Waltham, MA-based life sciences tools maker PerkinElmer (NYSE: PKI) announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire a Bay State neighbor focused on imaging and detection technology, Hopkinton, MA-based Caliper Life Sciences (NASDAQ: CALP), for $10.50 per share in cash. Caliper has a major office in Mountain View, CA, as well.

The purchase, which comes to a net total of about $600 million, represents a 42 percent premium on Caliper’s closing share price of $7.39 on Wednesday September 7. The acquisition is expected to close fourth quarter of 2011, and has received the unanimous support of the boards of both companies. Caliper chief executive Kevin Hrusovsky is expected to join the PerkinElmer leadership team following the close of the deal.

The Caliper deal comes as the latest in a string of PerkinElmer acquisitions this year. The Waltham company acquired London-based X-ray detection technology developer Dexela in June and in May bought Labtronics, a Canadian maker of electronic laboratory notebook products enabling laboratory routine analysis.

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Waltham, MA-based Thermo Fisher Scientific (NASDAQ: TMO), a provider of products and services for labs, announced that it has acquired Sweden-based Phadia from the European private equity firm Cinven for about $3.5 billion in cash. The acquisition of Phadia, which provides allergy and autoimmunity diagnostic products, is expected to close fourth quarter 2011 and will likely be immediately accretive to Thermo’s adjusted earnings per share, the company said.

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Hold onto your lab coats and safety goggles. Big drug companies and venture firms are engaging in a scientific land grab in the Boston area and beyond to gain rights to new discoveries about what are known as adaptive immune responses. They’re jockeying for the best technology and help from top brains at Harvard, MIT, and local biotech startups.

London-based drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK) formed the biotech startup Tempero Pharmaceuticals in March 2009 to stake its claim in this emerging area of immunology. Last week, Tempero CEO Spiros Jamas gave me a rare tour of his firm’s headquarters and labs in Kendall Square (including the foosball table) as well as a run-down of its founders’ discoveries—which shed new light on why some peoples’ immune systems mount dangerous attacks on healthy tissues in autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis.

Tempero, which is solely funded by Glaxo so far, is playing for keeps. It’s got a trio scientific founders—Christophe Benoist, Vijay Kuchroo, and Diane Mathis—who are Harvard professors regarded as top minds in immunology. The firm has also recruited two of Boston’s biggest names in biotech—Rich Aldrich, a life sciences investor who was a founding executive of Cambridge, MA-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:VRTX), and John Maraganore, the CEO of Cambridge-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ALNY)—to serve as Tempero’s independent directors.

Jamas told me about what prompted Glaxo to form Tempero, rather than pursuing its technology internally. “There was a realization that a lot of the basic science in this space was driven by academic thought leaders,” Jamas said. “And a lot of them were being pursued by venture capital … Next Page »

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Governor Deval Patrick had good intentions of wanting to grow the cleantech space when Ian Bowles consolidated all of the available money the state had slated for solar initiatives into a new group called the Clean Energy Center (CEC). This group essentially places bets on which startups will make it big and then provides them with grant money.

Why is it unlikely for this model to be successful? Venture capitalists hire the best and brightest to do serious due diligence on a startup prior to investing, and most of these startups fail. This formula has worked for VCs because the 20 percent of their portfolio companies that do make it, make it big enough for the VC to be successful. The same formula does not work for governments. It is unreasonable to think that the civil servants at CEC have the ability to make an impact through placing the right bets when VCs do it much better and still fail. There is a better solution for the Governor to make a real impact without placing bets.

Having seen many so many brilliant students from MIT, Harvard, BU, Olin College, and Northeastern come up with equally brilliant technology ideas, it is frustrating to see them faced with the following choices as they graduate:

1. Take a job with an established company (most likely outside the state), or

2. Continue to work on their technologies to prove out the concept in a lab/work shop.

The solution is for the State to be a facilitator for these potentially significant technologies by setting up a shared incubator space in the heart of these universities, where these engineers of the future can physically build their prototypes and go on to get funded for the right reasons. I actually asked Bob Healy, the Cambridge City Manager, if he would be able to find an empty basement near MIT to pull this off, and he was very much open to the idea. The model could follow what Tim Rowe’s Cambridge Innovation Center has done for office space. This way, engineers can access the necessary heavy tools and equipment to complete their prototypes where they would meet other brilliant engineers trying to do the same. It would create a powerful ecosystem of brilliant engineers.

