Ion Torrent Systems, a company advised by Harvard University genomics pioneer George Church, has raised $23 million in new capital to develop what it calls on its website “groundbreaking and highly disruptive technology” and to hire people who “want to do what it takes to put a dent in the universe.”

The company, which has a location near Yale University in Guilford, CT, and one in San Francisco, has raised $23 million in equity out of a financing round that could be worth as much as $26 million, according to a regulatory filing released today.

The document doesn’t say who invested, and Ion Torrent didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But the new company is associated with some big names, including Church and Stanford University’s Ron Davis, who serve on the company’s scientific advisory board, and CEO Jonathan Rothberg, who was the founding CEO of 454 Life Sciences before that company was sold to Roche two years ago for $140 million in cash.

Ion Torrent Systems website is pretty vague about what it is really up to, although its job postings offer some clues. It says it is looking to hire molecular biologists and biochemists to do the aforementioned universe denting, and that it offers that it offers the opportunity to work with top scientists “and have a profound impact.” It is also looking to hire software developers and “evangelists” who want to “create the biotech software platform of the future and share it with the world. Build powerful tools and create a tight-knit community that will use and develop them for years to come.”

GenomeWeb speculated back in March, based on a patent application filed by Ion Torrent Systems, that it is working on new DNA sequencing technologies, although the company wouldn’t confirm that. Major players in the field—such as Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies, San Diego-based Illumina, and Roche—have been in a competitive frenzy to lower the cost of sequencing full human genomes. One Mountain View, CA-based startup, Complete Genomics, raised $45 million in venture capital earlier this year to support its new model for sequencing entire genomes for as little as $5,000 apiece or less.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The local life sciences scene was pretty quiet this week, although we heard more than usual from medical device companies.

—Paul Yager, the University of Washington’s chair of bioengineering, offered a detailed status update on a tool called the DxBox his lab has been developing the past four years in collaboration with Redmond, WA-based Micronics, Seattle-based PATH, and Bothell, WA-based ELITech Group, all with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They are seeking to develop a portable, fast, accurate, and rugged diagnostic tool to help doctors in the developing world, and while there’s been a lot of progress, it’s entered the “put up or shut up” phase, Yager says.

—Seattle-based Dendreon turned in its complete application to the FDA for clearance to start marketing its first drug, sipuleucel-T, (Provenge) in the U.S. This filing came a bit earlier than Dendreon had forecasted, but it’s also a lot later than the company originally hoped when it first asked the FDA for approval, which you can read more about in this Dendreon history piece I did back in April.

—The Institute for Systems Biology said it has commissioned Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics to sequence the full genomes of 100 individuals as part of a Huntington’s disease experiment. This experiment is said to be the largest ever to use full human genome sequences.

—We’ve seen a few medical technology companies that are seeking to repair damaged tissues without leaving behind any implantable devices, and Bothell, WA-based QuantumCor is the latest. CEO Vern Dahl described his company’s plan to do this for a form of heart failure known as mitral valve regurgitation.

—Seattle-based Calypso Medical Technologies, the maker of a device to pinpoint radiation therapy for prostate cancer to minimize side effects, formed a collaboration with Siemens Healthcare. The companies will seek to develop the technology for pancreas and lung tumors.

—We also had an insightful guest editorial from Anthony Rodriguez, a Ph.D. bioengineering student at the University of Washington and an aspiring entrepreneur. He contends that it takes a village to raise an entrepreneur, and that while a few organizations have made some effort to cultivate young entrepreneurs at the UW, the business community could be doing much more.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology and Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics said today they are planning to gather full human genome sequences from 100 individuals to study Huntington’s disease. The experiment, the largest complete human genome disease association study ever conducted, will examine samples from patients with Huntington’s, family members, and matched controls to look for genomic differences linked to how the disease presents itself and progresses. Complete Genomics, which we profiled in August, is best known for its effort to sequence entire human genomes for $5,000 apiece, far cheaper than is currently possible with other technologies.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

There were some striking highs and lows in Seattle biotech this week.

