was gobbled up by bigger fishes.” (You can read more about his first startup, Computer Mathematics, which was venture-backed and later merged with Inference, here.)

Another thing Wolfram figured out early on was that university work was not for him. After spending time at Caltech and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, he started a research center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study complex systems and complexity theory. “My plan A was to get lots of other people to help work” on the implications and applications of his findings, he said. “It was OK, but it was really slow. I got kind of frustrated and needed a plan B,” he said. “My plan B was to build … Next Page »

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Sometimes biotech startups can find a backdoor route to going public without going to all the trouble of doing an IPO, and that’s what Seattle-based Allozyne just did today.

Allozyne, the developer of a long-lasting protein drug for multiple sclerosis, said today it has agreed to a merger with San Francisco-based Poniard Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: PARD) in which the little private company is essentially acquiring Poniard. Allozyne CEO Meenu Chhabra will lead the newly combined company, Allozyne shareholders will own 65 percent of the new entity, and Allozyne will control four of the seven board seats.

The combined company, to be headquartered in Seattle, plans to develop Allozyne’s experimental drugs and technology, and find a partner to carry on with Poniard’s lead asset, a cancer drug called picoplatin.

Poniard, the company known years ago as Seattle-based NeoRx, has retained its listing as a public company, but has essentially turned into a shell of its former self since picoplatin failed in the third and final phase of clinical trials in November 2009. The company lost about 80 percent of its stock value that day, and the stock was valued at just 19 cents a share today before the Allozyne deal was announced—meaning Poniard was only worth about $11 million heading into today.

So this is a deal that enables Poniard shareholders to get some new drugs that might be worth something, while it provides Allozyne with a way to connect with a new class of public investors, and potentially provide liquid returns for the venture capitalists who have put $43 million into the company since its founding in 2005.

“I’m extremely proud that an Accelerator company, if this merger closes, will be publicly traded. It will be a first for us,” says Carl Weissman, the founder and CEO of Accelerator, the Seattle-based biotech incubator that started Allozyne. “It’s a real testament to how great the company has done.”

Chhabra, a former dealmaker with Novartis, summed up what it means to Allozyne in a short conference call with investors. “We can now access the public markets to accelerate our strategic plan.”

Meenu Chhabra

There are a number of moving parts to the actual deal that were outlined in a statement. Under the deal, Poniard shareholders will issue shares to Allozyne shareholders based on an exchange ratio to be determined when the transaction closes. Allozyne shareholders are expected to own 65 percent of the company, while Poniard shareholders will get 35 percent. Bay City Capital, one of Poniard’s largest shareholders, has agreed to loan the company about $2.4 million at an 18 percent annual interest rate. The board will be composed of four Allozyne directors—Chhabra, Steve Gillis of Arch Venture Partners, Michael Steinmetz of Clarus Ventures, and Carl Weissman of Accelerator/OVP Venture Partners. The board will also include Poniard’s current CEO, Ron Martell, one other director selected by the Poniard board, and one more independent director selected by a majority of the board.

Leerink Swann advised Poniard on the financial aspects of the deal.

For those new to the Allozyne story, the company’s lead drug, AZ-01, is designed to be a long-lasting form of interferon beta, which has the potential to reduce the number of injections that multiple sclerosis patients need to control their disease. The company, based on technology licensed from Caltech, is also working on ways of engineering different properties into protein drugs, like attaching toxins to make them more potent, or devising ways to make them specifically hit two biological targets instead of just one. The company revealed some early-stage clinical trial results for its multiple sclerosis drug in an Xconomy exclusive earlier this year at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.

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Another week, another deal for Seattle Genetics. This company is clearly on a roll.

—Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN) raked in another $8 million upfront payment this week from a big drugmaker that wants to use its technology for linking targeted antibodies to toxins that make them more potent. This time, Abbott Laboratories shelled out for rights to the technology, making this the 11th such licensing deal Seattle Genetics has signed. If Abbott reaches certain milestones, Seattle Genetics could collect another $200 million in payments, plus royalties on product sales.

—Seattle-based Omeros (NASDAQ: OMER) said it passed a mid-stage clinical trial with one of its lesser-known assets in development—a combination treatment for eye surgery to repair cataracts. This drug, OMS302, was able to maintain pupil dilation during surgery, and reduce postoperative pain and irritation. Omeros said it plans to advance the drug into the third and final stage of clinical testing usually required for FDA approval. The stock climbed about 10 percent on the news.

—The Allen Institute for Brain Science made a notable personnel move this week, hiring Christof Koch, a veteran neuroscientist on the faculty at Caltech, as its new chief scientific officer.

—A year has gone by since President Obama signed the landmark healthcare reform bill into law. Plenty of people feared it would stifle drug prices and take away the incentive to develop innovative new drugs, but as I point out in this week’s BioBeat column, it didn’t happen.

—Vancouver, BC-based Tekmira Pharmaceuticals kicked up a storm last week when it sued its longtime partner, Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY) for more than $1 billion, accusing it of misusing trade secrets. Alnylam CEO John Maraganore says his company did no such thing, and he fired back with some choice words for the folks at Tekmira in this exclusive interview.

—Stewart Lyman offered up a thorough analysis of biotech financing over the past couple years, which raises a very tough question on a lot of people’s minds: “Who will pay for drug development in the future?” Check out his first installment, and the second part.

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The Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Seattle-based nonprofit backed by billionaire Paul Allen, said today it has hired Christof Koch as its new chief scientific officer. Koch comes from Caltech, where he spent 25 years on the faculty studying biophysics, neural computation, and neural systems, the Allen Institute said in a statement. “We are absolutely thrilled to have someone of this caliber directing our scientific efforts,” said Allan Jones, the Allen Institute’s chief executive officer, in a statement.

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[Updated: 2:15 pm] H. Stewart Parker did some soul-searching after her dreams fizzled out at Seattle-based Targeted Genetics, but now the well-known biotech executive has found herself a big new challenge at the Infectious Disease Research Institute.

Parker, 55, the founder and longtime CEO of Targeted Genetics, has agreed to sign on as the CEO of IDRI, the nonprofit global health research center on Seattle’s First Hill. She starts on March 1.

IDRI is pretty much invisible in its hometown, but it is well-known in global health circles as a bustling center for R&D. The nonprofit, founded by immunologist Steve Reed in 1993, now has 94 employees, and an annual budget of about $25 million—half of which comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to president Curt Malloy. The institute has seen about five-fold growth in the past six years, adding capabilities for vaccine research and development, low-cost diagnostics, and early-stage drug discovery—particularly a tuberculosis treatment program supported by Eli Lilly.

