Lebanon, NH-based Adimab, a provider of human antibody discovery technology, announced today that it has formed discovery collaborations with Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) and Danish firm Novo Nordisk. Each pharmaceutical company will use the Adimab technology to identify human antibodies against two targets. The specific targets and the dollar terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Adimab has signed previous collaboration deals with Genentech, Eli Lilly, Human Genome Sciences, Merck, Roche, Novartis, and Pfizer. Under the new agreements, both Novo Nordisk and Biogen have the option to commercialize antibodies discovered from the Adimab partnership. Adimab will receive upfront payments and preclinical milestones, and could be eligible for clinical development milestones and sales royalties.

“Our technology is simply faster, dramatically reduces the risk of development failures, and generates higher quality leads even against challenging targets; in fact many of our partners come to us with targets that have failed using traditional phage display approaches,” said Adimab CEO and co-founder Tillman Gerngross in the announcement of the deals.

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For a company that’s all about helping people wander the Web and make serendipitous discoveries, San Francisco-based StumbleUpon has been on a remarkably straight path since 2002.

That’s not to say the venture-backed company hasn’t gone through big changes. It has: from tiny Firefox add-on maker in Calgary, Alberta, to angel-funded SoMa startup, to eBay subsidiary, and finally (in 2009) back to being independent.

But throughout those changes, StumbleUpon’s technology and business model have stayed remarkably simple and consistent. Turn on the company’s browser extension or Web bar, and you’ll see a “Stumble!” button that will take you to a semi-random website or video chosen to match your interests. You have the opportunity to give each site a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, share it with others, or write a review—information that helps StumbleUpon’s collaborative filtering algorithms improve future recommendations for you and people with interests similar to yours. Every 20th stumble will take you to a sponsored site; publishers pay StumbleUpon 5 cents per visitor.

That’s it—that’s StumbleUpon’s whole business, and always has been. Of course, the company has introduced variations such as StumbleThru—a way to discover content within specific sites like PBS.org or Wikipedia—and it’s got nifty iPhone, iPad, and Android apps for stumbling on the go. But the only dramatic change at StumbleUpon, apart from its short-lived fling with eBay, has been the growth of its audience.

Today the service has 12.3 million active users who stumble about 600 million times per month. As a source of social-media traffic to sites around the Web, StumbleUpon is second only to Facebook—it accounted for 33.4 percent of all visits from social-media sites in October, compared to Facebook’s 43.8 percent, according to statistics from Web analytics firm StatCounter. StumbleUpon far outranks Twitter and social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Slashdot, or Y Combinator Hacker News. Yet for all that power, StumbleUpon is rarely mentioned in the same stories with media darlings like Facebook—which has led ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus to call the startup “the silent social media success story.”

Garrett Camp

Part of the reason for the company’s relatively low media profile may be that few journalists (at least among the ones I know) have time for undirected skimming. StumbleUpon is definitely not the tool to use if you’re in goal-directed research mode—you stumble when you’re in the mood for something new or unexpected. “It’s not a replacement for search engines,” says StumbleUpon co-founder and CEO Garrett Camp. “It’s for when you want to explore and see what’s out there.”

True, you could always turn to Google or other search engines for this purpose. If you’re daydreaming about where to go on your next vacation, for example, you could try a vague search query like “cool places to go.” But if you do that, Camp argues, there’s roughly a one-third chance that the sites you find will be blogspam, whereas every site in StumbleUpon’s database is either filtered by other users or sponsored. (Even sponsors’ sites get filtered out if enough users give them a thumbs-down.)

You can also lean on Facebook friends as a kind of proxy discovery engine, and many people do, as StatCounter’s statistics show. But link sharing isn’t what social networks were really designed for, Camp argues. “On Facebook, people share stuff and … Next Page »

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It’s a rare event for EMC, the Hopkinton, MA-based storage and information management giant that has been on an acquisition spree over the last few years, to launch a new product line in-house. But that’s what’s happening this week as EMC rolls out “SourceOne,” a new family of software products designed to help companies prepare for, and minimize the costs of, legal cases that may require them to produce corporate documents such as e-mails.

When companies get hauled into court, new federal rules put into place in 2006 mean they have to be ready to hand over stored e-mail and instant messages as part of the discovery process. If they haven’t been archiving this information systematically before a discovery request hits, it can be extremely costly to comply fast enough to meet court deadlines. Market research firm Gartner reported last year that paying lawyers to sift through e-mail files for relevant messages costs an average of $18,750 per gigabyte.

SourceOne is designed to drastically reduce those costs. It consists, at launch, of two components. The first is an e-mail management program that works with corporate e-mail server systems such as Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino to create a definitive archive of e-mails and instant messages. The system not only makes sure that all of a company’s e-mails are in one searchable location, but decreases storage needs by getting rid of duplicate data. The SourceOne e-mail management product is designed as a next-generation replacement for EMC’s EmailXtender product, which EMC inherited when it acquired Legato Systems in 2003, according to Kelly Ferguson, a senior product marketing manager at EMC.

The second component is the SourceOne Discovery Manager, which is specialized for searching large volumes of e-mail and isolating the subset of documents that must be handed over to outside counsel in legal cases. “A company might have a million messages that fit the date range or subject” for a given case, says Ferguson. “Discovery Manager will narrow that down so that only what is relevant is held in a secure ‘legal hold’ folder.” The system complies with the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), a set of e-discovery guidelines set up several years ago by a group of roughly 100 software vendors and consulting firms, including EMC.

Later this quarter, EMC plans to add a third component to the SourceOne family, the Discovery Collector, which will quickly scour a company’s larger information … Next Page »

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There’s a startup in Cambridge, MA, that’s quietly collecting gigabytes of data about the likes, dislikes, habits, and exploits of hard-core gamers. Given how lucrative console and online gaming have become—bringing in $1.3 billion for U.S. publishers in October alone, up 18 percent from the same month last year—you might guess that the startup intends to sell its insights to game companies, perhaps as a way of targeting gamers with advertisements and offers.

But that’s not the idea at all. The company, GamerDNA, was founded by and for gamers—and next week it will formally unveil the piece of software that’s making use of all of that data, a “discovery engine” designed to help gamers find new games they might like and connect with other gamers who have similar tastes.

“At GamerDNA the consumer is number one in everything we do,” says founder and CEO Jon Radoff, whom I’ve interviewed a couple of times before. “It’s all about helping you find other people like you, games you’ll enjoy, communities where you are going to feel at home, and tools for creating your identity as a gamer online.”

The discovery engine, which has been in a beta testing phase for several months, is a more sophisticated alternative to other automated game-recommendation systems, which are pretty much limited to the Amazon-style “customers who bought Final Fantasy XII also bought Kingdom Hearts 2″ genre. In other media, such as music, fans and developers are outgrowing the old-fashioned collaborative filtering technology inside most recommendation systems (including Amazon’s), and are looking for fresh information sources that cater to their unique personal tastes. That’s what GamerDNA’s system is designed to do for the console video game and online role-playing genres.

The engine works in part by breaking down user feedback into categories: setting, tone, who the user plays as, who the user plays against, and how the game works. “For some people, it’s all about the world,” explains Radoff. “For others, it’s who you get to be in that world. People want to be able to search along those particular lines, because they’re going to get a result that’s more relevant to them.”

During a visit to GamerDNA’s groovy Central Square office last week—which must be right above an Indian restaurant, since I left with a huge craving for chicken makhani—Radoff walked me through the discovery engine’s process for plumbing what users like about various game, and then serving up informed suggestions about what other games they might like.

I started by entering the title Bioshock, one of my favorite Xbox 360 games, into the GamerDNA discovery engine’s search box—the same way a music fan might enter an artist or a song name into the search box at Pandora’s personalized streaming music service. Then the system asked me, “Why do you like Bioshock?” Well, to me, the coolest thing about the game is … Next Page »

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Space exploration doesn’t captivate the public imagination like it once did—and small wonder, considering that the Space Shuttle is limited to endless circles in low-earth orbit, a mere 250 miles up. So now the small group of people who have had the privilege of looking down on Earth are doing something about it. They are going on a barnstorming tour of Washington state to whip up excitement among schoolchildren about seeking discoveries beyond this planet’s atmosphere.

The Association of Space Explorers started its 21st Planetary Congress yesterday at the Sheraton in downtown Seattle, marking only the third time the group has met in the U.S. The group includes 320 astronauts and cosmonauts from 32 countries who have been on missions in space. About 60 of them will tell stories about the wonders of space to an estimated 50,000 children in grades K-12 across the state tomorrow. To give their talks some added oomph, they won’t just talk about the Apollo glory days, but plan to grab the kids’ attention with an issue currently on a lot of minds—global climate change.

“It’s an eye-opening experience to see the parts of the atmosphere of the earth that are about the width of your little finger,” says John Fabian, the co-president of the space exploration group, and an astronaut who flew on the shuttles Challenger and Discovery in the mid-’80s. “It’s fragile, and we need to protect it.”

Fabian, 69, a resident of Port Ludlow, WA, is leading the charge. He’s one of seven Washington residents who have flown in space. The local contingent also includes shuttle astronauts Bonnie Dunbar, president of the Museum of Flight, George (Pinky) Nelson, John O. Creighton, Wendy Lawrence, and Apollo astronauts Bill Anders and Richard Gordon.

I must say they have their work cut out. My most vivid memory of the U.S. space program is the explosion of the Challenger shuttle in 1986, when I was in fifth grade. The No. 2 memory: Columbia’s disintegration over Texas five years ago. NASA’s big successes came before I was born—and well before today’s schoolkids came along—and it shows in public support. One telling statistic: the space program accounted for about 4.4 percent of the federal budget in the peak years of Apollo, a figure that’s dwindled to about 0.5 percent in the current federal budget, Dunbar says.

The public doesn’t appear very motivated to back space exploration. Even during the heat of a presidential election, neither major candidate has had a lot to say about the right future direction for the nation’s space program, Fabian says.

Still, the group has rounded up prominent sponsors for its new mission, including Boeing, Microsoft, the University of Washington, the Museum of Flight, and the Suquamish Tribe. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels appeared at the opening ceremony, welcoming the astronauts, and cracking a joke about Starbucks’ desire to open new stores on other planets (which I’m not sure all the foreign visitors really got.)

Boeing’s Jim Albaugh, the CEO of the Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems unit, stressed in his opening keynote speech that the astronauts are in a unique position to push for more resources for space exploration. NASA technologies have contributed to our ability to monitor climate change, hurricanes, artificial hearts and even new high-speed Olympic swimsuits, Albaugh says. It’s also churned out a steady of supply of some of Boeing’s best engineers, he noted. The country’s lack of interest in science and math careers has amounted to “intellectual disarmament,” he says.

“An entire generation was lost,” Albaugh says. “We need a curriculum for the information age, not the industrial age. We can’t wait for another Sputnik to galvanize government to action.”

Exactly what the space program’s priorities ought to be is another matter, which the astronauts and cosmonauts talk about a fair bit, Fabian says. The space explorers have their own views about whether to continue the shuttle program past its scheduled retirement in 2010, and some are clearly nervous about what will happen during the years we’ll have to wait for NASA’s new spacecraft program, called Constellation. “A lot of us are nervous” about the end of the shuttle program and the lack of funding for Constellation, Fabian says. I suggested that if the shuttle were extended past its retirement date it could increase the risk of another disaster. Fabian’s reply: “We always take risk in space flight.”

You get the idea pretty quickly this is an optimistic bunch of people. One of the Russian cosmonauts, Yuri Usachev, was unfazed when asked whether tensions between the U.S. and his country over hostilities in Georgia could derail future cooperation between the two countries’ space programs. “We’ve had situations in the past and we resolved them, and I think we will resolve them again,” he said through an interpreter. That sounds like the kind of hopeful attitude that just might rub off on some children across the state this week.

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Not so long ago, there was a day when biotechnology companies were built to last. They were founded and directed by pioneering scientists who were courageous, true-believers in their respective technologies. Their drive, creative spirit, and dedication to discovery positioned their companies in ways that could create multiple opportunities for success in therapeutic discovery and development. Here in Seattle, companies like Immunex, Icos and Seattle Genetics represented some of the last companies in our area formed with such intentions. Years after the founding of these companies, our industry changed dramatically after the “contraction” of 2001 where virtually all biotechs cut or eliminated discovery in favor of pushing forward late and later stage drugs (a market-induced effect as cash sources mysteriously dried up). The mantra at the time was, “we can always buy the drugs later when we need them.”

There was a also a day when your board of directors was “in it for the long haul.” I can recall George Rathmann, the co-founder of Icos, describing this attribute to a reporter, stressing its importance and necessity for success. The board of directors in those days set the example of investing and growing their companies to profitability – a painful process that can take an average of 10 to 12 years. Upon founding Spaltudaq, this is what I expected because it was all that I knew. I was confused when someone early on in the days of Spaltudaq asked me, “What’s your exit strategy?” I thought it was a trick question. “I’m still working on my entrance,” I responded. My startup carrots were given in the form of milestone achievement. Like the founders of old, my intentions were to spend the time to expand and take advantage of a versatile technology designed to create endless opportunities for creating LONG term value.

But in this decade, the way companies are started is much different. Instead of building the next Amgen, Genentech, or any other company with a long-term minded board of directors, the investors of today want the exact opposite. They want in and out at clearly defined exit points—going public or getting bought out. This is understandable given the number of investors that got burned in the 10 to 12-year plans of the past where about 1 in 10 companies succeeded. But the reflexive overreaction to those days has created a system of growing companies that today is inversely related to the spirit of discovery that got our industry here in the first place. And as a result, this plan is diametrically opposed to the intentions of most scientific founders whose vision is vectorial – and not with an “exit” in mind.

How has this happened?

Just like systems biology, perturbations in the market give rise to new emerging properties and investors react. For the most part in this decade, it has become obvious that biotech companies will give the greatest return for their investors if the company is purchased rather than the prior exit point, “going public”. Antibody companies are a classic example as they have been rapidly taken out for an average price of $500 million, whereas going public would only bring about one-third of that value.

The war on discovery:

Why are companies rapidly getting bought out and how does this affect drug discovery and growth in our industry locally? … Next Page »

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About 40 miles north of Seattle, on a rabbit farm, Johnny Stine thinks he has found a disruptive force for biotechnology. He’s building a startup, called North Coast Biologics, around the idea—without a penny from venture capitalists or more than a handful of employees.

Ridiculous, right? “I wouldn’t bet against him,” says Carl Weissman, the president of Accelerator, the Seattle biotech-startup incubator. Accelerator invested in Stine’s previous company, Spaltudaq, which has now raised $34 million in venture capital to develop antibody drugs.

To understand Stine’s new idea, a bit of background is necessary: Genetically engineered antibody drugs, which can zero in on diseased cells while sparing healthy ones, are the fastest-growing class of drugs in the pharmaceutical industry, expected to top $26 billion in global sales by 2010. South San Francisco-based Genentech (NYSE: DNA) has become the world’s most valuable biotech company on the strength of three such drugs for cancer: Avastin, Rituxan and Herceptin.

But those medicines all have origins in a technique discovered in 1975, using mouse cells. The immune system recognized them as foreign and rejected the drugs, so companies like Genentech used less mouse DNA, and incorporated more human DNA, into their antibodies.

There are problems, however, with using mice, Stine says. They don’t make antibodies against some proteins that humans consider foreign, while rabbits do, he says. Rabbit antibodies have 1,000 times higher “affinity” than mice (they bind with their target on cells much more tightly and for longer). For the biotech business, that means rabbit-generated antibodies can be given in fewer shots, and at much lower doses, saving a bundle on manufacturing costs.

And here’s the part that Stine says “blows people away.” With rabbits, he has developed a way to yield hundreds of antibody drug candidates in less than a month. By comparison, it can take several months for mouse methods to yield a single drug candidate, he says. He calls it BLAST (B-Lymphoblast Activation and Selection Technology).

Stine isn’t the only guy who thinks rabbits may be the antibody engine of the future. … Next Page »

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Stratify, which sells electronic discovery software to law firms and large corporations, has agreed to be purchased by Boston-based document storage and data protection company Iron Mountain for $158 million in cash, the two companies announced today.  Founded in 1999, Stratify is based in Mountain View, CA, and has received venture funding from Mobious Venture Capital and In-Q-Tel, the U.S. intelligence community’s strategic investment firm. John Clancy, president of Iron Mountain Digital, the company’s electronic backup division, said the acquisition will help Iron Mountain customers cope with the growing cost of document discovery necessitated by lawsuits and regulatory investigations.

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