—Seattle-based Targeted Genetics (NASDAQ: TGEN), the stalwart of gene therapy, needed a lifeline if it was going to survive any longer, and it got one at the last minute this week from Cambridge, MA-based biotech giant Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ). Targeted is handing over some intellectual property on gene therapy manufacturing for $7 million—enough to keep the doors open through 2010.

—Many biotechs have been known to overhype groundbreaking new therapies, but this week the SEC charged one Seattle-area company with crossing the line into investor fraud. The SEC leveled the charges against Bothell, WA-based CellCyte Genetics, and its former executives.

—The guys who created the Sonicare toothbrush have another hit on their hands with the Clarisonic. This is a $195 device that uses sonic wave technology as a new way of skin cleansing. Clarisonic, led by entrepreneur David Giuliani, topped $40 million in sales last year, has grown to 150 employees, and is turning consistent annual profits, he says.

—Seattle-based Theraclone Sciences and its collaborators made international headlines with the discovery of two antibodies with broad ability to neutralize HIV. This groundbreaking work helped Theraclone pick up some precious funding for its research from the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.

—Seattle-based Trubion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: TRBN) struck a deal last month with Redwood City, CA-based Facet Biotech (NASDAQ: FACT). But one of the world’s biggest biotech companies, Cambridge, MA-based Biogen Idec, which was looking to take over Facet, said in a statement it didn’t like the new deal with Trubion. Biogen is now mounting a hostile takeover bid for Facet.

—Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN), the Bothell, WA-based developer of antibody drugs for cancer, said this week it achieved a milestone with Bayer Schering Pharma AG, one of the companies that has bought a license to its technology for linking antibodies to toxins that can make them more potent.

—Complete Genomics, the Mountain View, CA-based company that has a goal of sequencing entire human genomes for $5,000, said it has completed 14 full genomes for customers since March. Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners is one of the founding investors in this company.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Complete Genomics, the Mountain View, CA-based company with a goal of sequencing full human genomes for $5,000, is announcing today that it has completed 14 full human genome sequences for commercial customers like March. The company says it has a dozen customers, including Pfizer, Duke University, the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Last month, we reported on how Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners joined a syndicate that invested $45 million in Complete Genomics.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Fallout from two of the proxy battles we followed earlier this year has become more apparent on the boards at San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN) and Cambridge, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB), which has operations in San Diego. We’ve got that and more life sciences news.

—Diabetes drug maker Amylin Pharmaceuticals said its board selected newly elected director and former Novartis CEO Paulo Costa as chairman, a move that was supported by dissident investor Eastbourne Capital Management. At Biogen Idec, longtime R&D president Cecil Pickett decided to retire from the company and to relinquish his board seat. He’s the second director to resign from Biogen Idec’s board in two months.

—After merging in June with VGX Pharmaceuticals of Blue Bell, PA, shares of San Diego’s Inovio Biomedical (AMEX: INO) have climbed in value. But in talking with Inovio CEO J. Joseph Kim, Luke reported that Inovio’s good fortune has less to do with the synergies of combining with VGX than with Inovio’s announcement about its vaccine for the H1N1 “swine flu.”

—Lately, a number of San Diego’s drug development companies are focused on reviving or repurposing older drugs, including Cadence Pharmaceuticals, Somaxon Pharmaceuticals, and Victory Pharmaceuticals. But Denise found that getting a head start with compounds that already passed regulatory muster doesn’t necessarily reduce the odds of failure.

—San Diego’s Ligand Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: LGND) has agreed to acquire Neurogen in a mostly stock deal valued at $11 million, resulting in a 3 percent ownership stake for Neurogen shareholders.

—AltheaDx, a San Diego startup that provides services and technologies to streamline drug development, intends to raise $6 million in fresh venture capital, according to a recent regulatory filing. AltheaDx has raised almost $3.6 million so far.