Reed will remain the head of R&D at IDRI, while he continues in his other work as CEO of Seattle-based Immune Design, a vaccine spinoff from IDRI and Caltech that has raised more than $50 million in venture capital. By adding Parker, IDRI is getting its first full-time CEO in the two years that have passed since interim CEO Steve Davis stepped down. Parker, with her experience at Targeted Genetics, knows all about the perils of taking promising science through the clinical development process, and all the money and collaborations it takes to support that enterprise.

“We really pride ourselves on how well we work with the for-profit sector, and she will bring a lot of experience in that area,” Malloy says. “She has product development focus, and operational expertise.” When I asked if Parker will help IDRI raise its public profile, and help improve community fundraising, Malloy didn’t answer directly, but it sounded like a yes. “We’ve kept our heads down too long, we really are a story that hasn’t been told,” Malloy says.

[Updated comment from Parker] “IDRI is the best kept secret in town,” Parker says. “This felt like a natural fit for me. I can’t wait.”

The fit was good, Parker says, because IDRI has an entrepreneurial spirit and an understanding of how things work in industry, which is rare in a nonprofit. Reed, who she has known for years since he was a co-founder of Seattle-based Corixa, personally called her to talk about the position almost a year ago, Parker says. She says she envisions working as a “co-captain” in which Reed continues to drive the R&D effort, while she focuses on key business functions like business development, strategy, fundraising, and “creating the opportunity for our scientists to excel,” she says. She adds: “Our skills are complementary.”

Since she left Targeted Genetics in November 2008, Parker took some time off to think about her next move, as I discussed in this December 2009 feature. She eventually took a part-time role with the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association as a mentor for budding biotech entrepreneurs. It was a role she had unusual qualifications for, as one of the first employees at Immunex in 1981, and as the head of Targeted Genetics from the time it spun off from Immunex in 1992. Parker says she plans to step down from the WBBA role after a transition period.

Like any job, this will involve a learning curve, but it has a new wrinkle for Parker. Her past two jobs were basically with companies that were just getting started, where the culture was being created. IDRI is different in that it has an established culture which Parker will learn. This will be a little like some of her past experience as a board member, in which she has had to get up to speed on established organizations.

“I’m a good listener, I believe in teamwork, I think it will be OK,” she says.

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The quest to sequence entire human genomes for $1,000 or less is one of the stories that many predict will change healthcare in the 21st century. It’s an enormously complex puzzle that requires some of the brightest minds in both IT and life sciences to put their heads together. And quite a few of them are working to make this happen right here in Seattle.

So that’s why I’m pleased to announce we’re adding a couple more great speakers to our next event, “Computing in the Age of the $1,000 Genome” on February 7th in Seattle. The first is Paul Rutherford, the chief technology officer of Seattle-based Isilon Systems, which has now officially been acquired by EMC for $2.2 billion. The second is Bob Nelsen, the managing director of Arch Venture Partners, an early investor in Illumina, the leading maker of DNA sequencing instruments that are creating this massive data pile-up.

Rutherford is a natural fit for this event because he has spearheaded Isilon’s work in providing the immense data storage capability that biologists need when they run DNA sequencers that spit out billions of data points. Isilon has gotten some early traction in this market, having signed up A-list customers like The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Johns Hopkins University, Merck, & Genentech.

Rutherford will offer his perspective during a panel at this event alongside Deepak Singh of Amazon Web Services, and Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Health Solutions. Each comes at the genomic data challenge from a slightly different angle—Amazon is focused on flexible cloud computing approaches for storage and analysis, Microsoft has an open-source software platform it is pushing along with bioinformatics software to crunch the data, while Isilon offers hard core centralized servers to store and access the data at places that pump out vast amounts of DNA sequences every day.

I’ve asked Tim Hunkapiller, one of the founding fathers of bioinformatics from the early 1980s at Caltech, to moderate this panel. Hunkapiller has a long history as an academic scientist, and these days has his finger on the pulse of what’s new in DNA sequencing instruments, partly through his work as a consultant to one of the industry leaders, Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE).

Paul Rutherford

Nelsen, who’s never afraid to stir the pot, will join this event for a closing fireside chat with biotech pioneer Leroy Hood.

So, here’s the updated list of speakers:

—Leroy Hood, the co-founder and president of the Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle

—Cliff Reid, co-founder and CEO, Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics

—Eric Schadt, chief scientific officer, Menlo Park, CA-based Pacific Biosciences

—Jim Karkanias, senior director, applied research and technology, Microsoft Health Solutions, Redmond, WA

—Deepak Singh, senior business development manager, Amazon Web Services, Seattle

—Rowan Chapman, partner, Menlo Park, CA-based Mohr Davidow Ventures

—Andreas Sundquist, co-founder and CEO, Palo Alto, CA-based DNANexus

Bob Nelsen

—Ilya Kupershmidt, co-founder and VP of products, Cupertino, CA-based NextBio

—Rob Arnold, president, Seattle-based Geospiza

—Tim Hunkapiller, Seattle-based consultant, Life Technologies

—Paul Rutherford, chief technology officer, Isilon Systems, Seattle

—Bob Nelsen, managing director, Arch Venture Partners, Seattle

Tickets have been going fast for this event, and at the current pace I wouldn’t be surprised if this event sells out a couple weeks in advance. So check your calendars for the afternoon of February 7, and join us for a thoughtful conversation about how computer scientists can work with biologists in a way that will ultimately shake up medicine as we know it.

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NanoString Technologies has been talking for months about diving into the molecular diagnostic business. Now it is going full-steam ahead with a plan to use its genetic analysis instrument to help physicians better understand the severity of certain kinds of breast cancer.

The Seattle-based company is announcing today that it has obtained an exclusive worldwide license to technology from Bioclassifier, a coalition of four academic researchers, which has intellectual property around what is known as the PAM50 gene signature. NanoString will now have the right to develop an instrument that incorporates the activity of the 50 genes involved in this array, which can be used to classify breast cancer patients into four distinct subpopulations with varying degrees of disease severity. Financial terms of the arrangement aren’t being disclosed.