Knowing that politicians need to show their worth within the four-year election cycle, is it possible for government to pull this off? Well, I say it’s worth the lobbying effort. We can follow the successful model of Jim Newton of TechShop in Menlo Park, CA. TechShop has become a de facto incubator for an astounding array of startups there. Cash-strapped inventors have used the shop’s lathes, laser cutters, welding equipment, 3-D printers, and shop tools to make prototypes.

Engineers with passion about their technologies only need a space to work out of and a bit of food to keep them going. Combining space from Bob Healy, donated tools from the private sector, and some pizza from Governor Patrick might just be the realistic key to fostering new jobs of the future in Massachusetts.

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On a clear day, David Wetherall can see Mount Rainier from his desk. On a clearer day, he can see the future of Intel. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But Wetherall, the director of Intel Research Seattle, has certainly been charged with leading an exploratory research effort for the chip-making giant—blue-sky, “off-roadmap” stuff that won’t be in Intel’s products anytime soon, but is nonetheless vital to the company because it could help create the broader future of computing.

Intel Research Seattle, located three blocks from the University of Washington campus, is one of three Intel labs tied closely to universities around the country—the others are at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The Seattle lab, which opened in 2001, has 20 full-time researchers, with about an equal number of students, interns, and visiting researchers at any given time.

I sat down with Wetherall yesterday as he was doing last-minute preparations for today’s annual lab open house. Wetherall has been director of the Seattle lab since mid-2006. He is also an associate professor of computer science and engineering at UW, and his own research has focused on wireless networks and distributed systems. It’s an unusual model, in that Intel hires its research lab directors for three-year terms, after which they typically go back to academia full-time. (Wetherall is the third director of the Seattle lab.) “The lab has a charter, to bring in new people from the university,” says Wetherall. This helps “invigorate things” and keeps the lab’s research on the “cutting edge.”

As Wetherall explains, it’s a pretty open and forward-looking effort. “We have a lot of joint research, projects where university people work here, and we also fund research at the university. It’s a big way we get things done. There is a joint, open collaborative agreement between Intel and UW. People don’t have to sign an NDA,” says Wetherall. “We’re not focused on an immediate product, we’re focused around opening markets…We’re chartered with doing disruptive research that’s not on the product map. Intel is interested in new computing technologies. We’re trying to invent them, and stay ahead of the game. We’re a small scout organization looking for game-changing technologies.”

The Seattle lab’s research theme is “focused on future computer systems woven into the fabric of everyday life,” says Wetherall. It’s the next step in the evolution of computers as they migrate from desktops to mobile devices to embedded devices. “We try to figure out what technologies and usage models work, how to power them, how to provide privacy, how to do sensing,” he adds. Researchers at the lab have expertise in hardware, robotics, machine learning, wireless networks, and human-computer interfaces, among other disciplines. “We believe in prototyping, from hardware through software systems, and we have a user-centered viewpoint,” says Wetherall. “We are finding out what users want.”

It sounds a lot like the “connected computing” (or ubiquitous computing) trend that the founders of Voyager Capital were telling me about last week, from an investor’s perspective—the confluence of software, wireless, and digital media. I asked Wetherall what connections the Intel lab has with the local innovation community in these areas. … Next Page »

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A huge new biotech lab complex is being planned for Burlington, MA, according to a report in the Boston Globe. The proposed $2 billion development is the brainchild of developer Patriot Partners, which is already building out the nearby 96-acre Lexington Technology Park at the site of the old Raytheon headquarters. If realized, the Burlington plan would produce New England’s largest life sciences complex, including 2 million square feet of lab and office space, as well as shops and 2,000 units of housing for the elderly. The plan seems to be rather preliminary, though, given that the company still doesn’t own the land and probably would have to build bridges and ramps to make it accessible.

As the Globe notes, there are already a number of other big developments aiming at the needs of the life science industry under way, like Alexandria Real Estate Equities’ planned 1.5 million-square-foot lab complex near Kendall Square in Cambridge.

Taken together, these Burlington and Cambridge developments would add 3.5 million square feet of life sciences labs to what’s already in existence in the region. If I have done my mental conversion to metrics correctly, that is nearly six times as much space as the former Pharmacia corporate R&D labs used to occupy in my Swedish hometown Uppsala some years ago. Will there really be a demand for all these facilities? (As a Scandinavian, raised on soccer, not baseball, I can’t just believe that if you build it, they will come.)

Patriot Partners doesn’t have any future tenants lined up for the Burlington site, though it hopes that life science companies will continue to move to the suburbs. At the same time, rising gas prizes, and energy costs overall, might make more central locations more attractive. That is why Alexandria is betting on a location close to the Kendall Square subway stop instead, as Xconomy reported in June.

“I think that in the long run the life science industry in the region will continue to grow. Will the growth be adequate to fill all the properties being proposed? That remains to be seen,” says Tom Andrews, senior vice president at Alexandria.

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Late last year a fire destroyed the biochemistry department at the Southern University of Chile and dealt a severe blow to its researchers. But thanks to Seeding Labs, a non-profit based in Cambridge, MA, the labs might soon be up and running again. The organization collects discarded lab equipment, sorts and packs it, and ships it to scientific institutions in developing countries.

“We see ourselves as a kind of angel investor,” says Seeding Lab founder and executive director, geneticist Nina Dudnik. “We can give our fellow scientists in developing countries a kick-start. The equipment makes it possible to get research done, publish articles, attract international funding and in the end build a self-sustaining lab through international grants.”

Seeding Labs was started five years ago by a group of graduate science students at Harvard. Almost all of the founders had worked in developing countries.

“I had worked at an agricultural research institute in the Ivory Coast in West Africa which had a molecular biology department,” Dudnik says. “When I came to Harvard I was struck by the stark differences in resources. Here, if you need something, you can order it in the morning and it comes the next day. In West Africa we would have to wait for months. Often the only way to get reagents was to ask a colleague who was going to a conference to pick them up.”

So far, Seeding Labs has sent equipment to 20 labs in 12 countries in Latin America and in Africa. The recipients—or their co-sponsors—pay for the shipping.

During its early years, Seeding Labs got its equipment from the academic sector, mainly from Harvard. But this year the organization has also started to collect used hardware and unused supplies from the private sector.

“We got an incredible generous donation from Biogen Idec—It consisted of lab equipment and consumables sufficient to send to five labs,” Dudnik says.

The Biogen Idec donation was organized by Mahin Aratsu, at the company’s neurobiology discovery department in Cambridge. “A co-worker had seen a flyer from Seeding Labs and had brought it over,” says Aratsu. “I thought it was a perfect opportunity to clean up our labs and get rid of equipment and send it over to places that would probably use it a lot more than we did. It turned out that our immunology department did something similar after we did, and we are hoping to continue this on at least every couple of years.”

The supplies and equipment collected at Biogen Idec range from test tubes and petri dishes to centrifuges and gel electrophoresis systems. After being packed up by a group of about thirty volunteers, part of the donation is now in Seeding Labs’ warehouse, waiting to be shipped to the Southern University of Chile.

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When Xconomy set up shop in Kendall Square, Cambridge, last year, we knew it was the innovation hub of New England, but we still didn’t realize just how deep the bench is here. Practically every week we learn about a new startup or an established technology firm with an office near ours. My most recent discovery was VMware (NYSE: VMW)—the virtualization company I usually describe as “a Palo Alto, CA, subsidiary of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC.” Turns out VMware has a 150-strong research and development laboratory right in the Cambridge Center complex, a stone’s throw from the Kendall subway station and just upstairs from Google’s new Cambridge spread.

VMware has been in the spotlight for months, thanks mainly to a spectacular August IPO and the seemingly unstoppable stock climb that followed. (Share prices peaked at almost $125 on Halloween, but have since returned to the much more earthly $40 to $60 range.) But here at Xconomy we’ve also cast a critical eye on the company’s long delay in issuing a patch for a critical software vulnerability affecting three of its workstation virtualization products. A fix was finally released on March 18, more than five months after Boston-based security firm Core Security notified VMware about the problem.

I’d spoken with several company officials for those stories by phone, but recently I got an invitation to meet some of the folks at VMware personally. So I headed over to the Cambridge facility and had breakfast with senior director of R&D Julia Austin, who is the lab’s site director, as well as director of product management Ben Matheson. They gave me the lowdown on the lab’s activities, which focus on advanced product development—”visionary work looking at new architectures and solutions not core to VMware today but where we think there is a business opportunity three to five years out,” in Austin’s words.

VMware, whose software helps companies save money on computer servers by allowing multiple operating systems to run on the same machines, opened a small R&D shop in Kendall Square shortly after EMC (NYSE: EMC) acquired the company in 2003. About three years ago, the operation moved to its current location, a 50,000-square-foot space on the tenth floor at Five Cambridge Center. (Soon the lab will swallow up an additional floor and double its capacity to 300 staff members, Austin says.)

Siting the lab was a no-brainer. “Being right here in Kendall Square has been a phenomenal opportunity for us,” says Austin. “Being across the street from MIT, and just down the street from Harvard and BU and Northeastern, and not too far from Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon, has been very helpful for us, for recruiting and growing our academic programs.” In addition to its core staff, the VMware lab hosts 25 summer interns from local universities, as well as visiting researchers such Richard West from Boston University’s computer science department as Larry Rudolph and Saman Amarasinghe, both from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

While there are at least three advanced development projects underway at the Cambridge lab, Austin and Matheson could only speak publicly about one of them—a system for disaster recovery that’s currently exiting the development stage and becoming a real product.

In a post-9/11, post-Katrina world, “the ability to recover from a disaster—natural or man-made—is one of the biggest problems across businesses of all sizes,” says Matheson. “Say an earthquake hits Boston. [Which isn't as implausible as it may sound---the city was badly damaged by a 6.0-to-6.5 temblor in 1755.] An IT administrator hits the proverbial big red button, and our site recovery manager is going to start all of the servers at your backup site in the right order, in a very fast, reliable way, so that you can recover really quickly.”

Virtualized systems actually lend themselves to being transplanted from an operations site to a backup site, since virtual machines look pretty much like … Next Page »

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Microsoft announced yesterday that by July Cambridge, MA, will be home to the fifth R&D outpost outside the company’s Redmond, WA, headquarters, joining existing Microsoft Research facilities in Silicon Valley, Beijing, China, Cambridge, England, and Bangalore, India. The new lab, to be located at One Memorial Drive adjacent to the MIT campus and led by mathematical physicist and 10-year Microsoft veteran Jennifer Chayes, will focus in part on blending computational and social-sciences approaches to understanding the needs and behaviors of people within online social networks.

Late yesterday I reached Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s senior vice president of research and the man who has been overseeing the growth of Microsoft Research worldwide since 1994, to ask about how the company decided to place a lab in Cambridge and what value he hopes it can create for the software giant.

Xconomy: Why put a research lab in Cambridge now, as opposed to, say, five years ago?

Rick Rashid: For us, what makes this a good time is simply that Microsoft as a company has been growing its presence in the Boston area. Before, if you’d tried to put a research lab there, there would have been wonderful universities to talk to, but it wouldn’t necessarily have been anchored in other parts of the company. Now with the really substantial, growing presence the company has there, it really makes sense. And we’ve been getting an incredibly enthusiastic response from within Microsoft—from people in the Boston area. Now that Microsoft Research is going to have a lab there, it gives them access to more really smart people and really great ideas. I think everybody is excited about what that could produce.

X: Why here? What makes Cambridge an attractive place for Microsoft to have a research center?

RR: One of the key things is that obviously, there is this incredible intellectual environment in the Boston-Cambridge area, and really in the Northeast in general. When we site our labs you have to think about, what are the opportunities to recruit and bring great people into the lab, and what are the opportunities to collaborate and work together with others? Being right next to MIT, near Harvard, not that far from Brown, not that far from New York, that will open up a lot of new collaboration opportunities and access to faculty and students. And clearly we will be able to hire some great people there. The way I think about research labs, first and foremost research programs are about people—the quality of the people you’re getting. It’s not like a product group. You are not hiring them to do something specific. What you’re doing is hiring for opportunities, hiring for the future. The people you bring in are really the critical resource that makes it go, or not.

X: The vision that Jennifer Chayes and her husband and deputy managing director, Christian Borgs, have outlined, of a lab where theoretical math will overlap with sociology and psychology and economics, would make it pretty unique among the system of Microsoft Research labs, wouldn’t it?

RR: The personality of each of our locations is really determined by its people. Jennifer and Christian, they have a vision, and there are things they’ll be doing, and that’s certainly going to have an impact.

But also, over time, we’ll have opportunities to hire great people who may be in very different areas. If they find some incredible person that that may be somewhat off the direction they may have been thinking about, I would still encourage them to hire that person, because that’s the way you win. You draft for the quality of the player, not for the position, or because you have some great plan for the team.

That said, having a lab in Boston will bring us access to some incredible people in a number of the areas that Jennifer is talking about.

X: What makes Chayes the kind of person you’d want to appoint to start a Microsoft Research outpost?

RR: Have you met Jennifer, face to face? If you had, you probably wouldn’t ask that question. She’s brilliant, first off. That’s a critical criterion. But also, she’s one of these people that has … Next Page »

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