—San Diego-based Enterprise Partners Venture Capital has renewed its commitment to Complete Genomics of Mountain View, CA. The VC firm is participating in the company’s latest $45 million venture round, along with OVP Venture Partners of Kirkland, WA. Complete Genomics intends to use the proceeds to build its own proprietary genome sequencing machines, and plans to provide its services to researchers who send in their samples.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

We’re supposed to be oh-so-laid-back here in the Northwest, so the surprise of the week came when one of the local biotech mainstays showed it was willing to step up and punch a competitor in the nose.

—Seattle-based ZymoGenetics (NASDAQ: ZGEN) showed it was willing to ruffle some feathers in its quest to gain market share for its sole marketed product, recombinant thrombin (Recothrom) for surgical bleeding. The company asked the FDA to pull a competing product from Bristol, TN-based King Pharmaceuticals (NYSE: KG) off the market, citing two deaths attributed to the product.

—Targeted Genetics (NASDAQ: TGEN) only has enough cash to operate through this month, so these could be the final days for this 17-year veteran of the Seattle biotech scene. It never cured anything, but this company is leaving a legacy, with a generation of biotechies making an impact at other local companies. I’ve pulled together a list of 60 Targeted Genetics alumni at last count. If you know of someone I’ve overlooked, please add a comment at the bottom of the story or send me an e-mail at ltimmerman@xconomy.com.

—Seattle-based Omeros is preparing to make a renewed attempt at an IPO, possibly as soon as next month, according to this story we broke on Xconomy yesterday. The IPO market is expected to open up again in the middle of September, because institutional investors like the caliber of companies in the IPO queue, and the bargain prices, says Cascadia Capital CEO Michael Butler.

—Speaking of the IPO market, Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners sees IPO potential in one of the most flush members of its portfolio, Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics. This is the company that’s on a quest to introduce full human genome sequencing for as little as $5,000. OVP joined a syndicate this week that pumped in another $45 million to help the company get its commercial sequencing facility up to full capacity.

—Seattle Genetics has been saying it’s six months ahead of schedule in enrolling patients in the pivotal trial of its drug for Hodgkin’s disease, and this week the Bothell, WA-based company (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SGEN]) made it official. It completed enrollment in the trial, and expects results in the second half of 2010.

—Seattle-based Cell Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CTIC) said the FDA has agreed to review its application to market pixantrone for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The company still hasn’t heard from the FDA on when the review should be completed, although it expects to be informed of the deadline by Sept. 4.

—AVI Biopharma, the developer of RNA-based drugs that moved its headquarters from Portland, OR to Bothell, WA, loaded up its balance sheet this week with more cash. The company (NASDAQ: AVII) ended up pulling in $34 million through selling common stock and warrants.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

It was a bit of a quiet week for Northwest deals, with some local venture dollars going to other parts of the country. Nevertheless, there was activity in gaming, music, robotics, biotech, and cleantech.

—Seattle-based Tuusso Energy completed a $2 million financing round led by Pivotal Investments, based in Portland, OR. The deal was made in partnership with Akula Energy Ventures, which will co-invest in Tuusso’s development of utility-scale solar power plants in the western U.S.

—Bellevue, WA-based Smith & Tinker said it has raised a total of $29 million in venture funding from DCM, Vulcan Capital, Foundry Group, Alsop Louie Partners, and Leo Capital Holdings. The gaming company was founded in 2007 and closed its most recent funding round last month. It is now promoting its new hybrid online/offline game, called Nanovor.

—Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners participated in a $45 million financing round for Complete Genomics, based in Mountain View, CA, as Luke reported. Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Prospect Venture Partners, Highland Capital Management, Essex Woodlands Health Ventures, and OrbiMed Advisors also contributed. It’s the fourth round of funding for Complete Genomics (for a total of $90 million-plus), which is building a commercial human genome sequencing center in Silicon Valley.

—ProFibrix, a Netherlands-based medical company with a Seattle subsidiary, raised $11 million in a Series B financing from new investor Gilde Healthcare Partners and existing investor Index Ventures. The company makes a dry powder topical tissue sealant that stops bleeding during or after surgery.

