More than anything, they should be studying math, including statistics and probability, and programming. No matter what the subject, we will have huge amounts of data about it, and will need these tools to get meaning from the data. The areas I’m thinking of include medicine, genetics, nutrition, and neuroscience; human behavior; energy management and consumption; materials science (so that we can use our personal 3D printers more effectively); aerospace and cosmology (so we can find asteroids, whether to deflect them from an earth-bound path, to mine them of valuable minerals or terraform them for human habitation); and of course biology, so that we can enjoy the company of animals, grow food, and ultimately create human-friendly living conditions on other planets and asteroids. It would also be great to get better at modeling and managing economic fluctuations!

But in the meantime, don’t forget to read world literature so you can understand your place in history and know how to be a human being.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The benefits of generating databases based on the personal genetics of thousands of people came into better focus today with an announcement from Mountain View, CA-based 23andMe, the startup that aspires to be the world’s trusted source for personal genetic information.

Using genetic data drawn from thousands of 23andMe customers, the company says it has identified a gene that appears to protect against a genetic mutation associated with Parkinson’s disease. Specifically, 23andMe says the gene serum/glucocorticoid regulated kinase 1 (SGK1) appears to be protective against a mutation known as leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2).

A specific mutation on the LRRK2 gene, known as G2019S, is recognized as a risk factor for developing Parkinson’s. About half the people with the mutation develop the disease. Yet 23andMe says it has genetic data from a large number of people who carry the mutation, but who surprisingly don’t have Parkinson’s. In scrutinizing this group, 23andMe says it made the first-time discovery of the potentially protective nature of SGK1.

23andMe chief business officer Ashley Dombkowski previewed the SGK1 findings at Xconomy’s “Computing in the Age of the $1,000 Genome” event in San Francisco yesterday. Dombkowski said the company has amassed the world’s largest Parkinson’s research cohort, which has more than 6,000 participants and includes one of the largest groups of individuals carrying the pathogenic mutations in the LRRK2 gene.

The Parkinson’s initiative undertaken by 23andMe “has proven the tremendous potential in leveraging DNA technology, the Internet, and patient participation to accelerate findings,” says Todd Sherer, CEO of The Michael J. Fox Foundation.

The foundation awarded a $500,000 grant to the San Diego-based Scripps Research Institute in 2010 to identify a new and potentially vital therapeutic target for Parkinson’s disease. The foundation directed the grant to Philip LoGrasso, a Scripps professor of molecular therapeutics, who has been studying LRRK2 and SGK1.

“The SGK1 discovery, while still early-stage, is a promising outcome of this unique research platform, and holds potential to inform a therapeutic approach for Parkinson’s,” Sherer says. “We are eager to see the results of the continued investigation of SGK1 by Scripps.”

23andMe says it has 125,000 genotyped customers, and nearly 90 percent have opted-in to participate in research approved by the company’s Institutional Review Board. “These individuals are extremely valuable for us to study as they provide insights into why some people do not develop disease despite having high-risk genetic factors,” says CEO Anne Wojciki in a statement released by the company. “This could lead to new drug targets or diagnostics.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

A new cancer treatment R&D operation is starting up in Cambridge, MA, based on the work of Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT founding members Stuart Schreiber and Todd Golub. H3 Biomedicine announced it has launched to develop treatments tailored to patients’ cancers, as part of a partnership with the U.S. unit of the Japanese pharmaceutical firm Eisai.

H3 will get up to $200 million in research funding from Eisai, access to its drug development resources, and support for the clinical development of its drug programs, according to the announcement. The new R&D house says it will focus on the genetics of patients’ cancers and will use cutting-edge chemistry to discover safe and effective drugs against the targets revealed by such genetic analysis.

Schreiber’s work has already resulted in three approved drugs that target cancer proteins he discovered. Golub, a leader in the genomic approach to cancer drug discovery, serves as an investigator at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Both researchers are among the founders of Cambridge-based Forma Therapeutics, which launched in 2007 to develop drugs based on new knowledge about the genetics of cancer. In November Forma nabbed a $20 million deal with Eisai, one of a number of deals Forma has inked with pharma companies since its launch.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

There’s a new round of interesting court filings in Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s lawsuit against a Bay Area biotech startup co-founded by Dana-Farber scientists. It’s the latest chapter in a case primarily concerning who has rights to a potential game-changing drug for lung cancer discovered at Dana-Farber.