It’s the kind of information that’s hard to obtain consistently and cost-effectively with any other device. So NanoString is betting that it can help popularize this kind of diagnostic test by selling a new instrument that can give physicians a new piece of information that will help them better understand a patient’s prognosis, and therefore help guide how aggressive he or she ought to be with a treatment strategy. NanoString currently sells its device as a research tool to academic groups and Big Pharma companies, and with this new technology, it is now free to create a modified instrument that can tap into potentially larger diagnostic markets. The plan is to run tests to win an initial FDA approval for the device in 2012, and start branching into other specific forms of cancer diagnosis after that, says CEO Brad Gray.

“We’ve gone from talking about going into molecular diagnostics to now working actively to make it happen,” Gray says. “It’s a very exciting moment for the company.”

NanoString outlined its strategy in some detail back in February, when I did an exclusive interview with chairman Bill Young, and then again when Gray was introduced as the new CEO in June. The company, founded in 2004 with technology from the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, first began selling its instruments to researchers in July 2008. It’s a digital machine, called nCounter, which helps biologists determine the extent to which many genes are dialed on or off in a sample-what’s known as gene expression analysis.

Brad Gray

There are entrenched competitors in this field, like Santa Clara, CA-based Affymetrix (NASDAQ: AFFX), Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE), and San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN). NanoString isn’t yet profitable, but it has built a small and influential fan base of academic researchers at places like the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Caltech, and the University of Washington. The technology is supposed to help researchers do a new kind of large-scale genetic experiment, where they might compare 50 or 100 genes from 100 different patients to see how they respond to certain therapies.

While that kind of broad capability allows academic scientists to use their creativity to run lots of experiments they couldn’t easily do before, NanoString sees more future potential in a similar instrument that’s tailored to be a workhorse diagnostic machine. In the case of breast cancer, this diagnostic instrument could conceivably be used to help classify patients who are newly diagnosed, Gray says. About 207,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year in the U.S., according to the American Cancer Society.

The technology to help physicians stratify those women, based on the … Next Page »

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Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, has been investing in biotech companies and basic neuroscience for many years, and now he’s set up a new program to put more money to work for scientists pushing the boundaries in those fields.

The Seattle-based Paul G. Allen Family Foundation is announcing today it is bankrolling seven research teams around the country with three-year grants worth a combined $9.4 million. This is the first round of grants for “Allen Distinguished Investigators” in what could become an ongoing program, according to Sue Coliton, a vice president at the foundation. The idea is that Allen will support cutting-edge research projects that haven’t been able to secure traditional funding from the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, yet have great potential to advance science, and enable the development of new medical technologies and products, Coliton says.

“Paul is really interested in asking big open questions in science,” Coliton says. “Our hope is these will lead to new knowledge in science that can be built on. We hope for breakthrough ideas, discoveries.”

The inaugural batch of Allen investigators come from MIT, Stanford University, the University of Washington, Caltech, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Much of the work they are doing reflects Allen’s longstanding interest in neuroscience, which he has been supporting in a big way since he committed $100 million in 2003 to establish the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. But the grants being announced today stretch beyond neuroscience, and will also support development of new laboratory tools that could see broader use.

While Allen is best known as the co-founder of Microsoft and for making investments in technology companies (including a few high-profile flameouts like Charter Communications), fewer people realize he has a longstanding interest in life science investing too. Allen is well familiar with the high-risk, high-reward character of biotech, through his investments in a number of well-known companies, including Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN), Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN), South San Francisco-based Cytokinetics (NASDAQ: CYTK), and Brisbane, CA-based BiPar Sciences (acquired a year ago by drug giant Sanofi-Aventis), to name a few. Last month, he bet another $20 million on Seattle-based Omeros (NASDAQ: OMER). Through getting to know biologists over the years, Allen has picked up the basics of what the NIH will pay for, what venture capitalists will support, and all kinds of interesting things that fall through the cracks.

“A year ago, I started searching for programs with potential for major breakthroughs but which had struggled to find funding through traditional sources,” Allen said in a statement. “The inaugural Distinguished Investigators are working on some of the most exciting research in biology and neurology and I’m proud to be able to help keep that work going.”

The Allen Distinguished Investigator program got started about a year ago, when Allen himself sent an e-mail around to a number of scientists he stays in touch with, says David Postman, a spokesman for Vulcan, Allen’s investment company. Before long, the Allen Foundation put together a request for proposal, and got back 120 applications for projects to pick from. The foundation sought help from scientists to vet the projects, but Allen himself made the final decision on who got the grants, Coliton says.

Allen plans to keep tabs on the progress of the grant winners, and bring them together once a year to talk about their results, Coliton says. After about 12 to 18 months of seeing how the program works in practice, the foundation plans to take a closer look at whether the program will become an ongoing, enduring sort of thing. “It will evolve over the next couple of years,” Coliton says.

With that, here are the seven original grant winners, with a thumbnail description of their work:

—David Anderson, Caltech, $1.6 million.

Anderson, one of the original advisors to the Allen Brain Institute, has secured funding to “localize, identify, characterize, and turn on” neurons in the mouse brain associated with attack and aggressive behavior.

—Edward Boyden, MIT Media Lab and McGovern Institute for Brain Research, $1.3 million.

Boyden’s team will attempt to develop “new devices for creating real-time electrical maps of the brain in three dimensions,” according to the foundation.

—Michael Dickinson, University of Washington, $2 million.

Dickinson plans to use the grant support “to develop new instruments to expand the body of knowledge in the field of measuring and quantifying complex group behavior in the relatively new field of study called “ethomics.” I must admit that was a new “omics” to me; you can read more about it in this paper in Nature.

—Christof Koch, Caltech, $600,000.

Koch plans to look at neural networks that enable worms (C. elegans) to move.

—Jennifer Nemhauser, University of Washington, $1.4 million.

Nemhauser, according to the Allen Foundation, plans to “reverse engineer a cell-to-cell communication system from plants, construct a modular molecular signal processing toolbox for synthetic biology, and to use the toolbox to genetically engineer the single celled organism S. cerevisiae, to exhibit multi-celled behavior.” S. cerevisiae is a form of yeast used in baking and brewing.

—Mark Schnitzer, Stanford University, $880,000.

Schnitzer, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, will seek to use his new money from Allen to “develop miniaturized, mass-producible, fluorescence microscopes that can create real-time imaging of neurons in the brain.” If he can do that, the plan will be to look at what’s going wrong at the neural and cellular level in schizophrenia.

—Tony Zador, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, $1.6 million.

Zador’s lab will study “the use of viruses to transport bar-coded nucleotides across synapses and map the connectome of a living animal.”

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Immune Design has struck its first big deal with a Big Pharma company.