—Seattle-based Bezos Expeditions, the venture investing operation of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, has invested in Heartland Robotics, a Cambridge, MA-based startup led by MIT computer scientist Rod Brooks. Wade reported that the industrial robotics company has raised just over $7 million in an equity offering in which Bezos Expeditions participated. Other investors were not disclosed.

—Bothell, WA-based AVI Biopharma raised another $30 million through a stock offering underwritten by Jefferies & Company, as Luke reported. AVI (NASDAQ: AVII), which recently moved headquarters from Portland to Bothell, is developing experimental RNA therapies for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and Ebola virus.

—MySpace confirmed its acquisition of Seattle-based iLike, as Eric reported. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the widely rumored price was $20 million. iLike will remain in Seattle, with its 26 employees joining the MySpace team, according to Owen Van Natta, the CEO of MySpace.

—Seattle-based Cell Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CTIC), the cancer drug developer, raised $30 million by selling preferred stock and warrants to purchase shares of its common stock to a single institutional investor, as Eric reported. Cell Therapeutics will use the money as operating capital.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Complete Genomics, the Mountain View, CA-based company that says it can sequence entire human genomes for as little as $5,000, has pinned down a $45 million venture round which includes support from two of its founding backers—Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners and San Diego-based Enterprise Partners Venture Capital.

The rest of the capital is coming from Prospect Venture Partners, Highland Capital Management, and a pair of new life sciences investors with deep pockets—Essex Woodlands Health Ventures and OrbiMed Advisors. It’s the fourth round of financing for Complete Genomics since it was founded in 2006, and brings its financing total since inception to a little more than $90 million. The company plans to use the money to continue building what it says is the world’s largest commercial human genome sequencing center, in Silicon Valley.

The genome sequencing field has been on an audacious drive to get better, faster, and cheaper, and Complete Genomics has made some of the boldest predictions on how far it can push the frontiers. The company made headlines last October when it declared it intended to start sequencing full genomes this year for as cheap as $5,000, and deliver them in as little as four days. This would be an astounding leap forward in democratization of genome sequencing, which until recently has been so costly and time-consuming that only a handful of genomes have ever been completely sequenced. If the technology were made more widespread to do that, researchers say, it could shed valuable light on how small, individual variations in genetic code can lead to diseases.

Complete Genomics plans to make this possible partly through proprietary sequencing technology and with a different kind of business model. The established players—Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies, San Diego-based Illumina, and Switzerland-based Roche—make money by selling expensive equipment and supplies to researchers. Instead, Complete Genomics plans to establish its own in-house sequencing center in Silicon Valley, and ask researchers to send in their samples to get them sequenced for a fee. Complete Genomics just needed the latest round of financing to build its own proprietary machines to do the work at commercial scale.

“Our equipment is orders of magnitude better than anything the others guys make,” says Chad Waite, a managing director of OVP Venture Partners, and a founding investor in the company. “That’s the only way we can do it so cheap.”

Still, not everything has gone exactly according to plan. When I wrote about the company in October, Waite said Complete Genomics intended to start offering its commercial sequencing service starting in the second quarter of 2009, and pledged to deliver 100 full genome sequences to the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle during calendar year 2009. The company fell behind on its schedule. Now Complete Genomics won’t be able to deliver all 100 sequences to the Seattle-based Institute this calendar year, Waite says.

Chad Waite

“We’re a bit delayed because the financing took a bit longer than we expected,” Waite says. “But we have already shipped a significant number of completed sequences to commercial customers.”

Skeptics have raised doubts about whether Complete Genomics really has superior technology, whether it can do the work so cheaply, and whether the data it produces will be full of errors. The company plans to answer these doubts in future scientific publications, Waite says. He wouldn’t say specifically how many sequences have been completed, or which customers have received them, although he noted that Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology and George Church of Harvard Medical School, a pair of giants in the genomics world, are scientific advisers to the company.

If Complete Genomics can show in a major scientific paper that it can do this many complete sequences at a high degree of accuracy, it will surely make headlines around the world. The actual number of genomes that have been sequenced is disputed, but at least according to a recent story in the New York Times, only eight have ever been completely done.

The latest financing should be enough to bring the company up to a commercial scale that can meet demand for many more sequences than that, Waite says, although it may not be the last financing for Complete Genomics. Waite raised the possibility of an IPO. I laughed out loud because I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

“They’re probably bold enough to make an attempt in the not-so-distant future,” Waite says. “The question will be if it’s possible, and when.”

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

A San Diego startup has joined the stampede of medical diagnostic startups that are offering to help consumers decode their own personal genome to determine their risk for disease. Pathway Genomics, which announced its debut yesterday, joins Complete Genomics and 23andMe, which are both based in Mountain View, CA, Navigenics of Foster City, CA, and deCODE Genetics of Reykjavik, Iceland. Pathway says it can test consumers for their genetic risk to more than 90 health conditions for $250. Consumers also can order an ancestry test for $200, or both services for $350.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

There was a lot of discussion about the top trends in energy, biotech, and computing at last week’s technology summit in Seattle hosted by OVP Venture Partners. The afternoon breakout session on information technology, attended by a few dozen IT leaders, focused on the theme of “big data.” This was all about the opportunities and challenges faced by companies, research organizations, and IT departments who need to handle very large amounts of complex data, or sell software and services to do the same.

OVP managing director Mark Ashida kicked things off by talking about how managing data in the Internet cloud fits into OVP’s investment themes. “It has become much easier to link data together at a higher level, and get higher value,” Ashida said. “We’re very excited because big data and biology are converging. Lots of startups are dealing with huge amounts of data.” (By “huge amounts,” think terabytes of data per day, which is roughly the amount of information in a human genome.)

A lively panel discussion ensued, with presentations from a half-dozen tech companies from around the country that are trying to solve different parts of this problem. The list of firms—most of which are not in OVP’s investment portfolio—included Specific Media, Complete Genomics, Cloudera, Vertica Systems, and Aster Data Systems.

Then it was the godfather of cloud services’ turn to speak. Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, gave an overview of where the industry is headed, and what kinds of new problems will be solved. Vogels came to Amazon in 2004 after 10 years as a research scientist in the field of distributed computing at Cornell University, and has led Amazon’s considerable efforts in Web services, among other things.

Vogels first defined “cloud computing” as he sees it—a term that didn’t exist when his company launched Amazon Web Services in 2006. “There is a definition I actually like: cloud computing is a style of computing where you have massively scalable IT-related capabilities that are available as a service, over the Internet, to multiple customers.” He added that the storage and computing resources also …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The genomic era hasn’t yet produced a revolution in personalized medicine, but it’s coming, says Harvard University geneticist George Church. Major tech companies like Google and Microsoft are making it their business to help people keep track of their health data—side-by-side with their genome sequence data (if they’ve got it). The adoption of these technologies has been slow to date, but combined with a new policy push for electronic medical records in Washington D.C., it just might move medicine away from one-size-fits-all approach that’s been the standard for so long, Church says.

That was the most interesting idea I picked up from talking with Church after he spoke at the Xconomy Forum on biotech innovation that we held recently at Biogen Idec headquarters in Cambridge, MA. People perked up their ears when Church talked about genomics and personalized medicine, since he’s one of the world’s leading thinkers on those topics, and has also worked hard to apply his ideas at a number of emerging biotech companies. The list includes Cambridge, MA-based Knome, a provider of genomic interpretation services; South San Francisco-based LS9, a renewable fuel company; and Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics, a gene sequencing company that has brought down the price of a genome to $5,000.

Here’s an edited account of my conversation with Church after the forum:

Xconomy: You mentioned earlier that you think Google and Microsoft are doing interesting things in terms of fostering greater usage of genomic data. How is that?

George Church: It’s not really about genomics so much as it is about personally controlled health records.

X: Ok, so what kind of impact does this have on your work?

GC: To the extent that these things are a controlled vocabulary, that’s important. To the extent that it makes people feel like they own their medical records, they can then share them more easily than filling out a form or asking the physician to give them something, and then getting a bunch of photocopied sheets that need to be transcribed onto a computer. This makes it much easier for people to share it for research.

I would love to see a wave of enthusiasm where people say ‘I’m going to share my genome and my medical traits, so that we can all benefit.’ Because right now it’s largely uninterpretable. But if everybody shares, it becomes interpretable. It greatly changes the ability to do research if the genome and the traits are both in the hands of the individual, and it really costs them nothing to push a button. But they need to think very deeply …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

A 95-foot sailboat named the Sorcerer II will set sail today from San Diego’s Shelter Island Marina on what its owner, the J. Craig Venter Institute, bills as “a global ocean sampling voyage of genomic discovery.”

Yesterday afternoon, the irrepressible Venter himself was barefoot as he hosted a dockside bon voyage party while an enormous white flag emblazoned with a blue insignia of discovery flapped lazily in the boat’s rigging overhead. His guests included SAIC founder J. Robert Beyster, whose family foundation is helping to fund the two-year journey, and Greg Lucier, the chairman and CEO of Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies, which also is providing funding.

The journey represents the continuation of a cruise that Venter began in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda in 2003 as a pilot project to analyze the genes of marine organisms the boat collected. Since then, the sailboat, named after the “source-er” of the human genome (get it?), has become the centerpiece in a global expedition of expanding scope and ambition. Summing up the feelings of many well-wishers, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders told the group, “I guess every one of us wishes we could sign up and go on a big adventure.”

Beyond the romance of sailing on a scientific expedition inspired by Charles Darwin, however, the technology that Venter is using to sequence new genes is undergoing a revolution.

Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) is now developing a next-generation sequencing technique called “single molecule sequencing,” and CEO Lucier told me Venter has joined the effort as a “technology partner.”

(From left) Life Technologies CEO Greg Lucier, San Diego Foundation CEO Bob Kelly, J. Craig Venter, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders

Life Technologies, which was formed in November’s merger of Carlsbad-based Invitrogen and Applied Biosystems of Foster City, CA, is already regarded as a leader in DNA sequencing. Before the merger, Applied was best known for supplying genetic analysis machines to the Human Genome Project, a public science consortium formed to map the chain of thousands of genes in human DNA. The Carlsbad, CA-based company says its existing SOLiD instrument is expected to bring the cost of sequencing a human genome down to about $10,000 this year.

The next generation technology represents the potential to bring the cost down a lot lower than that. Without going into much detail, Lucier says single molecule sequencing offers the possibility of decoding a genome in “a very high-speed fashion by rapidly unzipping the DNA.” He says Venter and the J. Craig Venter Institute will test the new technique on samples collected during the Sorcerer II’s voyage, and that “we’ll work with them to commercialize the technology.”

Life is not alone in developing such technology. Cambridge, MA-based Helicos BioSciences says it’s also developing a single molecule …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

It’s hard to believe Leroy Hood—a guy busy enough to employ not one, but two full-time executive assistants—is turning 70 today. But it’s true.

This milestone seemed to be as good a reason as any to catch up with the biotechnology pioneer. So I stopped by his office at the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) along North Lake Union in Seattle for a 45-minute interview last month. I gathered some revealing insights into his life, and walked away thinking that while business executives his age are usually put out to pasture, Hood has more fire in the belly than ever.

“I’m doing the most ambitious things, by far, that I’ve ever done in my career. Right now,” Hood says.

For those who don’t already know, Hood is recognized around the world for leading the team at Caltech in the 1980s that invented the high-speed DNA sequencing machines that made the Human Genome Project possible. Hood has won some of the world’s highest honors for invention, like the Lemelson-MIT Prize, Kyoto Prize, and Lasker Award. He’s also co-founded 13 companies by his count in a recent essay, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, and Rosetta Inpharmatics.

To celebrate his life, and to dream of what’s still to come, about 300 friends are gathering in Seattle tonight for an invitation-only gala dinner at the W Hotel downtown. Some of biology’s biggest names, like Harvard’s George Church and Stanford’s Irving Weissman, are scheduled to be there. There will also be a 10-minute video tribute to Hood’s life, featuring interviews with his family, colleagues, and a video appearance from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who recruited Hood to the University of Washington from Caltech in 1992.

This will not be about a bunch of graybeards telling old war stories (although I do hope to hear a few good ones when I stop by there tonight.) Much of the discussion will revolve around ideas being pursued at Hood’s ISB, a nonprofit research center he co-founded in 2000 with Alan Aderem and Reudi Aebersold. It’s designed to be a hothouse for cross-disciplinary scientists trying to push the frontiers of biomedical research, largely by using computers to sort through vast amounts of genomic data. Hood has been busy forming all sorts of collaborations this year with partners who have a need for ISB’s skills.

Just in the last few weeks, ISB has formed a partnership with Swedish Neuroscience Institute in Seattle to study the genomes of brain tumor samples, and has made a deal to fully sequence more than 100 human genomes in 2009 with Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics. Hood has unveiled plans to Xconomy for a new company called Integrated Diagnostics which will spot tiny cancers in the blood while they are at their most treatable stage. And just yesterday, ISB announced another big deal, a $14 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how the immune system interacts with dangerous pathogens like H5N1 bird flu.

Like the voter in New Hampshire who famously asked Hillary Clinton about how she holds up on the campaign trail, I wanted to know how Hood does it, at age 70. …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Fall is in the air, at least one baseball team in an Xconomy city is still alive (Red Sox, of course) and biotech news is coming out full throttle every day. Isn’t it a wonderful time of year?

—Dendreon announced that its interim analysis of the 500-patient Impact trial of Provenge wasn’t the sort of home run that could lead to an instant application to the FDA, but that the prostate cancer drug is certainly within hailing distance of its goal of prolonging lives when the final analysis is due in mid-2009. The stock shot up 33 percent on the day of the news, but has since given back most of the gains, closing yesterday at $5.60.

—The Institute for Systems Biology formed a partnership with Complete Genomics, a Mountain View, CA-based company that plans to usher in the era of the $5,000 service for sequencing an entire human genome. The ISB’s scientists plan to sequence genomes from 100 individuals in 2009, and 2,000 the following year. OVP Venture Partners’ Chad Waite gave us the skinny on how this approach differs from the other genomics companies out there.

—Eli Lilly made some effort to patch up relations with the Seattle biotech community this week, by holding a press conference about its support for a tuberculosis drug discovery effort going on at the Infectious Disease Research Institute here in Seattle. Lilly laid off more than 300 people at Icos when it bought that company almost two years ago, but it donated some expensive equipment and put $6 million in cash into an effort to use the equipment for developing new TB drugs.

—Another remnant of the former Icos, Calistoga Pharmaceuticals, reported this week that it has hired a Biogen Idec commercial veteran as its founding CEO. Calistoga, which got its original intellectual property from Icos, has a blood cancer clinical trial ongoing, and CEO Carol Gallagher is working on a game plan for how to make sure its lead drug lives up to its potential.

—From the medical device community, good news from Spiration. The Redmond, WA-based maker of a minimally-invasive device for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease said its partner, Tokyo-based Olympus, will begin selling its system in Europe. Trials still need to wrap up here in the U.S. before it can win FDA approval, but this could bring in a little cash in the meantime to keep things moving along.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Heading into the baseball battles of October (go Red Sox), the dealflow is really picking up. In the past week, the Northwest has seen deals in gaming, mobile software, healthcare, genomics, and biofuels.

—Oberon Media, a maker of casual games and gaming platforms that is based in New York but has a publishing arm in Seattle (I-Play), raised $20 million from Infinity Equity, based in Hong Kong. The deal is seen as an effort by Oberon to break into the Chinese market, and a way for Infinity to get into gaming.

—The Institute for Systems Biology, based in Seattle, has formed a partnership with Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics to sequence the genomes of 100 people next year, and another 2,000 people in 2010. As Luke reports today, Complete Genomics has a different approach to the market, offering genome sequencing as a service.

—TriQuint Semiconductor, based in Hillsboro, OR, won a 21-month, $4.5 million contract from the Office of Naval Research to make integrated circuits and amplifiers for radar and communications applications.

—Imperium Renewables, the struggling Seattle producer of biodiesel fuel, received a new investment from its existing investors to help settle its debts with Société Générale and other creditors. Imperium hopes the recapitalization (the amount and sources were undisclosed) will help it resume operations as soon as possible.

—Dexterra, a Bothell, WA-based maker of mobile management software, closed a $21.5 million round led by New Enterprise Associates. Previous investors Canaan Partners, Intel Capital, Mesirow Financial, Motorola Ventures, and Sigma Partners also participated.

—NeuroCom International, a Clackamas, OR-based maker of tools for assessing and rehabilitating patients with balance and mobility disorders, is being acquired by Natus Medical, based in San Carlos, CA. The deal is worth $18 million.

—Issaquah, WA-based Digini, a maker of development tools for Windows and Xbox games, closed a round of funding from California Technology Ventures. The amount was not disclosed.

—Bezos Expeditions, the venture organization of Jeff Bezos from Amazon.com, has made a Series A investment in ZocDoc, a New York startup that helps people find doctors and book appointments online. The amount of the investment was not disclosed. Last month, ZocDoc announced it had raised $3.3 million from the likes of Khosla Ventures.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

It’s getting cheaper by the day to sequence the entire string of 6 billion chemical units of DNA that make up an individual human being. Yesterday, Complete Genomics of Mountain View, CA unveiled plans for what amounts to a democratization of genomics. It will offer a service to sequence full human genomes for just $5,000, beginning in the second quarter of 2009.

At Xconomy, we normally focus on companies based in Boston, Seattle, and San Diego, but we couldn’t resist digging into this one, because it has multiple connections to our network cities. Complete Genomics raised its seed capital in 2006 from OVP Venture Partners in Kirkland, WA, and Enterprise Partners in San Diego. It also counts a pair of Xconomists, Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and George Church of Harvard Medical School, as scientific advisers.

So we tracked down OVP managing director (and Xconomist) Chad Waite to find out why he decided to invest in this technology versus all the other sophisticated instruments made by companies like Applied Biosystems, Illumina, 454 Life Sciences, and Helicos Biosciences. (He proudly pointed out that his Harvard Business School connection to CEO Clifford Reid gave him the inside track on this investment, and he invited Drew Senyei of Enterprise in on the action, but more on that later.)

It turns out Waite was sold on Complete Genomics because it has a fundamentally different vision of the market from its rivals. Instead of trying to sell a machine to pharmaceutical companies and top academic labs for hundreds of thousands of dollars, Complete Genomics plans to keep the work in-house on its own proprietary machines and offer sequencing as a service. The company plans to open 10 sequencing centers around the world over the next five years, with the capacity to sequence 1 million complete human genomes. It will have enough bandwidth to sequence an entire genome for $5,000 in about four days, compared with $100,000 and six weeks to six months on currently marketed instruments, Waite says.

“We’re disruptive on technology, and on the business model,” Waite continues. “We’re not going out and trying to sell million-dollar machines. Is there really a competitive advantage for a pharmaceutical company to have the machine? The advantage for them is in the data. They want the data.”

So how might that be really useful for companies or academics? At that high speed and low price, it’s conceivable that drug companies will want to sequence every patient who enters a clinical trial to provide clues as to why some patients respond differently than others to experimental drugs, Waite says. Or, they might want to run big experiments that compare the genomes of 1,000 patients with diabetes to 1,000 other people as healthy controls, to look for tiny genetic variations that might offer clues. They could look at a bunch of prostate cancer tumor samples to try to find genomic markers that explain why the disease spreads more quickly in some people than in others, Waite says.

These concepts are truly mind-boggling when you look at the recent history of …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

The Institute for Systems Biology and Complete Genomics, a Mountain View, CA-based maker of DNA sequencing technology, have formed a partnership to sequence the genomes of 100 people in 2009 and another 2,000 in 2010. Complete Genomics, founded in 2006, said in a separate release that it will be the first company to sequence complete human genomes for less than $1,000 in material costs.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share: