The past week in tech headlines was dominated by our leading alpha geek: Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates. Gates stopped by the University of Washington to give a short talk about the future of computing, and how he sees cheap, powerful storage and processing revolutionizing everything from robots to disease eradication (the part about malaria went on for kind of a long time).

But the most interesting part of the evening was surely the Q&A portion, in which Gates sat on stage with the UW’s Ed Lazowska to field questions on just about anything from students in the crowd. Gates seemed to rather enjoy the give-and-take, even when a young woman asked him how she could get rich.

As you’ve probably read by now, Gates marveled at how strange it was to be a billionaire, and said that once you get past a several million-dollar fortune, it’s really just more responsibility about how to give it away. “Once you get much beyond that—you know, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger,” Gates said to laughs. The UW now has the whole lecture up online.

Elsewhere around town:

—PopCap Games mobile chief Giordano Contestabile reminisced about the inglorious past of mobile gaming, when all games on cell phones were basically hokey ways to get people to send premium-priced text messages. As Contestabile said on Twitter, “When mobile games were crap.” Now it’s quite a different story, of course, and Contestabile is one of the people in the driver’s seat pushing the boundaries of how games will evolve.

He’s also joining us Dec. 6 for Mobile Madness Northwest, our half-day forum presented with the Washington Technology Industry Association at F5 Networks in Seattle. Early Bird pricing only lasts until Nov. 15, so get your tickets now.

—Online real-estate brokerage Redfin added $14.8 million in venture funding, with designs on expanding the business into new markets around the U.S.. The round was led by new investor Globespan Capital Partners.

—Speaking of venture deals, we looked at September’s fundraising for Washington-based companies in technology, biotech, and clean energy and found a total of $32 million had been raised, according to data from our partners at research firm CB Insights. Medical companies led the pack, with $12 million for RF Surgical Systems and $10.6 million for Theraclone Sciences.

—More turmoil at Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR), which saw board member Benjamin Wolff resign. Wolff is a close associate of Clearwire founder and former chairman Craig McCaw. The Kirkland-based wireless provider has been on a roller coaster ride lately—mostly down—as it and majority shareholder Sprint figure out how to navigate Clearwire’s expensive changeover to a new type of broadband technology.

—The state of Washington has been cutting millions from education budgets in the past several years as its treasury deals with low tax revenue. So there was one spot of good news for students shouldering larger tuition burdens: The rollout of open-source course materials for the most common community and technical college courses, called the Open Course Library. The project is jointly paid for by the state and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Tech entrepreneurs are pushing pretty hard these days to improve education, from the Khan Academy to Codecademy to Altius Education to education-focused Startup Weekend events. And, of course, there’s the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has made education its primary domestic policy initiative—something Bill Gates discussed in his recent wide-ranging lecture and Q&A session at the University of Washington.

Washington state’s two-year colleges are putting some of those ideas into practice with the roll-out of a new digital system called the Open Course Library. The coursework was developed with instructors to give students a low-cost alternative to expensive textbooks for the most common introductory courses, and is available to other schools on a Creative Commons license. The state legislature kicked in $1.2 million for the project a few years ago, and that was supplemented with a $750,000 grant from the Gates Foundation.

Eventually, the project plans cover the course materials for 81 classes. The courses themselves are all put together slightly differently—here’s an example chapter from a free introduction to calculus text, for example. Others are offered as downloadable e-books and tools from traditional publishers or other providers, but the price per text is capped at $30. Other courses link to wiki-based data from other colleges, or even Khan Academy videos to supplement the coursework.

The websites for the open-source coursework aren’t exactly state of the art, but the heart of the idea is certainly there. State Rep. Reuven Carlyle, a Seattle Democrat and wireless industry veteran who spurred the project along, says K-12 textbooks may be next on the target list for an open-source, lower-cost makeover.

With the amount of education spending that’s been chopped by the state legislature in recent years, finding an innovative way to save money is probably welcome all around. Well, except in the offices of textbook publishers.

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As the Web becomes more social, will search start to whither as a primary means for consumers to access the Internet? That’s been suggested by some folks in the tech world, as the rise of Facebook begins to create a dynamic layer on top of the “regular” Web that isn’t fully reachable by Google’s crawlers.

To get an update on the thinking behind this debate, we convened a couple of Seattle entrepreneurs who spend a lot of time researching and discussing the consumer Web: Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz and Ben Elowitz of Wetpaint. The result was a long, lively back-and-forth that generated some acquisition advice for Google, speculation about Facebook’s search deal with Bing, and interesting questions about which behemoth is scarier as the main filter of our information.

There was plenty more good stuff in the past week or so on the Xconomy Seattle tech beat, even with a short holiday week:

—Bob Buderi checked in from Boston with an exclusive update to Polaris Ventures closing down its Seattle office. Turns out the change is part of a broader move to expand in California, with general partner Brian Chee relocating to head up a coming-soon office in Palo Alto. Polaris co-founder Steve Arnold plans to continue working from Seattle, the firm said.

—I took a look at the story behind the HackStars program, a new-to-Seattle feature of the TechStars startup accelerator. HackStars recruits a pool of people who can code, design, and hack their way through projects that TechStars companies need some help with. If it works out, they might even wind up with a job—or a co-founder’s stake. That’s what happened with Sam Herbert of ADstruc, who unwittingly helped start HackStars by getting rejected from the main program and then brought on as a bit of extra technical help.

—Trinity Ventures led a $10 million investment in Act-On Software, an online marketing company based in Beaveron, OR. Previous investors Voyager Capital and U.S. Venture Partners were back for this round, which was based on a valuation of about $40 million—”a substantial step up,” according to founder and CEO Raghu Raghavan. It’s a nice Northwest success story: Raghavan started Act-On after leaving his previous company, Responsys, which relocated to California. He’s been vocal about staying in Oregon, saying there’s no reason to think a tech startup has to move south to succeed.

—Just before Groupon filed its IPO paperwork, a couple of Seattle players in the crowded online deals sector announced they were combining forces. We’re talking about Tippr acquiring DealPop, which was formerly part of WhitePages.com. Tippr’s strategy involves going heavily after online publishers, rather than working directly with merchants, as Groupon has done. Not to be outdone, Groupon came back the same day with some pre-IPO news: It’s partnering with Bellevue, WA’s Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) to provide travel discounts.

—Luke took a trip over to the new Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation headquarters for a preview tour, which included a speech from BillG, a smattering of local notables, and—seriously—a gospel choir singing “Lean on Me.” Oh, and amazing architecture, which Luke captured with some great snaps from his Windows Phone 7 device (coincidence).

—Briefly: Intellectual Ventures signed up a two-way licensing deal with Boise, ID-based Micron Technology; online property-tax challenge service ValueAppeal added $1.6 million in financing; and Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) continued its makeover by shifting about 700 customer service workers to a vendor.

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Microsoft Research is having its annual TechFest get-together across the lake, including some pretty cool-looking demonstrations and discussion of what Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) gets for its $9 billion in annual R&D spending. Of course, one of the biggest storylines out of the research shop lately is the popularity of the Kinect motion-sensor for more than just Xbox 360 games.

The Seattle Times’ Sharon Chan—one of the few reporters allowed to cover the Fest this year—reports that senior vice president Rick Rashid says “Kinect is already a multibillion-dollar business.” I guess I’d like to see the income statement on that one. There’s more on the Microsoft Research site.

A few other items to note in the Seattle-area tech scene:

—Seattle-based HomePipe Networks announced $1.1 million in financing led by Mark DiSalle of Scout Analytics. The other investors weren’t named. HomePipe makes networking software that enables users to access content on their home computer anywhere using their mobile phone. The app is available free or for $24 per year at a premium level.

—A new nonprofit aimed at boosting science, technology, engineering, and math education in Washington surfaced this week by passing out $2.4 million in grants to people working in those arenas around the state. Washington STEM said it’s already raised $20 million with a goal of collecting $100 million over 10 years. Big names from the Seattle area are among the contributors, including Microsoft, Boeing (NYSE: BA), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and McKinstry.

—Seattle-based Ookla is showing off a revamped Speedtest site, blending some social and game-type functions with the existing technology for checking how speedy your high-speed Internet really is. The new features include something called Speed Wave, which lets several people sign into a group for longer-range connection analyses and win little badges and other social network-enabled trinkets for participating. These guys made bigger news recently with their comparison test of iPhone speeds on AT&T vs. Verizon.

—Nominations are open for the second year of Pivotal Leaders, a network of community-nominated entrepreneurs and executives who will be voted the most promising candidates to lead new companies in cleantech. The effort is organized by Pivotal Investments, a Portland, OR-based early stage venture fund focused on cleantech and sustainability. Last year’s group of 32 leaders included folks from established companies like McKinstry and Microsoft, but also entrepreneurs.

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Susannah Malarkey, the executive director of the Technology Alliance in Seattle, spent three days earlier this month in Boston with a group of Seattle civic and business leaders as part of the 2010 Intercity Study Mission. These annual trips, organized by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce since 1983, enable Seattle business leaders to pick the brains of civic leaders from around the country and bring the lessons back home to the Northwest on venture capital, urban planning, and education.

In the 27 years the program has been around, this was the third time Seattle representatives have looked to Boston for tips on how to foster community, growth, and local industry. There’s a reason why we keep coming back. Boston has a comparable population to Seattle with just half the landmass and a long history as a standout cluster for academia, innovation, and startup culture. Boston has a lot to offer Seattleites as we are planning for our own city’s future, Malarkey says. I dropped by Susannah’s office last week and spoke with her about the trip. Here are a few of the most important lessons she took away from our sister city to the east:

Reconnecting to the Waterfront

In 2006 Boston completed the most expensive highway tunneling project in the country, the “Big Dig,” which rerouted the city’s Central Artery, Interstate 93, through downtown and away from the waterfront. The project, which went billions of dollars over budget and six years past its initial completion deadline, is often compared to the proposed deep-bored tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct along Seattle’s waterfront. And though the two projects are  different, according to Malarkey, there is much to be learned from both the Big Dig and its aftermath. What were the biggest hiccups in the project? How do we ensure that we don’t make the same mistakes? What can we do once the project is completed to help our city reconnect to its waterfront?

Former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation Fred Salvucci, often referred to as the “godfather” of the project, told the visitors from Seattle about the major road bumps Boston experienced during the Big Dig. On the top of the list: inconsistent management. He emphasized the need to have a clear vision, measurable objectives, and strong and consistent leadership to successfully complete a project of this size, Malarkey says.

“It was an enormous project, they had switched management, and it was so huge and so complex that not having consistent management was really key to not having it finish on time,” Malarkey says.

In Boston’s case, finishing the project was only the first part of the equation. The second part was reviving the city’s waterfront, even when little resources remained. Instead of using taxpayer dollars, … Next Page »

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In remote villages in Africa, clinics are struggling to deliver timely blood tests to help doctors determine the best way to treat HIV patients. But Bill Rodriguez, a Harvard-trained physician, through his new startup Daktari Diagnostics, is working on a handheld device that could someday perform blood tests for HIV patients virtually anywhere within a few minutes.

Cambridge, MA-based Daktari has generated buzz for its technology and social cause from a bevy of Boston-area backers that have invested a total of $2.8 million to complete its Series A round of financing, says Rodriguez, the co-founder and CEO of startup told me in his first in-depth interview about the company. (We wrote a short story last week that the one-year-old startup had raised $2.5 million, based on regulatory filings, but the firm now says it has raised more money than that.) The Boston-area investors in the startup—a few of which we reported last week—include Norwich Ventures, Partners Innovation Fund, Hub Angels, Mass Medical Angels, Launchpad Venture Group, and Boston Harbor Angels.

Daktari (a Swahili word for doctor or caregiver) has a goal with of producing both social and economic benefits. Rodriguez, who was previously chief medical officer of the William J. Clinton Foundation, said that millions of HIV-positive patients in the world aren’t receiving regular tests that measure the number of blood cells with CD4 markers on their surface—a key indicator of a patient’s immune system strength that can inform a doctor’s decisions on how aggressively to treat HIV. Part of the problem is that the blood tests to get CD4 counts typically must be performed by expensive, bulky instruments called flow cytometers. It’s also difficult to obtain and handle the blood samples because many HIV patients live in remote areas.. Daktari may have a solution: a handheld diagnostic device designed to for use in any setting, without having to manually transfer blood with pipettes or other manual steps.

Some serious players in diagnostics and innovation circles are affiliated with Daktari, including Stan … Next Page »

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Seattle has become a major global health hub over the last decade, thanks in no small part to having the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world leaders in funding for global health research, in our own backyard. Now, an emerging and related discipline is also finding an increasing number of connections here—global technology. Researchers around Seattle (and elsewhere) are thinking outside the box to come up with innovative, inexpensive technologies that can be easily implemented in developing countries to improve quality of life there.

“Technology is naturally mixing with global health as there is much low-hanging fruit where a little tech can make a big difference,” Gaetano Borriello, a University of Washington computer science professor, said in an e-mail. “Seattle is a hub for both, so it is a natural place for this new development to be happening.”

This past weekend, the third annual IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development took place at Carnegie Mellon University’s Qatar campus in Doha. Seattle-area researchers, specifically from the UW, made quite a showing at the meeting. Several Microsoft projects were presented too, and Bill Gates showed up to give the keynote talk.

Here are some global technology projects underway at the UW and presented at the meeting:

—*bus (or Starbus), a transportation tracking system developed by Borriello and UW technical communication professor Beth Kolko. *bus relies on only GPS and SMS technologies to track any vehicle by cell phone, as long as that vehicle has been equipped with a simple tracking device (*box). The researchers tested the system in Seattle this year and plan to start tests in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, soon. In areas with limited transportation and no means of communicating their schedules, a system like this would allow residents of those areas to get the most use possible out of buses and trains.

—MultiMath, a system that uses multiple numerical keyboards to allow students to share a computer in a classroom situation, led by UW computer scientist Richard Anderson and the UW Center for Information and Society’s Joyojeet Pal. The technology would allow a single computer to go farther in resource-poor settings, and allows children more interaction with each other to boot.

—AndroidRosa and JavaRosa, two open-source applications for data sharing on cell phones in the developing world, created by Borriello and his colleagues. The applications are part of the larger open-source cell phone-based data collection project OpenRosa. The idea behind Borriello’s applications is that sharing information such as medical records or tracking disease spread using paper records is slow, but establishing traditional online sharing systems is unrealistic in poor settings where computers, Internet service, and even electricity may be hard to come by. Cell phone usage is common even in poor countries, presenting an intriguing and efficient alternative to paper records.

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Even the chief executive of the world’s largest philanthropic institution has a little time for his boyhood passions. Jeff Raikes, the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, grew up on a ranch near Omaha, NE, rooting for the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, a national college football powerhouse. Raikes made his fortune at Microsoft, and since June 2007, he has been an investor in a Lincoln, NE, software startup called Agile Sports, which helps coaches and players communicate, prepare, and scout talent and opposing players.

It’s one way Raikes is giving back to his home state. Agile Sports’ customers include the Cornhuskers (its first big-name client, through a connection with former Husker coach Bill Callahan), the New York Jets of the National Football League, and nearly 90 high school teams. The company is focused on football and basketball, and is looking at Major League Baseball as well.

But first, some more background on the Seattle connection. Raikes joined Microsoft in 1981 and rose through the ranks of the company’s top brass to become president of the Microsoft Business Division; he is perhaps best known for running the Microsoft Office division, which did sales of more than $9 billion a year under his watch. Last September, Raikes left Microsoft to focus on his new role at the Gates Foundation.

Xconomy recently had a chance to learn more about his football side. “Jeff Raikes helped form the vision of Agile, and he’s a member of our board,” says David Graff, Agile’s co-founder and CEO. “Raikes’s passions are technology and Husker football.”

So what’s the idea behind the company? Sports coaches (especially in football) capture huge amounts of video of games and practices from many different angles. In game preparations, they break down each play, and each player, annotating the videos with the game situation, what to watch for, and other notes. Players and coaches have to study these breakdowns at the team’s practice facility, or else burn DVDs and watch them at home. It can be a clunky and tedious process.

Agile’s software, called Hudl (pronounced “huddle”) and Hudl Pro, lets coaches put these videos online in a secure and interactive Web environment that resembles a video game. Coaches and players can access the videos on their laptop wherever they are, draw on the screen with their cursor or stylus to mark players and patterns, record voiceovers, and so forth. The company uses Microsoft technologies like Windows Presentation Framework to develop the interface and make the software compatible with Xbox 360 controllers, as well as Silverlight to deliver video over the Web. “Microsoft has been a supporter and advocate,” says Graff. “They see their technologies in the freshest stuff being deployed and used publicly.”

In an e-mail interview, I asked Raikes about his involvement with Agile Sports, the future of Web-based sports technologies, and the football prowess of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, among other topics. Here are Raikes’s responses from Nairobi:

Xconomy: Can you describe the genesis of Agile Sports and your involvement with the company?

Jeff Raikes: In the late 1990s, I proposed the ideas for what became the Raikes School [of Computer Science and Management] at the University of Nebraska. One of the key principles was for the students to get involved in “design studio projects” that would give them real-world experience; work on projects at the intersection of computer science and business with real business customers. I had always wanted at least one of these projects oriented to helping the Cornhusker football team.

A few years ago, with some encouragement from members of the athletic department, … Next Page »

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Elias Zerhouni, the former director of the National Institutes of Health during the Bush Administration, has joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a senior fellow. Zerhouni, a world-class radiology researcher, will advise the foundation on its Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative, in which the foundation works to identify the top scientific challenges in global health. One aspect of the effort is the foundation’s support for far-out ideas that are still too unproven to win traditional federal NIH grants.

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Peter Piot, the founding executive director of the Joint United Nations’ Program on HIV/AIDS, has joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a senior fellow. He will advise the foundation on global health strategy, including the fight against HIV and other infectious diseases. The appointment will last only until May, when Piot will start a global health program at Imperial College in London, according to the Seattle P-I’s Tom Paulson.

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Heading into the holidays, the deals have slowed down a bit. But there was still a trickle of activity over the past week in biotech, renewable energy, and software.

—Seattle-based Jobster’s co-founder and ex-CEO, Jason Goldberg, sold his New York startup, Socialmedian, to Hamburg, Germany-based Xing for $7.5 million. Socialmedian’s news-filtering service fits well with Xing, which is a social site focused on business and professional networking.

—3Tier Group, a Seattle company that helps developers and financiers spot the best places in the world to build renewable energy facilities, raised $10 million in venture capital, as Luke reported. The funding round, first reported by TechFlash, was led by UK-based Good Energies.

—Luke also reported that Seattle-based Oncothyreon (NASDAQ: ONTY) sold the manufacturing rights to its cancer vaccine Stimuvax to Germany-based Merck KgaA for $13 million. Merck will take over Oncothyreon’s drug manufacturing plant in Edmonton, Canada. It’s part of a series of strategic moves made by Oncothyreon to conserve cash.

—The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded a three-year, $7 million grant to the Seattle-based Infectious Disease Research Institute to treat patients with visceral leishmaniasis, a parasite infection, in Africa.

—We announced a deal of our own at Xconomy, which means stories like the one you’re reading right now will reach an even wider audience. Xconomy formed a syndication partnership with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that will allow both organizations to share online content, and gives the P-I the right to publish some of our content in newsprint.

—Seattle biotech firm VLST formed a major partnership with Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk, as Luke reported. The deal allows Novo to develop drugs against cell targets VLST has discovered for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. It will pump $12 million into VLST from upfront fees and equity investment, plus undisclosed future milestone payments and royalties.

—Seattle’s Movaya and PressOK Entertainment are teaming up to develop games for mobile devices. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. PressOK was formed in September by the merger of the mobile-gaming companies Reaxion and Mobliss.

—Seattle-based Pelago has partnered with Norwich, VT-based Maponics to provide Whrrl, a location-aware mobile networking service, to customers in more than 50,000 neighborhoods in 2,000 cities across the U.S. and Canada. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

—Not a deal per se, but some priceless anecdotes from three of Seattle’s most respected dealmakers. Luke attended a fireside chat with life sciences execs Bruce Carter, Bruce Montgomery, and Stewart Parker, who talked about (among other things) the understated role of luck in innovation and dealmaking.

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a three-year, $7 million grant to the Seattle-based Infectious Disease Research Institute to develop improved ways to diagnose and care for patients in Africa infected with visceral leishmaniasis. The infection, caused by a parasite, affects about 500,000 people each year and is deadly in about one in 10 cases when it isn’t detected early enough, IDRI said in a statement.

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropy, said today it is giving $1.4 million to provide emergency food supplies to hungry people in the Pacific Northwest. The money is going to Food Lifeline, Oregon Food Bank, and Second Harvest Food Bank of the Inland Northwest. The money will be able to provide 18 million meals to people in need, the foundation said. Local food banks say thousands of families are asking for food in a time of crisis, the foundation said.

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is planning to dole out less grant money in 2009 than anticipated, in response to the global financial crisis. The Seattle-based foundation, the world’s largest philanthropy devoted to global health, is still planning to spend 10 percent more on grants next year than in 2008, although that’s less than what it had previously budgeted, said CEO Jeff Raikes, in a letter on the foundation’s web site dated Nov. 21. The foundation’s grantmaking has been growing rapidly since 2006, when it received the first annual installment of stock donations from investor Warren Buffett. The donations were worth $1.6 billion in 2006, $1.76 billion the following year, and $1.8 billion this past July, according to the foundation’s web site.

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest charitable organization, said it is accepting grant proposals for the second round of its five-year, $100 million initiative to try unconventional approaches against global health problems. The foundation will accept proposals for six topics, which include: new vaccines for HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis, new approaches to avoid drug resistance, and alternatives to traditional vaccines. Proposals will be accepted online through Nov. 2. The first round generated 4,000 applications from scientists in 100 countries, the foundation said.

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Duffy Cox and his dad, James, had a great idea that went nowhere for years. Their quest to develop Vitamin-A fortified rice, which could put a dent in global malnutrition, started in 1985. That’s when the father-and-son inventors at Bellingham, WA-based Bon Dente International, a research and development firm, were asked to give it a shot by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Vitamin A deficiencies are thought to kill 2-3 million children a year in developing countries, so getting it into a staple food like rice is a big deal. For years, though, food scientists considered such rice fortification a big challenge, because Vitamin A has a short shelf-life and is susceptible to heat and humidity common in warehouses of the developing world, Duffy Cox says.

After five years of experiments, and the assistance of a researcher at Iowa State University, they nailed it. Through a process that’s like making pasta—running rice through a type of noodle-making machine—they were able to extend the shelf life of Vitamin A in rice from one week to about six months, and withstand hot and humid storage conditions, Cox says. The patent issued in the mid-1990s, and the family entrepreneurs then traveled to Asia and Latin America, trying to strike deals with local partners and distributors to get it out into the marketplace. They trademarked it Ultra Rice.

Then the whole thing fell flat. It could have been language barriers, cultural barriers, resistance from competitors, all of the above, or something else, Cox says. “We’re not marketers. We like to develop a unique concept and let somebody else take over,” he says.

Cox, whose father has since died, ended up donating the Ultra Rice patent to PATH. The Seattle-based nonprofit, backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, specializes in nurturing technologies to reduce health disparities in the developing world. After a couple of false starts of its own, PATH has found partners to help it get Ultra Rice into commercial use by the end of this year, says Dipika Matthias, the project director for PATH. The organization now has a $6 million grant from the Gates Foundation to expand the use of Ultra Rice in its first four markets Brazil, Colombia, China, India. “This is a product now poised for success, on the brink of commercial production,” Matthias says. “We’re going to see an impact from this within five years.”

The technology has evolved a bit at PATH. It now fortifies rice to carry extra iron, to counteract deficiencies that sap the energy and learning capacity of a billion people. Other varieties can make rice with folic acid to prevent birth defects, as well as zinc deficiency, which weakens the immune system of children.

Here’s how it works. A pasta maker in a given country makes some minor equipment modifications … Next Page »

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Genocea Biosciences is aiming to upstage the best-selling vaccine ever. The Cambridge, MA-based biotech startup, through funding from Seattle-based PATH, a nonprofit that supports global health technologies, has started pursuing a next-generation pneumococcus vaccine that may offer broader protection to infants in the developing world than Prevnar, a vaccine made by drug giant Wyeth, and do it at a fraction of the price.

Prevnar has become a runaway success in the U.S. and other wealthy countries, generating $2.4 billion in worldwide sales in 2007. It works by building up infants’ immune defenses against pneumococcal bacteria, which can cause deadly pneumonia and meningitis infections. Yet like a lot of health innovations, the benefits aren’t spread evenly. The vaccine costs health agencies $66 a dose in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control. Even though Wyeth says the vaccine is available in 86 countries, an estimated 2 million children worldwide still die of pneumonia every year, with most cases caused by the pneumococcal bacteria.

PATH, through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, committed $1 million in May to Genocea for a three-year program to discover new antigens, substances that trigger an immune response, that could be incorporated into a new vaccine, says Eileen Quinn, a PATH spokeswoman. Richard Malley of Children’s Hospital Boston is also part of the team. Part of the problem they’ll face is that Prevnar is designed to be effective against only seven of the 80 different types of pneumococcus bacteria, the most common types in the U.S., leaving plenty of room for broader coverage, Quinn says. The long-term goal on price, so developing countries can buy it on their own, on a sustainable basis? About $3.50 a dose, she says.

“The goal here is to save lives,” Quinn says. “For vaccines to ultimately make a difference, they need to be at or below that price, and offer expanded protection.”

The alliance with Genocea is part of a broader strategy by PATH and GAVI, formerly known as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, to get more vaccines used in the developing world, Quinn says. On pneumococcal vaccines, PATH is also supporting work by Intercell, a biotech in Vienna, Austria, that’s working on what is known as a common-protein vaccine, or sub-unit protein found in multiple types of pneumococcal bacteria and can alert the immune system. Such a vaccine could be cheaper and easier to manufacture than Prevnar, Quinn says.

Genocea’s co-founder and president, Robert Paull, couldn’t be reached yesterday, although he said in a statement last month that “Genocea believes it is important to address both the needs of the developed world and geographies where poverty, socio-economic challenges and disease prevalence require public/private partnerships to bring innovative approaches to help those most in need.”

Some of the people at Genocea have first-hand experience with the struggle to get vaccines into the developing world. George Siber, the company’s executive chairman, previously was chief scientific officer of Wyeth’s vaccines division, where he oversaw development of multiple childhood vaccines, including Prevnar. Abel Mahmoud, the former president of Merck Vaccines, is also on Genocea’s scientific advisory board. We’ll see in a few years if their experience and contacts can help usher in the cheap and effective pneumococcus vaccine that PATH and the Gates Foundation want to see.

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A million people in India are getting clean, cheap drinking water every day because of technology from a little company in Bothell, WA, that few people in the Northwest have ever heard of.

The company, Halosource, has started getting traction in the Indian market this year with its technology that makes water safe to drink. About 200,000 water purifiers have been sold there that use the company’s proprietary method for killing bacteria and viruses, through a partnership with Eureka Forbes, according to Halosource CEO John Kaestle.

The problem of contaminated drinking water—and the business opportunity for anyone who can solve it—is enormous. About one-fifth of people on Earth lack access to safe drinking water, a condition that led to the death of 2.2 million people in 2004, according to the United Nations. The global market for consumer products to purify the basic human necessity is worth an estimated $18 billion, according to market research firm Frost & Sullivan. Tackling that market is no small goal for a venture-backed company with about 100 employees.

To get its products adopted in the market, Halosource has formed partnerships with local companies in India, China, and Brazil. The technology can come in various formats, but has gained popularity in India with a simple product that the emerging middle class can afford.

“This is a whole new product class addressing a need for a whole new consumer class,” says Andrew Clews, Halosource’s vice president for marketing and business development, in an interview at the company’s office.

The problem with bad drinking water isn’t new. Boiling water effectively kills bugs, but is time-consuming and expensive. Carbon-filtering systems (think Brita) filter out dirt, and sediment particles, but can’t kill bacteria and viruses that make people ill with diarrhea, dysentery, and numerous other nasty ailments. Chlorine tablets work, but make water taste bad.

Newer technologies like reverse osmosis or ultraviolet lights in water tanks are becoming available in China and India, Clews says, but they can cost $200 to $350 for a home system, and depend on reliable water pressure and electricity. That’s not realistic in large parts of those countries, Kaestle says.

That’s where Halosource enters. Its proprietary technology is in a cartridge about the size of a yo-yo, at the bottom of a jug. Water in the jug (about the size of a Gatorade cooler) flows down thanks to gravity. It passes through the cartridge, which is filled with polystyrene beads coated with bromine, a chemical with the germ-killing punch of chlorine but without the foul taste.

All bacteria and viruses are killed on contact in seconds. No indoor plumbing or water pressure is needed. No electricity. It can take muddy water from a drainage ditch, or a rooftop, and in tandem with a sediment filter from another company, can produce water safe enough to drink, Kaestle says.

The cost? Consumers can buy the jug-and-cartridge product, called AquaSure, for about $40 to $60. Replacement cartridges cost $7 to $10, and typically need to be replaced every six months.

Andy Dale, managing director at Buerk Dale Victor, a Seattle-based venture capital firm that is one of the company’s early backers, says the progress at the company in the last couple years has been “incredible.”

“Here you’ve got a relatively small Seattle company that is dead center in solving one of the biggest global problems there is,” Dale says. “They’re making their mark in their industry.”

The technology has caught the attention of folks at the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) in Seattle, a Gates Foundation-funded nonprofit devoted to fostering new technologies to solve health … Next Page »

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Just wanted to post a quick note about Bill from one of our editorial advisors, Xconomist Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington:

“The big change is that Bill now gets to choose how to allocate his time. A number of new activities are thus going to be the beneficiaries of his intellect,” Lazowska said in an email. “When he visited UW recently, for example, he was really jazzed by discussions about cell phones as health care data collection devices in the developing world; he established some connections between us and the Gates Foundation and promised to become personally involved after July 1. Seattle’s role in all aspects of global health is going to blossom because of his engagement with UW, the Foundation, PATH, etc.”

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Washington state doesn’t do much Texas-style boasting, and the state’s economic development promoters have never tossed around big bucks to crow about the biotechnology cluster here. Case in point: how many of you know that the world’s top-selling biotechnology drug, and fifth-biggest pharmaceutical product in 2007 (Amgen and Wyeth’s Enbrel) was developed in Seattle?

As more than 20,000 people gather in San Diego for the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s annual four-day extravaganza, which starts today, Washington is sticking with the modest approach. Yet this time it is doing a little more to stand out from the crowd of states and countries that seemingly spend (and waste) millions of dollars trying to convince people they will become the next Boston or San Francisco.

After at least three years without offering any evidence Seattle exists on the busy trade show floor, biotech boosters from around the state have pooled $40,000 for a booth this year, said Susan St. Germain, senior business development manager for the state’s Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development. The booth (#401) will tout the Northwest’s quality of life, featuring mini Evergreen trees, mountain bikes, and landscape photos like one of Mt. Baker shot from the San Juan Islands, said Jack Faris, the president of the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association.

“We want the booth itself to be distinctive and more attractive than a lot of stuff you see that tends to be high-tech and plastic,” Faris says. “We want to play up the fact that this is a wonderful place to live, and build a career and grow a company.”

There’s a reason the state wants to focus on that message. Northwest biotech companies often complain it’s hard to recruit talented scientists to the far upper left corner of the U.S., because candidates believe that if their company fails, or even succeeds and gets acquired, they could lose their job and not be able to find another one in town. Recruits to Boston know if their company goes belly-up, they can probably score another comparable gig in the same area code.

To counter the perception of slim pickings in the Northwest, Washington’s booth will be staffed by human-resources reps from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, discussing jobs to advance health in the developing world. Gilead Sciences, the world’s largest maker of AIDS drugs, will also be there, talking about opportunities as it diversifies into lung diseases at its Seattle research center.

Now if the biotech boosters could just clone another Genentech or Biogen Idec for the Northwest, they’d have a sure-fire way of changing perceptions about Seattle.

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