Dana-Farber filed a lawsuit against Millbrae, CA-based Gatekeeper Pharmaceuticals in U.S. District Court in Boston on September 21. The lawsuit, as I explained last month, essentially asks the court to let Dana-Farber out of a previous agreement to license patent rights to the potential lung cancer drug, WZ4002, to Gatekeeper, a startup formed in March 2009 to commercialize the technology. Dana-Farber indicated in its complaint that the Swiss drug giant Novartis, a longtime supporter of the cancer institute, had come forward after the agreement was inked to claim it had rights to the molecule—and that Dana-Farber now believes that claim to be valid. Now the new round of court filings deal with the issue of whether Gatekeeper’s president, John Chant, should be allowed to intervene in the case.

At stake in the case is a potential drug for lung cancer—the most common cause of cancer deaths in the U.S—that could treat certain cases of non-small cell lung cancer that have built up resistance to existing drugs. Many patients today develop resistance to lung cancer drugs such as the blockbuster erlotinib (Tarceva) and the more infrequently prescribed Iressa (gefitinib), causing their cancer to relapse. The molecule in question in this case addresses the so-called T970M gene mutation, which is believed to be responsible for about half of cases of resistance. (The molecule’s discovery was described in a December 2009 article in Nature.)

In its response to Dana-Farber’s complaint, Gatekeeper asked the court, among other things, to order the cancer institute to license WZ4002 to the startup, and to order Novartis to pay damages for causing that license to be delayed. But the startup’s president, Chant, argued in a motion to intervene in the in lawsuit, filed last month, that the four members of his firm’s board of directors have not sought the types of damages from Dana-Farber and Novartis that Chant believes are in the startup’s best interest. In part, his argument is that the board members have conflicts of interest because three of them—Nathanael Gray, Pasi Janne, and Kwok-Kin Wong—are employees of Dana-Farber and one of them, Jeffrey Engelman, has served as a paid consultant to Novartis. If the court grants Chant’s motion, then he would have the legal standing to represent the company in this case.

On Monday, both Gatekeeper and Dana-Farber filed memoranda to oppose … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Cambridge, MA-based biotech powerhouse Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) has struck a deal to sell its laboratory testing unit to Laboratory Corporation of America for $925 million in cash, the company reported this morning. The move is part of a plan to win over shareholders and comes after the French drug maker Sanofi-Aventis made an unsolicited offer to acquire the company.

Genzyme Genetics, the business unit under agreement to be sold to Burlington, NC-based LabCorp (NYSE:LH), took in $371 million of Genzyme’s $4.5 billion in 2009 revenue. LabCorp “is committed” to offering jobs to the Genzyme unit’s roughly 1,900 employees and senior managers, according to Genzyme. This sale pact comes on the heals of an internal memo that Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer sent to employees last week to announce that the company would let go about 1,000 of the company’s 12,000 total workers over the next 15 months.

Both the sale of Genzyme Genetics and the job cuts revealed last week are part of Termeer’s plan announced in May to boost shareholder value. The plan also calls for the sale of Genzyme’s diagnostics and pharmaceutical intermediates units. The proceeds from these sales might be used to finance the second half of the $2 billion stock buyback plan that was also announced in May, the company said today.

Genzyme, the world’s largest maker of drugs for rare diseases, has come under intense pressure from shareholders because of manufacturing snafus such as viral contamination found in its Allston Landing plant on June 16, 2009, which caused shortages of its drugs. Activist investors Carl Icahn and Ralph Whitworth criticized management’s handling of the manufacturing problems and caused a leadership shakeup on Genzyme’s board and executive ranks.