The Seattle-based vaccine developer has agreed to provide a license to an immune-boosting compound, called an adjuvant, to the MedImmune unit of London-based AstraZeneca. The pharma giant plans to use the compound as a key ingredient in potent new vaccines it has in the works. In return, Immune Design will get undisclosed upfront cash, future milestone payments worth up to $212 million based on development and sales goals, plus “mid-single digit” percentage royalties if the vaccines become marketed products, according to Bruce Carter, Immune Design’s executive chairman.

Today’s deal is the latest step forward for Immune Design, a company founded two years ago by a trio of scientific heavyweights—Nobel laureate David Baltimore of Caltech, Larry Corey of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Steve Reed of the Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI) in Seattle. Immune Design raised $32 million its second round of venture capital in July, bringing its total fundraising haul to $50 million.

Back in July, Reed said in an Xconomy exclusive he was following the playbook of his old company, Corixa, which sought to build a foundation in the first couple years and start doing deals by year three. It’s an important point in the evolution for a biotech startup with a lot of proprietary technology that few people have really seen yet up close.

“The money is important, but what’s more important is that someone very interested in developing new vaccines recognizes the necessity of putting our adjuvant in their vaccine,” Carter says.

Bruce Carter

MedImmune is paying to get ahold of Immune Design’s synthetic chemical adjuvant, called glucopyranosyl lipid A (GLA). This compound is supposed to boost the effectiveness of vaccines in a cheaper, more reproducible, and more scalable fashion than previous generations of adjuvants that were derived from natural products. Reed and his teams at Corixa and IDRI did pioneering work on a natural product adjuvant, known as Monophosphoryl Lipid A (MPL), which is now a critical component of GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine for cervical cancer, called Cervarix.

While this deal for Immune Design isn’t huge by biotech standards, it is intentionally limited in scope, Carter says. MedImmune has obtained the rights to use the GLA adjuvant to enhance experimental vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), Epstein-Barr virus, and cytomegalovirus (CMV) infections.

MedImmune, of course, is well-known for its expertise in respiratory syncytial virus, since its fortune was built on the success of palivizumab (Synagis), which generated $1.23 billion in sales in 2009. Instead of just treating RSV, MedImmune now has its sights set on developing a potent new vaccine … Next Page »

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Cerulean Pharma has made lots of progress since its early days in 2007 when I first visited the biotech startup, then called Tempo Pharmaceuticals, and company chairman Alan Crane broke out his laptop to show me an animation of the newly hatched firm’s nanoparticle drugs congregating inside tumors and killing them.

The Cambridge, MA-based startup, which has raised $37 million, is now working on building clinical-trial evidence that its lead nanoparticle drug can kill tumor cells for real. Oliver Fetzer, Cerulean’s chief executive, also told me that the firm is working on raising a new funding round to bring the drug, dubbed CRLX101, further into clinical development for treating solid tumors while developing earlier-stage molecules as well.

There’s been lots of hype about the promise of nanotechnology in medicine. Cerulean is a rare case of a firm that has shown its nanoparticles could be safe for humans while delivering some of the hoped-for benefits of the tiny molecules. The company reported late last month that its lead drug was well tolerated in an initial human study. With that data, it has begun enrolling patients into its next, Phase IIa, clinical trial, which aims to provide more evidence of the drug’s ability to treat solid tumors such as lung cancer, Fetzer said. Cerulean is further along in clinical development that its local rival in the nanoparticle-based cancer drug field, Cambridge-based Bind Biosciences.

Already, Cerulean has seen how its lead nanoparticle, which contains the anti-cancer compound camptothecin, helps keep the active drug inside tumors for much longer than if the patient received the compound alone. The nanoparticle also large enough to keep it from being removed from the body by the kidneys, where it could cause side effects, but small enough to enter tumor cells to deliver the cancer-killing agent. Development of camptothecin as a stand-alone cancer drug had been scrapped years ago because of the compound’s toxic side effects, but Cerulean’s nanoparticles might be able to limit those effects by keeping the drug concentrated in the tumor cells and away from healthy tissues.

“Cerulean is at this point the only the company that has an … Next Page »

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San Diego-based Illumina has acquired an intriguing startup from southern California with a vision of putting low-cost genetic analysis systems on every biologist’s benchtop.

Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN), the leading maker of high-speed gene sequencing instruments, said today in its second-quarter financial report, and in a separate statement, that it has acquired Carlsbad, CA-based Helixis for $70 million in cash upfront, plus another $35 million in contingent considerations. Helixis CEO Alex Dickinson has agreed to join Illumina as a senior vice president, and assist in the coming weeks with the introduction of a new product line Illumina is calling Eco Real-Time PCR.

The acquisition was apparently made on April 30, but wasn’t announced until today’s quarterly report. Still, the Helixis deal shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that Illumina CEO Jay Flatley joined the startup’s board last year as it prepared to launch its new product for high-powered, low-cost polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing. Helixis, which I profiled back in January, was built around the idea creating a real-time PCR technology that’s small enough to sit on the average lab bench, costs less than one-fourth of the standard bulky machines found in centralized labs, and performs with a higher degree of accuracy and consistency. Helixis, which began with technology developed in the Caltech labs of David Baltimore and Axel Scherer, wanted to make a lab bench tool that any biologist could use to precisely measure how DNA is switched on or off in a given sample of, say, cancer cells, compared with healthy cells.

While the big standard machines sold by competitors like Life Technologies, Bio-Rad Laboratories, and Roche can cost as much as $50,000, the new Illumina tool aims to carve out a new market at a much lower price—$13,900. That price should make it “accessible to individual researchers around the world,” Illumina said in a statement.

“We are excited to launch the Eco Real-Time PCR System, which we believe will set new standards for performance, simplicity and affordability,” said Christian Henry, Illumina’s senior vice president and general manager, life sciences, in a statement.

Helixis’ investors appear to be getting a pretty good return on their investment. The company was founded in 2007 with a $10 million investment from Domain Associates, Advanced Technology Ventures, and Okapi Venture Capital. Back in October, Xconomy reported on a regulatory filing which showed the company had raised another $7.3 million.

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Steve Reed is following a tried-and-true road map for building a biotech company. First year, build the team. Second year, gather some data to support the founding idea. Third year, prove it in clinical trials. Then start coaxing Big Pharma to open up its checkbook and do deals.

“This is when it gets exciting,” Reed says. “That’s just what happened at Corixa.”

Reed was talking about the growth strategy at his latest startup, Seattle-based Immune Design. The company made news yesterday when it raised $32 million in its second round of venture financing, from a big name crew of investors outside the Northwest—ProQuest Investments, The Column Group, Alta Partners, and Versant Ventures.

Immune Design was founded with an $18 million venture round from the last three investors a little more than two years ago, in June 2008. The company’s vision is to create a new generation of more specific, potent vaccines. In theory, these vaccines could provide lasting protection against infectious diseases with a single shot, or could be used to re-direct the power of the immune system toward an internal invader like cancer cells.

The technology builds on research from the Caltech lab of Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, who created a viral vector that makes it possible to specifically stimulate dendritic cells of the immune systemare known for sending sentinel warning signals about pathogens throughout the immune system. That targeting ability is being combined with synthetic chemical compounds called adjuvants, which boost the effectiveness of vaccines. These adjuvants from Reed’s lab at the Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI), when combined with Baltimore’s precise delivery system, offer an opportunity to trigger highly potent and specific immune responses in the body, as I described in yesterday’s breaking news story.

Steve Reed

Immune Design plays its cards very close to the vest, so I was eager to stop by Reed’s office yesterday for a download on the company’s progress the past couple years, and what enabled them to raise a healthy sum like $32 million.

Reed, of course, has been here before. He founded the nonprofit IDRI in 1993 to pursue his dreams of fighting global health scourges. Soon thereafter, he connected with Immunex co-founder Steve Gillis to start a for-profit venture, Corixa, with the idea of raising private money and bringing business discipline to some of his vaccine work. Corixa struggled to market its lone cancer drug, although it successfully developed adjuvants that are now incorporated into GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine for cervical cancer, marketed as Cervarix. Corixa was ultimately sold to pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline for about $300 million in 2005.

While Corixa went away, Reed went back to innovating in the adjuvant world with his team at IDRI. The earlier generation of adjuvants, known as MPL, were made from natural products, which made them a little more tricky and expensive to manufacture. The next step was to isolate the specific component of the MPL compounds that appeared to be closely related to sparking an immune response, and then make that component through a synthetic chemical process that would be cheaper, consistently reproducible, and scalable. That technology was went into Immune Design, through what it now calls GLA.

Like in the early days of Corixa, Reed sensed … Next Page »

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Integrated Diagnostics has done what it told its investors it would do, at least in its early days.

The Seattle-based developer of predictive diagnostic tests has secured a $10 million financing, which represents the second installment of a three-part, $30 million Series A venture deal announced last October. As part of the deal, a newly formed investment group in Luxembourg called BioTechCube Luxembourg is replacing a German firm, dievini Hopp Biotech, in an investment syndicate that also includes InterWest Partners and the Wellcome Trust. Integrated Diagnostics, aka InDi, received the second tranche of cash after hitting a series of six progress milestones that investors said they wanted to see at the beginning, says CEO Al Luderer.

“The first thing really is that I didn’t screw anything up since I joined,” Luderer says, explaining how he nailed down the money.

Kidding aside, it sounds like InDi has been hard at work the past few months trying to execute on the big idea of its co-founders, Leroy Hood and David Galas of the Institute for Systems Biology and Jim Heath of Caltech. The vision, which I last wrote about here in March, is to create a new class of diagnostic tests that can spot specific proteins that can be shown to be early warning signs of certain cancers, or Alzheimer’s disease. Hood, the biotech pioneer, has said he hopes this could shake up the healthcare system by making it possible for doctors to detect diseases much earlier than they can be caught today, giving them more information before they make hard decisions about treatment.

This program is still in its early days, and the milestones were chosen carefully by the founders to make sure they were both “meaningful and achievable,” Luderer says. The company has essentially settled on its first two market opportunities, in the early detection of lung cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, Luderer says. It has filed for U.S. patents on its lung cancer diagnostic test, done a lot of market research and studied the health economics, and laid the technology foundation for a test that could be ready to perform in its first rigorous clinical trial before the end of next June, Luderer says.

Albert Luderer

The $10 million financing is enough for InDi to operate at least another 16 months, Luderer says. By that time, it should have data to demonstrate the value of its test at predicting lung malignancies. The company hasn’t yet signed its contracts with medical centers, but it envisions a retrospective study that will analyze existing blood samples from more than 700 people. These patients came in to the hospital with a variety of chest ailments, and had CT imaging scans that showed small lung lesions of between a half centimeter or 2 centimeters, Luderer says. Doctors are often reluctant to do a lung biopsy, an invasive procedure, when the lesions are likely to be benign.

That’s why InDi sees this is an ideal proving ground for its test. By taking a simple pinprick of blood, InDi’s instrument will look for telltale proteins that ought to indicate whether a lesion is benign or malignant. The medical history on these patients is already loaded with data on what the CT scans showed, what biopsies revealed, and how sick the patients got over time. InDi hopes that it will see clear differences in the blood between patients who got serious lung cancer, those who had benign growths, and those who got some other malignancy. In everyday clinical use, the pinprick test would be an early warning sign, which a doctor would verify … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Allozyne has been operating in stealth mode for more than a year, prompting some biotechies to wonder if it had quietly run out of cash and closed its doors.

Far from it.

Allozyne, one of the startups that graduated from the Accelerator biotech startup incubator, has been making huge strides behind the scenes, based on what I gathered from an exclusive interview this week with CEO Meenu Chhabra. The biggest news is that Allozyne has now gathered what Chhabra calls “very promising” results from its initial clinical trial of a longer-lasting multiple sclerosis drug. Full details aren’t yet available, although Allozyne is planning to issue a press release and to present the data in a scientific forum, Chhabra says.

That might have been enough to secure more capital, but the company didn’t stop there. It has also shown that its technology, originally licensed from the Caltech, could be used to make scalable and reproducible quantities of a two-pronged “bi-specific” antibody drug for a hot target against inflammatory diseases. The company has shown it can do more than just make small proteins and fragments of antibodies in fermenters with E. coli bacteria. Its techniques can also be extended to commonly used mammalian cell hosts that are better at producing full-length antibodies like the ones that sell for more than $30 billion a year to treat cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and other diseases. And last, Allozyne has secured a research partner in the form of an undisclosed Big Pharma company that will extend its cash runway.

Allozyne has done all of that in the past couple of years with 25 employees, and without completely burning through the $30 million it raised in October 2007 from MPM Capital, OVP Venture Partners, Amgen Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, and Alexandria Real Estate Equities. Chhabra, a former Novartis dealmaker, said she’s done it with line-by-line budgeting in which she personally scrutinizes the tiniest expenses. She has saved more than $1 million in salaries by insisting that she and chief scientist Ken Grabstein handle all the key executive functions—operations, business development, finance, medical affairs—by themselves. She provides box lunches, not fancy dinners, for board updates. The CEO with the Novartis pedigree even flies coach herself, uses frequent flier points, and only lets her team attend a couple key conferences a year.

Meenu Chhabra

It might just sound like prudent business in a downturn, but OVP managing director Carl Weissman says the company’s recent achievements amount to “incredible progress.” Chhabra and the Allozyne team have adapted, he says, to “the new realities of venture-backed biotech.”

Chhabra, who says she likes to use visual analogies to explain things, put it this way:

“I had this beautiful bulb in front of me to plant when I joined Allozyne,” Chhabra says. “We’ve planted the bulb, and it has sprouted a lot of things.”

Before I dive into the nitty-gritty details of Allozyne’s progress from the past year, a little background is required. Allozyne was founded in 2005 with technology from William Goddard and David Tirrell at Caltech, and incubated at Accelerator in Seattle. The Caltech scientists, as I described in this October 2008 feature on Allozyne, discovered a way to essentially snip out a certain amino acid found in the backbone of protein drugs (methionine), and replace it with a genetically modified amino acid that can stick like Velcro to other molecules. This is sort of like plugging in a Lego block, which performs a certain function wherever researchers want on the backbone of the molecule.

This was thought to be important to provide the rock-solid consistency … Next Page »

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Seattle-based NanoString Technologies hasn’t had a permanent CEO for more than a year, and now the search has ended in Boston. The company, which makes instruments to help scientists perform sophisticated genetic analyses, has named Brad Gray, the former vice president of product and business development for Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme Genetics, as its new president and CEO.

Gray comes to the job after almost six years at Genzyme, where he got experience in the pharmaceutical, venture capital, and diagnostics operations inside the biotech giant (NASDAQ: GENZ). Before that, he spent four years working with healthcare clients at McKinsey & Co. He’s got a bachelor’s in economics and management from the University of Oxford in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in chemical engineering from MIT. Gray, a first-time CEO, was still getting settled into his new office in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood when I stopped by for an interview yesterday.

NanoString’s new leader joins at a pivotal moment for the company, as it seeks to grow into a stronger commercial enterprise. NanoString, founded in 2004 with technology from the Institute for Systems Biology, introduced its first commercial product in July 2008. It’s a digital instrument for academic biologists to help them determine the extent to which many genes are dialed on or off in a sample—what’s known as gene expression analysis. The company has built a base of academic customers at top institutions like the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Caltech, and the University of Washington. While the company raised $30 million in a round led by Clarus Ventures a year ago, it hasn’t yet turned profitable, and it has been operating without a permanent CEO since Perry Fell resigned more than a year ago.

Brad Gray

NanoString executive chairman Bill Young, an industry leader who’s currently the chairman of Biogen Idec, said when he joined NanoString in February that the company has some very good people, but it needs “consistent leadership that can take the company to the next level.”

Gray says he envisions NanoString growing into a “very valuable company.”

“I want this to be a company that helps researchers make important biomedical discoveries, and helps physicians to translate those discoveries,” Gray says.

NanoString first hit Gray’s radar screen about a year ago, when he was running the diagnostics operation inside Genzyme. Scientists inside Genzyme told him about the NanoString instrument, called nCounter, and noted that its ability to generate digital readouts on hundreds of genes in a relatively small sample could be useful inside Genzyme. Gray noticed the company again in February when Young was named executive chairman of NanoString. Young, who formerly ran Monogram Biosciences, had noticed Gray’s work at Genzyme, where he ran a $370 million business in 2009, essentially one of the top five diagnostic service providers in the U.S., Gray says.

“We had a few interactions when Bill was at Monogram, and we had a good rapport,” Gray says.

That got Gray to listen when the recruiter called. But when he started taking a closer look, he found the opportunity more and more attractive. He liked the fact that NanoString’s instrument has broad ability to do “multi-plexed” experiments that, instead of looking at one gene, are able to analyze hundreds of genes in a sample to look at a symphony of what might be going wrong in complex diseases like cancer, diabetes, or inflammation. He liked the digital precision of the NanoString results. And, based on his experience in diagnostics, he really liked that the NanoString tool isn’t thrown off track by Formalin-Fixed, Paraffin-Embedded preservation techniques that are commonly used in medical facilities, but sometimes cause problems for competing devices.

Still, this was a big decision to make personally and professionally. Gray, a native of Columbia, SC, had never even been to Seattle until he flew here to interview … Next Page »

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One of the leaders of the renaissance in biomedical research and entrepreneurship in San Francisco’s Mission Bay district almost didn’t have a chance to go to college.

Reg Kelly, the director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), was born 70 years ago in Edinburgh, Scotland, into a family so poor that he couldn’t afford boots to go hiking with his friends. His stepfather was an auto mechanic, and his mother cleaned factory floors. Kelly’s mother wanted him to go to work at 17 to help the family. He went to college only because Britain’s government in the late 1950s provided full-ride scholarships, including tuition and living expenses, to bright kids from poor families.

The force of personality that was partly shaped by those early struggles propelled Kelly on a career arc that led to the peak of academic neuroscience. Now six years removed from an abandoned attempt to sail away into the sunset, the hard-driving Scotsman has come back to pursue an even more improbable dream. He’s overcome some big political and cultural barriers to create an environment that’s incubating 22 biotech startups in what used to be one of the bleakest areas of the city. Mission Bay, he says, is on track to become nothing less than what he calls “the academic health center of the 21st century.”

“I’ve just hustled. It’s what I’ve been doing all my life,” Kelly says. “It’s the advantage of growing up a poor kid. You’ve got to hustle to make things happen.”

QB3 connects three big research centers in northern California—UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz—to venture capital, entrepreneurship, and the for-profit life sciences industry. It provides key ingredients like mentoring, lab space, state-of-the-art equipment, about $8 million in seed capital, and free beer for networking events.

I met with Kelly at his office a little more than a week ago to learn more about the person who has made so much of this happen.

Kelly was born in 1940, the year Germany launched the Blitz against London and other British cities and prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his legendary “finest hour” speech. He was the oldest of three sons. The Kellys lived in public housing, and the boys attended schools operated by the Catholic Church. He was a top student in his class, but didn’t show interest in science.

“There were only two choices, you either studied Latin and Greek and became a priest, or you opted for science,” Kelly says. “I didn’t particularly care for science. I liked history.”

While Kelly was growing up, Britain’s Labour Party established a benefit program for kids like Kelly. Not only could bright students from poor families get free tuition, but their families could get aid to cover living expenses, which made it easier to cope with a young worker being out of the workforce. This benefit proved to be short-lived, and the program was cancelled when middle-class families started demanding the same benefit, Kelly says. “There was a brief window there when to be bright, and poor, was advantageous,” Kelly says.

That scholarship took him to the nearby University of Edinburgh. He graduated … Next Page »

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One of the Nobel Prize winners at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego has been saying for a decade that chemists would be better off doing the simple thing instead of the hard thing. Now quite a few of the world’s top academic scientists and Big Pharma companies are starting to adopt K. Barry Sharpless‘ philosophy of “click chemistry.”

This is the concept that Sharpless has been advocating a long time, along with a couple like-minded faculty members at Scripps, MG Finn and Valery Fokin. I met with Sharpless, Finn and Scripps’ tech transfer leader, Scott Forrest, a few weeks ago to talk about the boom they are seeing in scientific publications, patents, and some new technology licenses that are taking advantage of “click chemistry” principles.

What’s the big idea? It’s about using small chemical building blocks that you put in water or some other solvent, until they naturally “click” together. Sort of like a plastic buckle on a backpack, these molecules join together in the easiest, cheapest, most reliable, and most durable reactions possible, according to the laws of Mother Nature. These are fundamental reactions that tightly bind molecules together and could be useful as oral pills, industrial adhesives, stable coatings for implantable medical devices, or any number of valuable products. It sounds simple, and Sharpless and Finn say it is. What’s surprising is how strange it might appear to the modern lab with its state-of-the-art tools and its efforts to constantly strive for the leading edge and peer approval that goes with it.

Sharpless has been applying this idea for about 20 years, but he says he was really inspired by Kevin Kelly’s 1995 book “Out of Control.” Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, wrote that scientists should recognize they’re playing “God games.” In the case of a chemist, he or she is trying to do things that are more complicated any human can fully understand, so they should listen carefully to what Mother Nature says. It’s a more humble approach than what you often see in pharmaland.

“We are going toward an unknown target. Even if we think we know the target, we say we know what’s best. That was big-scale hubris. It’s like Cinderella and her sisters, with a shoehorn. Our intellect is saying we can shoehorn what we say works into the shoe. It’s not close to the truth,” Sharpless says. “If you want to be God, you have to allow your objects to have free will. You have to relinquish control.”

Barry Sharpless

Instead of trying to do things the way nature wants, chemistry and other fields of science are really more of a game of “hey, can you top this?” to hear Finn and Sharpless describe it. The click philosophy, they say, strikes a lot of peers as mundane.

“We are trained as most experts to do the hardest things and do them well. That’s how you get praise and learn,” Finn says. “You want to do the hardest chemical reactions and make them work. It’s weird to say ‘We’re not going to do the hardest reactions.’ We’re going to find or create the easiest reactions.’ But if you think about it, it’s a lot harder to invent a process that works all the time, than it is to make the process that’s really difficult work a few times.”

Yet more and more scientists and companies are seeking to apply the click philosophy. One example is Seattle-based Integrated Diagnostics, a company co-founded by Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology and Caltech’s Jim Heath. Their idea is to create a diagnostic tool that can perform binding reactions cheaply and reliably enough to usher in an era in which physicians will be able to spot proteins that are early warning signs of cancer or neurodegenerative diseases in a pinprick of blood.

Hood loves to tell the story about how the prototype, and the tight binding reactions it performs inside, were rugged enough to produce reliable results even when Heath left the machine in the truck of his car near Caltech in Pasadena, CA.

That’s just one example. Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) markets a kit that performs a click reaction to take quantitative measures of DNA in cells, Finn says. Tampa, FL-based Intezyne, whom Finn advises, is using the click principles to attach polymers to drug candidates in a cheap, strong, consistent way to make chemotherapies active only inside tumors, not other tissues where they cause side effects. Hundreds of drug candidates that use the principle are now working their way … Next Page »

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Yesterday afternoon, I attended the Seattle-based Technology Alliance’s “Innovation Showcase” at the Rainier Square Conference Center downtown. This is a relatively new event—the fourth one so far, and the first open to the press—in which tech and life sciences companies from Washington state pitch their businesses to a small, select crowd of angel investors, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and service providers.

The event had a strong University of Washington flavor, as several of the speakers and sponsors had UW ties. Linden Rhoads, vice provost and head of the UW Center for Commercialization, and her deputies, Rick LeFaivre and Tom Clement, each said a few words about the presenters.

Similar to the NWEN First Look Forum last week, the five presenting companies cut across some very different disciplines, including hardware, wireless sensors, and biotech. Guess how many software or Internet companies presented? None.

Well, none of the traditional Web 2.0, social networking, or business software, at least. Susannah Malarkey, executive director of the Technology Alliance, told me this was a conscious decision. Her team chose non-software companies for this event, in part because software startups tend to need less capital and can get off the ground more easily these days than other tech and life sciences firms. One of the goals of the Innovation Showcase was to highlight different kinds of companies compared to other events around town—though each was built on a strong technical idea.

Here’s a quick rundown on the companies, and what stood out to me. No audience voting, no winners, just the facts. I’ll say a little more about some companies than others, but this is by no means comprehensive:

1. Enravel (Seattle)

Linden Rhoads introduced this startup by pulling out her iPhone and iPad (yes, one of those) and talking about the devices’ display capabilities. “These are great, these are fun, but they’re going to be so much more fun when there are projectors available for them,” she said. “That day is very, very close at hand.”

Enravel is led by UW mechanical engineer Brian Schowengerdt, an expert in alternative displays, user interfaces, and human visual perception. He co-founded the company in 2009 to commercialize a laser-based “pico projector.” The idea, he says, is to “take a display of iPad size and compress it into the size of an iPhone.” More specifically, to shrink a projector to “the size of a grain of rice” and use it to project on-screen images, video, games, websites, e-mail—you name it—onto any larger surface.

The core technology is a “scanning fiber” projector that uses fiber optics and a vibrating element to scan an image and blow it up, for example, to a size of 17 inches across from just five inches away. A matchbook-size assembly of laser diodes (off the shelf) provides the light source to project the image. You could imagine such a projector might be crammed into a smartphone and used … Next Page »

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Boston’s prolific bioengineering professor, Bob Langer, is at it again. Selecta Biosciences, the Watertown, MA-based vaccine developer with ties to the Langer lab at MIT, has raised another $15 million in venture capital to make nanoparticles that it says are the key ingredients in a new generation of more effective vaccines.

Selecta collected the cash, its Series C round, from a new lead investor in OrbiMed Advisors, as well as existing backers Polaris Venture Partners, Flagship Ventures, NanoDimension, and Leukon Investments. This latest shot of cash—which Selecta didn’t actively solicit—comes in addition to a $15 million round the company pocketed back in February 2009. All this cash means that Selecta now has enough money to run through 2012, while speeding up its plans to test its platform technology.

What’s the big idea attracting all this investment? It’s all about tiny particles. Selecta is developing biodegradable polymer nanoparticles that can be self-assembled at low cost, and at a large commercial scale, Langer says. These particles can be made in the same size and shape of a virus, which looks like a foreign invader to the immune system.

But that’s only half of the equation. Selecta’s particles can be designed to specifically target a type of white blood cell, antigen-presenting cells, that are critical for exposing bits of pathogens to both B and T cells of the adaptive immune system. Vaccines of old haven’t had the potential to be aimed this specifically, or made to be this potent. Selecta’s method could be applied to vaccines that prevent infectious disease, or those that mount a therapeutic immune response to ward off an existing disease. The new method doesn’t require any weakened forms of virus as a delivery vehicle, which means the new vaccines have potential to be safer, Langer says.

“We haven’t seen anything like it,” Langer says.

Bob Langer

Langer, of course, isn’t doing this all by himself. Selecta’s executive chairman is Bob Bratzler, the former CEO of Coley Pharmaceutical Group, the cancer immunotherapy company that was bought by Pfizer in November 2007. Omid Farokhzad of Harvard Medical School is a co-founder, and the board includes George Siber, the former chief scientific officer of Wyeth Vaccines—the company that developed the blockbuster pneumoccocal vaccine for infants (Prevnar). OrbiMed’s Carl Gordon is joining the Selecta board in connection with the financing.

Selecta is still awfully coy in public about what it plans to do with the new money. Bratzler wouldn’t say what the company’s lead vaccine candidate is designed to treat, or whether it will be a therapeutic or prophylactic vaccine. Animal tests have shown that Selecta’s method can stimulate a prolific antibody response, which translates into high rates of effectiveness. The company does say that its first clinical trial is scheduled to begin in 2011.

This idea of specifically engineered vaccines sounds similar to a Seattle-based company called Immune Design, which is backed by Versant Ventures, Alta Partners, and The Column Group. The company is making synthetic adjuvants—compounds that boost an immune response to vaccines—while specifically targeting them to antigen-presenting cells using a viral delivery mechanism from David Baltimore’s lab at Caltech. One key difference, Bratzler says, is that Selecta doesn’t use the viral delivery mechanism.

“We’re the only company with a fully integrated synthetic vaccine approach,” Bratzler says.

While that may not matter much in early demonstration projects, the Selecta approach is thought to have advantages for a commercial product, Langer says. By using the biodegradable nanoparticles that can self-assemble, the vaccine compounds are easy to manufacture. The Selecta vaccines also ought to be easy to handle and transport, potentially through freeze-dried packaging, Langer says.

The high degree of potency also allows Selecta to think about different ways of delivering the vaccines, Bratzler says. It’s possible that some vaccines that currently require multiple booster shots could be given in a single shot. Selecta is also thinking about topical delivery through the skin, and through mucosal membranes that line nasal passages, he says.

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Integrated Diagnostics, the Seattle-based company seeking to carry out biotech pioneer Leroy Hood’s vision for personalized medicine, has hired its first CEO.

The company’s new leader is Albert Luderer, a veteran diagnostics executive who ran Woburn, MA-based BioTrove until that company was acquired last November by Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) for an undisclosed sum. Luderer’s name may be familiar to some Seattle biotechies from his stint running Bellevue, WA-based Light Sciences earlier in the 2000s.

This is a critical hire for a fledgling company like Integrated Diagnostics, known as InDi. The company, founded by Hood and David Galas at the Institute for Systems Biology and their Caltech colleague Jim Health, took its first big step as a company in October. That’s when it secured the first $7.5 million out of a $30 million founding venture capital round from InterWest Partners, the U.K.-based Wellcome Trust, and Germany-based dievini Hopp Biotech holding, part of a collaboration with the government of Luxembourg. The company, one of the boldest visions of Hood’s long career, aspires to create a new wave of diagnostic tests that can spot signature proteins in a pinprick of blood that are associated with certain cancers, or Alzheimer’s disease.

This work has the potential to shake up the healthcare system in three big ways, Hood has said. It will make it possible for doctors to detect diseases much earlier; it will pave the way for more individually tailored therapies that are more likely to pass clinical trials; and it will allow doctors to follow up with patients to see if treatments they prescribe are really working at the molecular level. While diagnostics have traditionally been low-price, low-margin commodities that take a backseat to drugs, this new wave of truly predictive diagnostics could become more valuable to the healthcare system than today’s one-size-fits-all drugs.

Albert Luderer

InDi (pronounced like “Indy”) considered some CEO candidates from outside the Seattle area to carry out this vision. But Luderer has agreed to move back from Massachusetts to Seattle to build the company here in the Northwest.

“Lee knew my background when we met, and he said he was looking for someone who could crystallize the vision and turn the science into a commercial vehicle. That’s what I do,” Luderer says.

BioTrove, which makes a “universal test tube” to speed up the efficiency of genetic analysis, ended up as a success, even though it wasn’t able to follow through with an IPO in 2008 when the capital markets crashed. The death of the IPO meant that Luderer didn’t have enough cash there to take BioTrove’s successful life sciences tool business into a potentially broader market like diagnostics, as he intended.

But Luderer has a lot of experience in diagnostics over the course of his 30-year career. He held senior positions at Dianon Systems (now part of Lab Corp of America); and Boehringer Mannheim (now owned by Roche), as well as Corning. He helped create Siemens Diagnostics through a joint venture with Ciba Corning. Luderer also knows how to speak the language of science, with a doctorate in immunogenetics from Rutgers.

Why did he take this job? Money was important, and not in the sense you might think at first blush. He has been working for the past decade in venture-backed companies, spending most … Next Page »

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