Termeer, 64, has built Genzyme to be a diversified business during his 26 years as chief executive. But now the company, founded in 1981, is streamlining its operations to focus on its therapeutics business, which brings higher profit margins than the Genzyme Genetics unit and the other divisions it has on the block.

“LabCorp is the right strategic partner for Genzyme Genetics,” Termeer said in a statement. “LabCorp intends to invest in growing its operations. The business will have the opportunity to continue to grow, serve its customers and fulfill its potential to bring continued innovation to important areas of the diagnostics field.”

Genzyme said the deal is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of the year.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

When Henry McCance started at Greylock Partners in 1969, the venture capital industry had less than $100 million of capital flowing into it each year, he approximates. Now, it’s roughly a $20 billion-a-year sector of the financial world that has backed companies whose products are, in many cases, staples of modern living.

Five years ago, McCance, now Greylock’s chairman emeritus, started a nonprofit research foundation called the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, based on many of the same principals he sees as driving the venture capital success he’s witnessed over the past four decades.

“I’ve seen the power of what a passionate, bright entrepreneur, coupled with some farsighted investors, can do in terms of changing an industry and transforming how the commercial world works,” McCance says. He hopes his foundation can bring about a similar transformation in the realm of medical research.

It all started about ten years ago, when McCance’s wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, the degenerative neurological disorder. The couple visited a number of doctors, and McCance found that most doctors’ advice seemed primitive at best, suggesting patients do things like take Advil or vitamin E as ways to slow the disease’s progression, he says.

Determined to change that state of affairs, he connected with a few other wealthy families with a strong interest in Alzheimer’s research, he says. Veteran investors Jacqui and Jeff Morby and philanthropists Phyllis and Jerome Rappaport joined him as the founders of the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, he says.

First they set out to find the brightest minds in Alzheimer’s research. This falls directly in line with McCance’s first tenet of venture capital success: find the visionaries. “The really great venture capitalists are proactive, not reactive,” he says. “They try to identify the best entrepreneurial talent and they go and sell themselves to those future leaders.”

So rather than sifting through unsolicited research proposals from across the country, the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund founders looked for the people who they thought were the best. Top of the list was Massachusetts General Hospital geneticist and Alzheimer’s expert Rudolph Tanzi, McCance says, who joined the foundation to head up its research consortium.

McCance’s second piece of advice for … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Swift Biosciences, an Ann Arbor, MI, company that makes reagents for genetic tests, has announced that it received $3 million in Series A financing in June led by VC firm DFJ Mercury and joined by several Michigan-based investors. Swift was founded in January by former Accuri Cytometers Chief Scientific Officer David Olson. “Swift Biosciences plans to grow operations and launch products next year,” Olson says in an e-mail to me this morning. “I think the Ann Arbor area is a great place for us.” As we reported in May, Houston-based DFJ Mercury is actively seeking investment opportunities in Michigan.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

AltheaDx, a San Diego-based developer of molecular diagnostics, reported yesterday that it had closed its $6 million Series A round of funding. Telegraph Hill Partners, of San Francisco, led the funding round. In September, AltheaDx filed papers with the SEC to report $3.6 million it had raised in the first-round financing. Magda Marquet, founder and co-CEO of AltheaDx, said in a statement yesterday that the fresh capital will support the firm’s partnerships with pharmaceutical companies to develop diagnostics that help predict whether a drug is safe for certain people.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The Jackson Laboratory, a Bar Harbor, ME-based nonprofit provider of genetic research and lab mice, said yesterday that its president and CEO Richard Woychik is stepping down from his post. Woychik, who took over as chief executive in 2002, told the nonprofit’s board of trustees that he is open to staying on while the firm searches for his replacement. The organization, a major biotech employer in Maine, has a total of 1,318 employees in Maine and Sacramento, CA, and an annual budget of $170 million for the current fiscal year.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Fragile X syndrome is the second leading cause of mental retardation, after Down syndrome. Caused by a defect on the X chromosome, the syndrome affects boys more frequently and severely than girls; one-third of men with Fragile X are autistic and have trouble with communication and social interaction.

There is no cure or specific medical treatment for the genetic condition—at least not yet. Drug companies large and small, spurred by recent discoveries in neuroscience, are now working on possible treatments.

Among the more intriguing companies to enter the hunt is aFraxis, a San Diego startup backed by Avalon Ventures. The company, led by Avalon partner Jay Lichter, is leveraging discoveries from the lab of Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa of MIT to develop a pill that might reduce or reverse the brain abnormalities and related behavioral symptoms of Fragile X.

Lichter agreed to talk with me last month about aFraxis, but missed our appointment. His assistant explained that Lichter was dealing with a company emergency; she said his schedule was so jam-packed that he couldn’t speak with me until sometime in March.

Fortunately, my colleague Luke had a conversation with Lichter in mid-December and shared some of his notes with me. So here’s what we know about aFraxis so far.

The company was formed in 2007, the same year Tonegawa’s research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) identified a possible drug target for Fragile X. That target was PAK, an enzyme that affects the number, size and shape of connections between neurons in the brain.

In people with Fragile X, these connections-small protrusions called “spines” on the branches of neurons-are longer, thinner and more abundant than in people without the condition. When Tonegawa inhibited PAK in mice that had been genetically alerted to have the symptoms of Fragile X, the spines became … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Helicos Biosciences, the Cambridge, MA-based maker of genetic research instruments, said today it has raised $6.4 million. The company (NASDAQ: HLCS) collected the cash by offering a combination stock and warrants. The deal was underwritten by Thomas Weisel Partners.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

After Carlsbad, CA-based Verdezyne disclosed last month that it plans to raise more than $15 million in venture funding, I arranged to sit down with Damien Perriman, the company’s vice president of business development.

As it turns out, the startup that was founded in 2005 as CODA Genomics has essentially re-engineered itself over the past 18 months. The company overhauled its core business strategy, recruited a new CEO, E. William Radany, along with a new management team, changed its name, and moved its headquarters from Orange County to Carlsbad, CA, about 28 miles north of San Diego. In changing its name to Verdezyne, the company created an identity that is better aligned with its revised focus on the “green design” of biofuels and industrial chemicals.

The company initially was focused on technology spun out from UC Irvine that used specialized computer algorithms to design synthetic DNA. The company offered its services in Computationally Optimized DNA Assembly, or CODA, to help drug discovery teams at pharmaceutical customers like Eli Lilly and Genentech design synthetic genes that could be used to maximize the production of certain proteins for their biotech drug manufacturing processes.

Perriman, who joined Verdezyne in February, tells me, “Our investors made a decision in 2008 that we could make a lot more money by doing the production ourselves.”

With its extensive experience in computational biology and bioinformatics, Verdezyne saw the value in creating high-diversity libraries of genes, so that various genes could be inserted into fast-dividing yeast cells (and other micro-organisms), essentially programming the microbes to produce enzymes it would not otherwise produce. Verdezyne landed a federal grant last month to help build out its genomic library.

“We prefer to work with yeast,” Perriman says, “but we can work with any fungi or bacterial organism.”

The company, which now has 26 employees, has identified three primary markets for its technology.

The first and most obvious target is an … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

NanoString Technologies, the maker of a machine that lets scientists digitally analyze how genes are turned on or off in a tissue sample, just won a glowing endorsement from one of the biggest names in biology—Eric Lander of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

The Seattle-based company has nailed down a three-year research collaboration with the Cambridge, MA-based Broad Institute to look at how networks of hundreds of genes work in concert to form immune defenses against foreign invaders. Financial terms aren’t being disclosed, but NanoString has sold the Broad a couple discounted nCounter machines that normally retail at $235,000 apiece, and will provide proprietary reagent chemicals to operate them, according to acting CEO Wayne Burns. In return, NanoString gets certain intellectual property rights from the collaboration, advice on how to improve its tool, and some golden word of mouth.

NanoString, a private company founded in 2004 with technology from the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, has been building stronger ties to the Broad over the past year as people there have started using one of the first commercially available machines, Burns says. The mounting enthusiasm at the institute was instrumental in helping NanoString nail down a $30 million venture capital round in June. The round was led by Clarus Ventures, which has an office just a couple blocks from the Broad. Word has spread to the point that 15 researchers at the Broad are now involved in 20 separate collaborations to see whether the NanoString technology can yield biological insights that couldn’t realistically be attained with competing instruments, Burns says.

“NanoString offers the ability to look at hundreds of genetic markers across many samples at relatively low cost and with high sensitivity. They have developed exciting technology with potential applications to a wide range of scientific problems,” said Lander, the director of the Broad Institute, in a NanoString statement. “We look forward to working together to explore new ways of using of this technology.”

That kind of endorsement is sure to carry weight in the biomedical research community, and can’t hurt a fledging company trying to increase sales. “If you’re in the industry you know exactly who Eric Lander is, the reputation he has, as well as that of the Broad. We have the best of the best endorsing our technology,” Burns says.

For those who are new to the NanoString story, the idea is to allow researchers to look at a large number of genes, with digital precision, to see the extent to which they are turned on or off in a given sample. It’s the sort of technology that’s supposed to help researchers do … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The work leading to Brent Gaylord’s dissertation on using light-emitting polymers to detect bits of DNA was more far more than an academic exercise. His initial paper, and the intellectual property that was subsequently generated, directly lead to the creation of San Diego’s Sirigen.

Gaylord co-founded Sirigen six years ago to enter a business plan competition at UC Santa Barbara, where he earned his doctorate in materials science. Sirigen won the contest, and has been moving forward ever since. Today the venture-backed diagnostics technology startup has 15 employees and formal collaborations with five companies. Gaylord, the company’s chief scientific officer, says it is too soon to identify the collaborators but assures me that “they are names you’ve heard of.” The first product using Sirigen’s technology is expected to reach the marketplace sometime next year, he says.

Sirigen has no intention of producing its own line of complete diagnostic kits or detection devices. Instead the company is pursuing an “Intel Inside” strategy of getting its technology into diagnostic products made by others. Sirigen’s polymers use high-sensitivity fluorescence (HSF) to enhance the ability of conventional assays to detect specific antigens, proteins or bits of DNA. Gaylord says the technology can detect smaller quantities of target substances than conventional tests.

Also, the technology can offer improvements over conventional immunoassays—tests that commonly use an enzyme linked to an antibody to detect the presence of drugs or pathogens, such as the viruses that cause AIDS or hepatitis. Gaylord says existing immunoassays can detect just one target at a time, but an assay that alternatively incorporates Sirigen HSF technology can sense multiple targets with little loss in accuracy.

The result is faster, and potentially cheaper, testing.

Gaylord says the technology is generating interest because it has numerous applications, ranging from biological threat detection to drug discovery. With funding from the Army, for instance, Sirigen successfully demonstrated the ability of its technology to detect … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

It may be that TEDMED founder Richard Saul Wurman is the Brett Favre of emcees, or perhaps he’s like Al Pacino in Godfather III, who proclaims in exasperation, “Just when I thought I was out—they pull me back in!”

But after a five-year hiatus, TEDMED has returned this week (opening last night at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado), and Wurman, who is both the TEDMED chairman emeritus and lead master of ceremonies, stepped back onstage for what must be a familiar role. He is the folksy glue that brings the sometimes-esoteric show back to Earth as leading thinkers in medicine, health care, and life sciences deliver 15- to 20-minute talks about their work and big ideas.

So, for example, after J. Craig Venter, a leader in genomic sequencing and synthetic biology, ended his presentation last night, Wurman took the stage and reassured the crowd by saying, “I’ve heard Craig speak a number of times. And I don’t understand it all…”

The four-day TEDMED symposium, which costs $4,000 per person to attend (and is sold out), follows a format similar to the first conference in Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) that Wurman established in 1984. Chris Anderson acquired rights to that TED business in 2001 and Boston entrepreneur (and Xconomist) Marc Hodosh got rights earlier this year to TEDMED and its focus on health care. Wurman told us he had agreed to help Hodosh out this year, and between sessions he often helped the audience by identifying themes they would likely see emerging in presentations to come.

“Maps are also patterns, and patterns are the threads that run through this conference,” Wurman said. “They are the constructive tissue that holds ideas together.” Those emerging ideas include:

—J. Craig Venter, the co-founder and CEO of San Diego-based Synthetic Genomics, said about 21 million genes have been discovered since the first genome was sequenced in 1995—“and over 20 million have been taken from the deck of my sailboat.” (Venter’s sailboat, the Sorcerer II, embarked from San Diego in March on an expedition to collect and sequence marine organisms.) Venter also outlined synthetic biology research that aims to transplant a chromosome from one cell into another cell—and turn it into a different species. Venter says, “I think it’s possible we’ll have the first species powered by a synthetic chromosome by the end of this year, although that’s something I’ve been saying now for two years.”

—Anthony Atala, a urologist and director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, showed how researchers are using “smart biomaterials” to patch damaged organs and grow new heart valves, blood vessels, liver, muscle, skin, ears, and even fingers. Still, Atala said, “90 percent of patients on transplantation waiting lists are waiting for kidneys.” He also noted that the organs with lots of blood vessels—the heart, liver, and kidney—are the hardest to grow.

—Bill Davenhall, who leads the health and human services marketing team at ESRI, the Redlands, CA, company that specializes in geographic information systems, argued for the creation of new programs and training in “geo-medicine”—and for ensuring that GIS data can be included in electronic health records. He demonstrated his point with a map that shows geographical areas in mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states where heart attacks occur far more frequently than other parts of the country. Davenhall, who said he suffered a heart attack in 2001, associates environmental factors in the places where he has lived with the higher incidence rate. He grew up with high levels of sulfur dioxide in Scranton, PA, before moving to Louisville, KY, with high levels of chloropene and benzene. He now lives east of Los Angeles in Redlands, CA, which has high levels of airborne particulates, carbon dioxide, and ozone. He told the audience, “Doctors never ask me about my place history. But if I wanted to have a heart attack, I’ve lived in the right places.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Amgen, the world’s largest biotech company, which has operations in Seattle and Cambridge, MA, said today that its drug for colorectal cancer slowed the spread of tumors for patients with a certain genetic profile, in a clinical trial of 1,186 patients. Despite slowing down tumors, the drug failed to show that translated into helping patients live longer. Still, it’s the second major prospective trial to suggest Amgen’s panitumumab (Vectibix) may work for patients with normal forms of the KRAS gene, and offer no benefit for patients with a more aggressive, mutated gene.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Two scientists walked into Leroy Hood‘s office in Seattle a little more than five years ago with a burning question about the genomes of dogs. They had sequenced the entire string of DNA in the canine genome for biomedical researchers, and sought out the high-speed gene sequencing pioneer for business advice. They wondered what it would take to build a business that sells information to pet owners, who might be curious about what breed their dog is.

This conversation in the summer of 2003 led to the formation of Seattle-based Argus Genetics, a spin-off company from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The technology has since been licensed to Mars Inc., the $21 billion-a-year candy and pet food giant in McLean, VA, which has turned it into a test called the Wisdom Panel MX. I heard the story of how this idea evolved into a product from Carl Weissman, a venture capitalist at Seattle-based Accelerator (and OVP Venture Partners), and Neale Fretwell, a business development manager for Mars’s veterinary division.

The original idea from Elaine Ostrander and Leonid Kruglyak at the “Hutch” intrigued Weissman when he got the referral, even if it made some of his investing partners roll their eyes because it wasn’t their usual swing-for-the-fences-to-treat-cancer kind of bet. Weissman and Kristina Burow, a Kauffman Fellow now with Arch Venture Partners, started their research. They learned there are 60 million dogs in the U.S., and half are purebred, while half are from mixed-breed heritage. They talked to breeders and purebred owners, and found out they didn’t want the test because it might disqualify purebreds from shows. That left mixed-breeds. There are 30 million of those dogs, and the test could be developed and sold for $100. That meant if Argus could capture at least 11 percent of the market, it could have a $330 million opportunity.

“Dog people are serious,” Weissman says. “It looked like an interesting business to us.”

It also seemed like something that could take off quickly, Weissman thought. It was an application of cutting-edge science that didn’t need to pass the strict scrutiny of the FDA, or go through hassles with reimbursement from health insurers. He negotiated for the rights to the technology from the Hutch, and set up the company in a structure that left what he calls “significant ownership stakes” for Ostrander, Krugylyak, and the Hutchinson Center, who get royalties on sales from Mars. (Ostrander has since left for the National Institutes of Health, and Krugylak is now at Princeton University.)

Mars got an early bead on this technology because it has sponsored some of Ostrander’s research in the past, Fretwell says.

Here’s how it works. A pet owner comes into a veterinarian’s office, curious about what breed their dog is. They provide a blood sample, … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Illumina (NASDAQ:ILMN), a San Diego-based provider of genetic and biological research tools, says it has formed an commercial alliance with Oxford Nanopore Technologies, an Oxford, England, developer of a single-molecule DNA sequencing system. Illumina will invest $18 million in Oxford as part of the deal, under which Illumina will exclusively sell and distribute Oxford’s experimental system worldwide.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Geospiza, a Seattle-based maker of software to help researchers analyze reams of genomic data, said today it has sold its FinchLab product to the Molecular Genetics Core Facility shared by Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. Terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed, although Geospiza president Rob Arnold said it June that it typically charges $30,000 for software, or about $2,500 a month.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

San Diego’s Illumina has a pretty amazing story to tell about exponential growth. The maker of genetic analysis tools has beaten or matched Wall Street earnings forecasts for a dozen quarters in a row. It has grown from 239 employees in 2004 to an estimated 1,604 by the end of this year. But when it invited investment analysts to its headquarters yesterday for an in-depth rundown on the state of the company, Illumina’s stock fell 5 percent on another lousy day for the markets.

The Wall Street crowd apparently thinks it’s a tough economy for selling super-sophisticated genome analysis machines, which cost more than $450,000 fully-equipped, plus as much as $200,000 a year in consumable supplies to keep them running. Since Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) did a 2-for-1 stock split on Sept. 23, its value has sunk 33 percent, to $27.71 at the close Thursday.

CEO Jay Flatley painted a broad picture of what Illumina does in his opening remarks at analyst day, which I watched on a webcast. It makes tools for high-speed DNA sequencing, genotyping of a segment of an individual’s genetic code, and tests that examine to what extent an individual’s genes are dialed on or off. By bringing down the cost of full genome sequencing to less than $100,000, Illumina is one of the companies that has been ushering in the era personalized medicine, along with its competitors, Foster, City, CA-based Applied Biosystems, Roche, and Cambridge, MA-based Helicos Biosciences. Illumina’s new goal is to bring that price down to $10,000, Flatley said.

“It’s within our sights,” he told analysts.

Getting there isn’t easy. Illumina has had struggles to manufacture its arrays to keep up with demand, mostly from government, academic, and hospital labs, Flatley says. It placed special emphasis—unusual for a Wall Street presentation—on its initiatives to recruit and develop enough talented workers to keep up with its rapid-fire growth.

To give a sense of where that growth is coming from, Illumina brought in Peter Gregersen of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research on New York’s Long Island. Gregersen, who does genetic research for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, gave a fascinating talk about how the new tools are enabling him to ask new questions.

Autoimmune diseases are a bunch of conditions in which the immune system goes haywire and starts attacking healthy tissue instead of foreign invaders like viruses and bacteria. These diseases affect millions of people—about one in 20 people in the country—with rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes, and inflammatory bowel disease, to name a few, Gregersen said. Their causes aren’t really known, although researchers suspect multiple genes play a role. For rheumatoid arthritis, about 10 genes are thought to be responsible, and for lupus it’s 20, he said.

By looking broadly at the genetic profiles of patients with these diseases—and with costs coming down to the point where large numbers of patients can feasibly be sequenced—new sequencing tools will lead researchers to much deeper understanding of these diseases. “This is an engine of hypothesis generation,” Gregersen said. … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share: