This was a great year for Seattle biotech if you measure success through sheer number of acquisitions. But if you prefer to measure the health of an innovation community by the number of exciting new startups it hatches, then this was most certainly a down year.

That’s the mixed bag of returns that I saw when looking back at the news of 2011 from the Seattle life sciences scene. This was the year of the acquisition for Calistoga Pharmaceuticals, Pathway Medical Technologies, Calypso Medical Technologies, SonoSite (NASDAQ: SONO), Amnis, Geospiza, and Pacific Biosciences Labs (the maker of the Clarisonic skin brush.)

While those companies got harvested, not a whole lot of new seeds got planted. The list of notable Seattle biotech startups this year includes Cardeas Pharma, Oncofactor, Blaze Bioscience, Aquedect Neuroscience and Cardiac Insight.

Who else made headlines in Seattle biotech in 2011? Seattle Genetics emerged. Dendreon crashed. Marina Biotech, Omeros, and AVI Biopharma all had years they’d like to forget. Cell Therapeutics somehow managed to stay in business. New leaders emerged at the global health nonprofits, as Alan Aderem moved in to run the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, Stewart Parker took over at the Infectious Disease Research Institute, and Chris Elias created a vacancy at the top of PATH by leaving for a new gig at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation’s head of global health, Tachi Yamada, left for a new venture capital gig, and was replaced by a former Novartis executive, Trevor Mundel.

Here’s a company-by-company rundown of the major events at Seattle biopharmaceutical and global health organizations we keep tabs on here at Xconomy. Tomorrow, I’ll follow up with the rundown of rundown of medical device, diagnostic, and others in fields like Bio-IT or Health IT.

Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN). This was a transformative year for Seattle Genetics. The company broke through in August by winning FDA approval of its first product, a souped-up antibody for rare lymphomas. The drug validated a new target on the surface of cancer cells, CD30, and provided hard proof that Seattle Genetics’ proprietary chemistry can successfully link toxins to antibodies—a feat that has eluded scientists for 30 years. Big Pharma companies have beaten a path to Bothell to get licenses to the antibody-drug linking technology, and Seattle Genetics has exceeded Wall Street expectations in the early days of its drug rollout.

Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN). Dendreon was the star of local biotech in 2010, and this year it fell flat on its face. The company failed to live up to its first full year sales forecast with its immune-boosting drug for prostate cancer, and burned its shareholder base in the process. The company lost more than $3.5 billion in market valuation, and had to cut 500 jobs, largely because it sparked controversy and confusion by pricing its cancer drug too high—at $93,000 per patient. It remains to be seen this year whether Dendreon can pick up the pieces, as the disastrous screw-up of 2011 has created a gaping opportunity for emerging competitors like Johnson & Johnson’s abiraterone (Zytiga) and Medivation’s MDV-3100.

Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN). The Thousand Oaks, CA-based biotech company, which has significant R&D in Seattle, said at the end of the year that longtime CEO Kevin Sharer … Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

It’s rare to see an entrepreneur cheering for a direct rival, but that’s exactly what’s been happening over the last week or so in New York. It started on October 18, when shares of Boston-based Agenus (NASDAQ: AGEN) jumped 65 percent to $4.43 on news that a GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) malaria vaccine containing an ingredient that Agenus supplies performed well in a clinical trial in African children. That ingredient, called QS-21, is a chemical extracted from the soap bark tree, an evergreen native to Chile.

So who was cheering? That would be Jeffrey Gardner, CEO and co-founder of Adjuvance Technologies, an NYC startup that’s developing synthetic versions of QS-21, as alternatives to the sometimes scarce natural version that Agenus markets. The Glaxo/Agenus vaccine, he says, “is a good opportunity to prove QS-21 works. Would I prefer that Glaxo license QS-21 from us? Absolutely. But this is pivotal. It will prove the efficacy of QS-21 not just in humans, but in really young humans.”

Agenus’ stock has since settled back down to $2.71, but over a sushi lunch in Manhattan yesterday, Gardner’s enthusiasm for QS-21 was anything but muted. QS-21 is what’s known as an “adjuvant”—a substance that boosts the body’s immune response to a vaccine. The only adjuvants that have been approved by the FDA are aluminum salts or gels, and vaccine makers such as Glaxo have long been on the hunt for alternatives. About 15 drugs and vaccines containing Agenus’ QS-21 are currently in late-stage clinical trials. “People in pharma love QS-21, but it’s rare and not always easy to get,” says Gardner (pictured above). “That’s where we can add the most value.”

Adjuvance Technologies was born out of necessity at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer center in New York. Co-founder Philip Livingston, an attending physician at the hospital, was looking for adjuvants that would work in the cancer vaccines he was developing. “He tested literally everything under the sun,” says Gardner, himself a scientist who … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Chronically bad unemployment is the biggest story in the U.S. today, and we had some more bad news about jobs being lost this week in Seattle biotech. But there were a few other good things to report, including a story about a new company being born.

—Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN), the Thousand Oaks, CA-based biotech giant, said this week it is cutting 380 jobs companywide from its R&D operations, which includes 70 people at its sites in Seattle and Bothell, WA. The company plans to say more about the cutbacks Monday on its quarterly financial conference call.

—GlaxoSmithKline made big news in Seattle this week at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation‘s malaria forum. The story was about how GSK’s experimental malaria vaccine, supported by the Gates Foundation through the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, was found to protect about half of African children in a Phase III clinical trial. But there’s an elephant in the room about vaccine cost that nobody is really discussing thoroughly in public.

—The latest biotech startup in town has officially spun out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The company, called Blaze Bioscience, has raised its first $725,000 in angel financing and recruited former ZymoGenetics dealmaker Heather Franklin as its CEO. The idea, from the lab of researcher Jim Olson, is to “paint” tumors so that surgeons can make sure they get rid of the whole tumor, and not leave behind straggler cells that can lead to a recurrence.

—I’ve had Immunex on the mind lately as we prep for our next big Xconomy life sciences event, “The Immunex Impact“ on Dec. 1 in Seattle. Yesterday, I invited Immunoids to bring some old photos and company memorabilia to the event. I also announced the newest addition to the lineup of speakers—Patricia Beckmann. She will join Steve Gillis, Chris Henney, Doug Williams, Stewart Parker and others in this special confab of Immunex alumni. And speaking of Henney, he was honored this week with a biotech “Hall of Fame” award at an annual industry event in Laguna Niguel, CA.

—Bothell, WA-based Marina Biotech (NASDAQ: MRNA) has been running low on cash lately, but it found some support this week from a single investor who agreed to put as much as $15 million into the company over time.

—From the medical device side of town, we had a couple stories about companies going in opposite directions. Kirkland, WA-based Pathway Medical Technologies, acquired in August by Bayer’s Medrad unit, has allowed a lease extension option to expire on its headquarters, suggesting that it may not be interested in keeping operations in Seattle. On a more positive note, Redmond, WA-based Mobisante talked about how it has received more than 300 sales leads for its ultrasound-on-a-smartphone, even before it’s really ready to capture much of the market for this low-cost diagnostic tool.

—I know people have heard a lot of song and dance about genomics revolutionizing healthcare, and the reports have been greatly exaggerated to date. But in this week’s BioBeat I took a moment to marvel at the truly amazing kinds of experiments that are now feasible as scientists have learned how to sequence entire human genomes for $4,000 or less, in a matter of weeks. I’m going to explore this further next Monday at our next event in San Francisco, “Computing in the Age of the $1,000 Genome.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The buzz at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s malaria conference yesterday was all about clinical trial results from a new vaccine the foundation developed with pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline. But there’s a big question about how much this vaccine will cost, and nobody is willing to offer specifics about that yet.

To recap, here’s what got people excited. The vaccine, known as “RTS,S,” showed it protected about half of African children aged 5-17 months from getting the disease, with minimal safety problems or side effects, according to findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The analysis was done on about 6,000 children, who were followed for 12 months after being vaccinated. The data, from the third and final phase of clinical trials, essentially confirmed what scientists saw in more preliminary studies. The full trial is expected to run through 2013, and once a 30-month follow-up analysis is complete, the hope is that the vaccine could be made available for sale in Africa in 2015, says Christian Loucq, the director of the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, a Gates-funded initiative that is co-developing the vaccine with Glaxo.

It’s clearly a bit of good news for the field of malaria. The disease, which was wiped out thanks to the widespread use of the insecticide DDT in many parts of the world in the mid-20th century, made a roaring comeback as the malaria parasites evolved, killing as many as 1 million people a year worldwide by the early 2000s. The death toll has dropped in recent years by about 20 percent, to an estimated 781,000 in 2009, according to World Health Organization (WHO) statistics cited in an AFP story.

No one has ever successfully developed a vaccine against this infectious disease, and the ability to disseminate one will depend heavily on price. Glaxo CEO Andrew Witty repeated yesterday that the company plans to sell the vaccine at the same cost it takes to manufacture the product, plus a 5 percent markup, which will be plowed back into development of next-generation vaccines for malaria and other bugs. Bill Gates himself, in a keynote, commended the company for its commitment to a “low-cost” vaccine. But exactly how much it will cost to produce such a vaccine for some of the world’s poorest people, and will it be priced low enough so that it can really reach the tens of millions of children who need it?

Melinda Gates, center, at blogger roundtable in Seattle. Gates Foundation program officer Jessica Milman, right.

That’s where things get more vague, and more sensitive. I posed the question to Melinda Gates yesterday in a briefing with bloggers, and she deflected it to an aide sitting next to her—Jessica Milman, a senior program officer at the Gates Foundation. Here’s the exchange:

Xconomy: We heard Bill mention this morning that GlaxoSmithKline is committed to a low cost for the RTS,S vaccine. How low is low? And what is a good price for a vaccine that is 50 percent protective?

Jessica Milman: All we can really go on is what Andrew Witty has been saying. He has said cost will not be a barrier for people who need it most. And he has been on the record multiple times saying it will be the cost of manufacturing plus a 5 percent margin, all of which he plans to put back into research for neglected diseases.

X: But where would you like to see the price at, so it can reach the broadest number of people?

JM: The issue of cost has to be built into the efficacy, and the coverage that we think we’ll be able to achieve. Right now, everything is in motion, as we collect the rest of the data and we get a better sense of what will be the most appropriate cost.

Followers of the pharma industry know quite well how hard it is for any company to make a commitment like Witty’s. The malaria vaccine effort so far has cost $300 million over the past decade, and GlaxoSmithKline estimates it will have to invest another $100 million to $150 million to complete the project. The company is developing capacity to make 30 million doses of the vaccine at a factory in Belgium now, three to four years before the vaccine might be widely available, so that it can meet the demand it anticipates based on the current rate of effectiveness. It’s possible the company may need to boost … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Today European drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) announced that the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published results from a late-stage trial of its malaria vaccine, which showed that the vaccine provided significant protection against the disease in young African children. The results were announced in Seattle at a forum hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

More than 3,000 miles away, the 60 employees of Lexington, MA-based Agenus (NASDAQ: AGEN) celebrated the experimental vaccine. Why? Because the vaccine, called RTS,S, is made with an immune-system-boosting plant extract that Glaxo licenses from Agenus.

Agenus is providing the extract, called QS-21 Stimulon adjuvant, for four GSK products that are in late-stage development. As those programs advance, Agenus will receive milestone payments and, for each product that makes it to market, it will receive royalties for 10 years after launch. The financial specifics haven’t been disclosed, but Agenus CEO Garo Armen says, “Our financial gain a few years out, if all these are successful, would be very very substantial.”

Indeed, QS-21 could be a savior for a company that has had its share of near-death experiences. Armen co-founded Agenus in 1994 with the goal of developing therapeutic vaccines containing “heat shock proteins,” which are designed to activate the immune system’s T-cells to fight diseases such as cancer. But the company, which was originally called Antigenics, has struggled to get the FDA on board with its experimental products, and so far has only one cancer vaccine approved in one country—Russia.

As the disappointments mounted, Agenus’ stock fell below $1, forcing the company to do a reverse stock split on September 30 to avoid getting delisted by NASDAQ. “We needed to get out of the penalty box. Being delisted … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a new boss for its multi-billion dollar global health division. Trevor Mundel, the former global head of development for Novartis, the Switzerland-based pharmaceutical giant, will start at the Seattle-based foundation on December 1, according to a statement.

Mundel will oversee the foundation’s $14.7 billion global health grant portfolio that seeks to have an impact against a variety of scourges like HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. Mundel replaces another Big Pharma veteran, Tachi Yamada, a former head of R&D at GlaxoSmithKline who spent five years overseeing the foundation’s global health work until he stepped down in June.

“We are very pleased that Dr. Mundel has agreed to lead our global health program,” said Bill Gates, co-chair of the foundation, in a statement. “He brings tremendous scientific and medical credentials, in the lab and in the clinic. We look forward to working with him to help improve the health of people in the world’s poorest countries.”

At Novartis, Mundel oversaw some 140 clinical projects, a budget of $3 billion, and more than 7,500 employees. He is also on the boards of the Genomic Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, and the Novartis Venture Fund, the Gates Foundation said in its statement.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

One of Seattle’s leading scientific entrepreneurs grew up in a working-class home in which neither parent went to college. Ken Stuart‘s family didn’t have enough money to send him to one of the many universities in his hometown of Boston.

When he graduated high school, he had no idea what would come next.

“I wasn’t sure I’d even go to college,” Stuart says. “I never applied. I was sick of school.”

After waiting all the way until May of his senior year, Stuart ended up talking his way into Northeastern University at the last minute and finding a co-op job to help pay the bills. Once there, he got hooked on biology. He soon got on the fast track, and could have had a tenured university faculty job, but decided early on that wasn’t enough. By combining a curiosity for some obscure fields of biology, some entrepreneurial spirit, and really good timing, Stuart ended up building a mini-global health empire at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute.

Now at 70, after 35 years of building up Seattle Biomedical Research Institute from scratch into a research hotspot with 365 employees and a $52 million annual budget, Stuart is handing over day-to-day leadership to a successor, Alan Aderem. Stuart now says he’s looking forward to returning to more of the science that got him so fired up in the first place.

“There are very few people with the dynamic range to grow an organization from nothing to the state where Seattle Biomed is now,” says John King, a former Merck and Rosetta Inpharmatics executive who served on the institute’s board in the ’80s and ’90s. “Ken learned on the job how to be a startup guy, how to bootstrap an institute based on scientific excellence. He grew into doing things like sophisticated fundraising, marketing—all the kind of things big research institutes have to do.”

Stuart’s journey started in an unusual place. He was born in December 1940, and grew up the youngest of four sons in a working class home in Brighton, MA. His father was a house painter, and his mother was a stay-at-home mom. Stuart found himself interested in the stacks of books that his family kept at home, but he says he wasn’t much of a student. Grammar school was “incredibly easy and boring,” he says.

Stuart didn’t find much that interested him in high school science either, except for physics. It was hard to see where that might lead, though, since Stuart never really saw himself as college-bound. It all changed that one day in May of his senior year, when he recalls going to the school in person, and asking to meet with the dean of admissions. After getting an incredulous look from the secretary, who told him the fall class was full, Stuart persisted in seeing the dean. Within about 10 minutes, he had persuaded the dean to let him in, largely because Stuart had gone to a competitive public high school, he says.

This was the late ’50s, years after Watson and Crick had made the pioneering discovery of the structure of DNA, igniting the modern era of molecular biology. Looking back, Stuart says that moment was lost on him. He found biology more from his personal reading, of a number of books at home that his father accumulated. Pretty soon, Stuart found himself spending long hours not just in the libraries at Northeastern, but at Harvard and MIT libraries, which had reciprocity agreements with Stuart’s school just a few miles across the Charles River. Everything from physiology to biochemistry to frog embryo development, he gobbled up.

“I started studying intensively. I liked it,” Stuart says.

Textbooks soon weren’t enough, and Stuart says he really found his passion … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Tachi Yamada ran what you could call the world’s largest nonprofit venture fund for high-risk, high-reward global health ideas the past five years. Now he’s going to apply that same feel for risk and reward in the traditional venture capital business.

Yamada, 66, the former president of global health at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and chairman of R&D at GlaxoSmithKline, has landed in his next full-time job as a senior executive in residence with Frazier Healthcare Ventures in Seattle. Frazier, a firm with offices in both Seattle and Menlo Park, CA, has more than $1.8 billion under management for venture capital and growth equity investments.

While at the Gates Foundation, Yamada oversaw an effort to seed hundreds of offbeat scientific projects with big potential for global health, part of the $36 billion philanthropy’s mission to fight the most common deadly diseases in the world today—including HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. Yamada also enlisted support for the cause among Big Pharma companies that hadn’t shown a lot interest in the past. There’s probably no more than a handful of people in the world with his set of relationships in Big Pharma, and with government health ministers around the globe.

“He has a great ability to open doors, find new opportunities, help us build our existing opportunities, and get access to international markets,” says Jamie Topper, a general partner with Frazier. “I can’t say Tachi will have a dramatic shift in our strategy, but he’ll make us better investors. He has a unique set of experiences.”

Yamada will spend about 75 percent of his time working with the firm, helping to identify new investments, get the most out of existing portfolio companies, and help craft international expansion plans for the firm—especially in China and India, Topper says. Aside from Frazier, part of Yamada’s time will still be devoted to his work on the board of Japan-based Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and as a special advisor to Takeda’s CEO.

Last July in an interview with Xconomy, Yamada noted that biotech and venture firms haven’t been nearly as active as Big Pharma companies in the global health field. But he’s kept his eye on the venture business for years, partly through a part-time advisory role he has maintained since 2006 with Frazier Healthcare Ventures. Earlier this year, he oversaw the Gates Foundation’s first-ever equity investment in a biotech company—Research Triangle Park, NC-based Liquidia Technologies. The idea was, by being an equity investor instead of a project financier, the foundation could have a bigger influence over the development of a vaccine technology with broad potential against a number of diseases.

Frazier isn’t expecting that Yamada will tilt the firm’s interest toward global health, but Topper did say that global health is “incredibly important” and that Yamada will help the firm better understand how to invest in it. “I think there’s opportunity there,” Topper says. “I’m not sure we’ll invest in 15 companies in it, but some of our companies are engaging in it now.” A couple of Frazier’s portfolio companies, Topper says, have already been interacting with the Gates Foundation, and “Tachi has been instrumental in making that happen,” he says.

Yamada, in a Frazier Healthcare statement, said he’s excited to join the firm partly because it makes bets on healthcare companies “that address major health needs.” As examples, he pointed to Seattle-based Calistoga Pharmaceuticals, a cancer drug developer recently acquired by Gilead Sciences; Marcadia Biotech, a Carmel, IN-based diabetes and obesity drug developer bought by Roche; and Baltimore-based Bravo Health, a provider of Medicare Advantage health plans for seniors which was acquired by Health Spring.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

PATH, the Seattle-based global health nonprofit, said it has formed a collaboration with Netherlands-based Crucell and London-based GlaxoSmithKline to develop a next-generation malaria vaccine. The effort will bring together two vaccine approaches in an attempt to improve upon Glaxo’s RTS,S, a vaccine that has shown an ability to protect about half of people who get immunized against malaria. The collaboration will focus on using a single dose of a Crucell vaccine candidate, followed by two doses of RTS,S, in what is known as the “prime-boost” strategy to trigger immune defenses. Terms of the partnership weren’t disclosed.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

There are two sides to Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based “invention capital” company started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The revenue-generating side of the business is a stockpile of more than 30,000 patents, which Intellectual Ventures licenses and sells to other firms, including tech companies large and small looking to defend themselves in lawsuits. IV also isn’t shy about suing to defend its patent portfolio.

On the other hand—and in a different set of buildings, actually—is the invention lab. Tucked into nondescript space in outer Bellevue, the lab is stocked with a huge amount of equipment, from sophisticated laser arrays to really big band saws, sometimes purchased at fire-sale prices. This is the epicenter of the “make side” of Intellectual Ventures, which also includes a network of affiliated individual inventors who work on their own. That side of the business files about 500 patents per year on inventions that are cooked up in-house, not acquired from somewhere else.

You’ve probably heard of some of the biggest creations to emerge from the lab, including the TerraPower next-generation nuclear reactor, the “photonic fence” of lasers designed to keep malarial mosquitos at bay and “Modernist Cuisine,” a nearly 50-pound food-geek compendium that that is redefining the term “cookbook.”

But the lab staff also is working on plenty of projects you might not have heard of, including some interesting stuff in the arena of global health. Some of this work, no surprise, is being financed by Myhrvold’s old boss, Bill Gates.

On a recent visit to the workshop, I got a look at some of the interesting but under-the-radar things that the Intellectual Ventures crew is working on. Here’s a quick look, with details from Geoff Deane, the company’s VP of engineering and head of the lab:

—Malaria diagnosis. One of the problems in treating malaria in the developing world is finding an effective way to diagnose people.Today, blood tests might have to be strapped to the back of a motorcycle and driven 100 miles to the nearest health facility, making the economics of diagnosis not much better than the actual production of malaria drugs. So frequently, the path is just to medicate almost everyone, Deane says—and routine overuse of medication can eventually lead to drug-resistant strains.

The Intellectual Ventures team set out to build a quick, portable, durable screening system. There is a reliable marker in something called hemozoin, a blood byproduct that the malaria parasite excretes. So, the IV team set out to detect it, and wound up with a method that involved a complex-looking … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Global health innovators have a rich new venture capitalist to turn to—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Seattle-based nonprofit, the world’s largest philanthropy with $36.4 billion in assets, made its first direct equity investment in a for-profit biotech company last week when it pumped $10 million into Research Triangle Park, NC-based Liquidia Technologies. While the foundation has made grants to companies for years, and has linked its support to specific programs with clear global health goals, this is the first time the foundation has structured a deal to take equity ownership, and have board-level oversight of a startup’s work, much like a venture capital firm.

It took more than a year to sort through the technical, financial and legal issues before the Gates Foundation was comfortable enough to make the Liquidia investment a reality. But it could provide a template for a new financing approach, which seeks to balance the focus and discipline of a venture investment with the nonprofit mission of fostering global health innovation, says Doug Holtzman, a deputy director on the infectious diseases team at the Gates Foundation.

“This was not a decision made with the snap of a finger,” Holtzman says. “We explained our charitable intent, as a slightly different kind of investor in the company. We don’t want to interfere with their ability to make money, but we do have an expectation they’ll make this technology available for (global health) product development.”

The Gates Foundation has been thinking about new ways to structure its support for innovation in global health for quite some time. Tachi Yamada, the executive director of global health at the foundation, has spoken about how venture capitalists and biotech entrepreneurs haven’t done enough to support the cause.

The foundation’s interest in Liquidia emerged about a year ago when Holtzman saw the company’s chief medical officer, Frank Malinoski, at a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Holtzman—a scientist with experience working at biotechs like Icos, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and Microbia (now Ironwood Pharmaceuticals)—says he was intrigued by what Malinoski had to say about Liquidia’s potential for new vaccine development.

Doug Holtzman

The Gates Foundation certainly isn’t the first group to see potential in Liquidia’s work. The company already had significant venture backing, including a $25 million Series C venture round last April from Canaan Partners, Pappas Ventures, Morningside Venture Investments, New Enterprise Associates, PPD, and Firelake Capital.

Liquidia has attracted the interest in a technology for creating specific 3-D shaped particles that can be made to look like an invading virus does to the human immune system. Getting the proper shape is critically important, because it could coax the immune system to mount a defense against a particular invader. Even more importantly, Liquidia’s technique can be used to make these precise shapes, make them consistently, and do it in a scalable fashion, Holtzman says. Those are essential factors any company must figure out to make … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

San Diego-based Pfēnex, a 2009 spinout from Dow Chemical, got a $3.1 million subcontract from SAIC, the Virginia-based government contractor, to help develop a scalable production process for a key Malaria antigen. Pfēnex has developed a technology platform that uses fluorescing bacteria to produce a variety of specialized protein-based products. In a statement today, the companies say Pfēnex is being hired to develop a process for large-scale production of the full-length Circumsporozoite protein from Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria in humans. The subcontract was funded through a $62.4 million prime contract that the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded to SAIC.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Seattle’s life sciences industry has been on life support for a few years, but now, for the first time in a long time, biotech has started to show some legit signs of rebirth.

Will the Northwest seize this moment, and become a stronger and more vibrant place for companies that dare to develop new drugs, medical devices, and diagnostics? Or will we look back on 2010 as just another period where the region took two steps forward and then took two steps back? What can the community do now to make sure it builds on this newfound momentum?

These are the kind of hard questions I’m looking forward to raising with an all-star cast of speakers who have agreed to join us for the next big Xconomy event: “Biotech’s Back in Seattle.”

As always, I’ve done a lot to sweeten the pot for this event since I announced it on this site last month. This event will be held the evening of November 29, at the new headquarters for PATH, the global health hothouse in South Lake Union. We will kick things off with a 10-minute keynote address on the state of Northwest biotech from Dendreon CEO Mitchell Gold, whose company has created more than $5 billion of stock market wealth and 800 new jobs since April 2009. That was when it proved that it had developed the first treatment of its kind that could help men live longer with prostate cancer by stimulating their immune systems to fight tumors. It’s by far the biggest story to hit Seattle biotech in a decade. Even so, there are still major issues Dendreon has to settle—namely, reimbursement and manufacturing—before this can truly be considered a lasting success for the Northwest.

After Gold gets the conversation started, I will moderate a wide-ranging panel discussion with CEOs from three other companies that have also taken major steps forward in the past year. The group includes Clay Siegall of Seattle Genetics, Carol Gallagher of Calistoga Pharmaceuticals, and Randy Schatzman of Alder Biopharmaceuticals.

Then right before the cocktail-and-appetizer hour, we will hear short “burst” talks from a number of innovators who will describe their work and its potential to change human health. The short presentations will come from Tom Hansen, the CEO of Seattle Children’s Hospital and the inventor of an inexpensive ventilator with potential to save lives of premature infants in the developing world; Stefan Kappe, the scientist at Seattle BioMed who is spearheading work on a new malaria vaccine candidate in clinical trials; Caitlin Cameron, the CEO of Presage Biosciences, a Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center spinoff seeking to improve the success rate for cancer drug developers; and Ryo Kubota, the CEO of Acucela, a company seeking to develop effective new treatments for glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration, two of the most common causes of blindness among people around the world.

It’s rare to get this many Seattle biotech leaders in the same room, on the same day, so I’m really looking forward to this dynamic event. It’s also a special opportunity to encourage cross pollination between the for-profit biotech community and the global health community, which Xconomy Seattle has been committed to fostering through our journalism and events from the moment I joined the company in May 2008. The folks at PATH love to show people the stuff they are working on, and for this biotech-heavy audience, they are offering short guided tours of their new facility for people who want to arrive a little early, at 4:30 pm or 5 pm.

As always, I’ll be roaming the audience with a microphone to give you a chance to pose questions to the speakers. So if you haven’t already, snap up a ticket at the registration page, or tell a friend about this event they won’t want to miss. See you at PATH on Nov. 29.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Tachi Yamada was a big name in Big Pharma before he took the top global health job at the world’s richest charitable organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But no single organization—not even a multi-national, multi-billion dollar R&D shop at GlaxoSmithKline, or the Gates Foundation—can conquer leading killers like HIV, tuberculosis, diarrheal diseases, and malaria by itself.

The need for productive partnerships came up over and over again yesterday at an event yesterday at PATH, the nonprofit global health hothouse based in Seattle. This event brought together Yamada, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, Helene Gayle of CARE USA, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a high official in the U.S. State Department, and others. Most of the talk was about forming partnerships between the U.S. and other nations, between the state and federal governments, and between nonprofits like PATH, Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, the University of Washington, etc.

A number of speakers emphasized the humanitarian need to stay committed to fighting scourges of the developing world, even when state and federal budgets are tight. Yet little was said about how all the nonprofits and governments are supposed to work with Big Pharma companies like Yamada’s former employer, or for-profit venture-backed biotech companies whose job it is to turn basic research into actual vaccines, drugs, diagnostics—and get them implemented in a big way.

So I followed up with Yamada for a few minutes afterward to ask him about what Big Pharma, biotech entrepreneurs, and venture capital can do to get more involved. Here’s what he had to say.

Xconomy: What is one example of something Big Pharma has done well recently in global health, and one example of a missed opportunity?

Tachi Yamada: We consider Big Pharma to be essential partners. Ultimately new drugs and vaccines are made by Big Pharma companies, they aren’t made by the nonprofit community. So a lot of the investments we make in the discovery of new drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines really depend on private sector, for-profit companies and their full commitment to developing them. For example, the most advanced malaria vaccine candidate, in Phase III, is one that’s partnered with GlaxoSmithKline. It’s in registration trials, and we’ve invested a very significant amount of money, and they’ve matched it 50/50. We’re working together.

Tachi Yamada

Are there are other areas where things could work better, yes absolutely. But Big Pharma has stepped up, and seen the opportunity here and the responsibility. I have to say that of all the industries we deal with, they are right at the top.

X: What about venture capital and biotech entrepreneurial community?

TY: There’s been very little there, interestingly enough. One, because it’s kind of a troubled space. The old VC model for biotech has been challenged by the economic environment. We haven’t partnered as much with them, but they have partnered with some of our Grand Challenges Explorations grants. We have seen some partnership there. But I have to say that we haven’t seen much from the biotech community.

X: So who steps in to fill that vacuum? Like you say, somebody has to develop these things for global health.

TY: Basically, we serve as the VCs, and we finance virtual pharmaceutical companies with startup funds to do early stage drug discovery and development.

X: You mentioned Glaxo’s RTS,S malaria vaccine candidate. If you had to pick one program going on now that could have the biggest impact on global health five years from now, what would it be?

TY: It’s hard to say. A malaria vaccine would have a very important impact. Several TB vaccines are in early development and Phase II. They could have a big impact. We’re also working with the NIH to really push along a follow-on to the HIV vaccine trials that were promising in Thailand, along with Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis.

X: What’s the craziest idea you’ve seen in the past couple years that you think just might work?

TY: There are lots of crazy ideas. One is infrared light that keeps mosquitos away. Amazingly enough, mosquitos appear to be repelled by infrared light. We’ll see.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

As I reflect on my time in the Northwest, I find myself gravitating toward the bigger picture: which areas of technology and business innovation is this region poised to really own over the next few years? After giving us the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, McCaw Cellular, and Starbucks, surely Seattle is ready for an encore or two?

It’s a topic that comes up often in tech startup circles. For example, on Tuesday, TechFlash put together a provocative panel and town hall discussion on the future of startup financing—but it ended up being about much more than financing. I wish I could have been there, but I’ve been on the East Coast this week.

During the event, the founders of Avvo, BigOven, BuddyTV, Jackson Fish Market, Wetpaint, and other prominent Seattle Web startups talked about the various tradeoffs between bootstrapping, taking angel money, and venture capital. I reported on this topic back in late 2008, and things haven’t changed all that much since, although company valuations are lower and it seems like more entrepreneurs are bootstrapping out of necessity.

One point of discussion in particular caught my eye from the TechFlash writeup of the event: the need for entrepreneurs to think bigger, balanced against giving up equity to VCs. “I don’t see how the small-time thinking of ‘I want control, I want control, I want control’ is going to create the incredible successful outcomes that not only Seattle needs but our industry needs in a time of change,” said Ben Elowitz of Seattle-based Wetpaint.

Entrepreneur and investor Andy Sack, from TechStars, RevenueLoan, and Founder’s Co-op, had a bit of a conflicted take on the venture capital industry, according to the report. He called the business “a racket,” but also said VCs are misunderstood in the entrepreneur community. In the end, his main message was consistent with Elowitz’s. “I think as a community Seattle has fallen behind other cities, and as a community we need to stop whining and start kicking some ass,” Sack said.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch concurred, talking about the success of companies like Twitter, and the importance of dreaming big: “Where are the people here in Seattle saying, ‘We want to be the pulse of the planet’?” he asked.

Here’s where I stand: I think it’s mostly a cultural issue. Seattleites tend to be more reserved and laid-back than their counterparts in Silicon Valley or Boston. And they are a bit more isolated from the rest of the world than those other geographies. That doesn’t mean they don’t want their startup to rule the world (it might even be an advantage). And in fact, lately I’ve been thinking about the ways in which Seattle tech startups could rule the world. These are my five best guesses at the moment:

1. Alternative financing schemes

Seattle is quickly becoming an epicenter of new models and structures for financing … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Seventh Sense Biosystems wants to remove some of the hassle, expense, and pain of collecting blood for medical tests. The secretive startup has recently begun talks with major healthcare companies about its technology, which includes a device for collecting blood samples that almost anyone ought to be able to use without causing pain, says Doug Levinson, the firm’s co-founder and CEO.

The Cambridge, MA-based firm—which counts among its co-founders two of Boston’s medical technology gurus, R. Rox Anderson of Harvard and Bob Langer of MIT—prides itself on putting sophisticated technology into simple-to-use packages. Levinson, a partner at Flagship Ventures, managed to convince his own venture firm and the startup’s other backers at Polaris Venture Partners in Waltham, MA, and Boston-based Third Rock Ventures to invest $4.75 million in its Series A round in 2008 to get the operation rolling. The Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropic organization, is also supporting infectious disease research at the startup.

Last year at our big XSITE event, Levinson gave us a look at the startup’s unique chemistry that enables polymer particles to reveal certain colors or form into defined shapes when they come into contact with specific molecules in the blood or other bodily fluids. The technology opens the door to potential uses in the diagnostics field such as monitoring drug dosage levels or spotting infection. Yet Levinson was less clear last year how a patient’s blood would be tapped to enable the startup’s chemical invention to alert patients of certain health conditions.

Enter the startup’s TAP (touch activated phlebotomy) device, which is in development. With the push of a button, the system … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Get ready for a double-dose of your usual Seattle biotech roundup, as I was too slammed to give you the regular weekly shot of news last Thursday.

—Six months after Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) wrote a big check to Bothell, WA-based Alder Biopharmaceuticals, we can see why. Xconomy had the exclusive on how ALD518 generated “outstanding” results in a mid-stage trial of 124 patients with rheumatoid arthritis, in the words of the lead investigator. This story was based on an abstract posted online in advance of the European League Against Rheumatism conference next month in Barcelona.

—Rheumatoid arthritis may be the really big market on the horizon, but Alder didn’t give away the whole store in the Bristol deal. Alder has retained the full rights to ALD518 for cancer, and the company is getting ready to present some other important mid-stage trial data next month at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference. The idea is that ALD518 can tamp down the excess inflammation that plagues cancer patients, making them vigorous enough to withstand more chemotherapy that kills tumors, which might help them live longer.

—Leroy Hood coined the term “P4 Medicine” as the tagline for his vision of predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory medicine about seven years ago. Now he has clinched the first partnership with a major U.S. medical school, Ohio State University, which is setting up a demonstration project to put this idea to the test. The deal is for two years, and calls for Ohio State and the Institute for Systems Biology to contribute $1 million each to make this work.

—One intriguing Seattle connection jumped on my radar during my last trip to San Diego, when I met with Nobel Prize-winning chemist K. Barry Sharpless of The Scripps Research Institute. Sharpless is well known as a proponent of “click chemistry,” in which scientists seek out the simplest, easiest, most reliable, irreversible reactions possible for industrial processes, rather than just trying to do what’s most cool or exotic to impress their peers. This technology is at the heart of a prototype device that Lee Hood’s Seattle-based Integrated Diagnostics is using to gather reliable measurements from a pinprick of blood.

—Ikaria, the Clinton, NJ-based biotech company with an R&D operation in Seattle, is gearing up for a $200 million IPO to be underwritten by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and others. The company is profitable because of a drug that treats respiratory illness in infants, but its big swing for the fence is with technology licensed from Mark Roth’s lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center that seeks to induce a reversible hibernation-like state that could someday buy more time for doctors to treat traumatic injuries, or perform heart surgeries. Arch Venture Partners has a 10 percent stake in Ikaria, so Bob Nelsen is rooting for this to be a big win.

—While all this news was breaking, we somehow found a way to organize an event on health IT innovation at the Frye Art Museum, with support from event host Swedish Medical Center and a number of sponsors. You can catch up on what happened by checking out this photo gallery, the speakers’ slides, and Greg’s roundup of some of the pithy insights we picked up.

—Seattle Biomedical Research Institute has been itching … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Seattle Biomedical Research Institute said today it has officially started the first human clinical trial of its malaria vaccine candidate. The trial will assess the safety of a genetically engineered version of the malaria parasite. I wrote about this trial in depth back in March based on an interview with Seattle BioMed’s lead researcher on the program, Stefan Kappe. If the vaccine candidate passes this initial safety test, the Seattle-based nonprofit said it plans to start a mid-stage trial, in late 2010 or early 2011, to examine the vaccine’s effectiveness.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Genocea Biosciences, the Cambridge, MA-based developer of vaccines, said today it has been granted $2.7 million to work on discovering a new malaria vaccine. The grant is from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command as part of a research collaboration with the Naval Medical Research Center. Genocea will use its technology to find target antigens for a vaccine, while the Naval Medical Research Center will contribute their expertise in developing sub-unit vaccine formulations.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Think it’s possible to shoot down a swarm of buzzing mosquitoes in mid-air? Or maybe you want to power up a remote flying vehicle? Tom Nugent is your man. The Seattle-area entrepreneur just might be the most versatile guy with a laser you’ve ever met.

Yes, a laser. Until recently, Nugent worked in the laboratory of Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures, the invention company led by Nathan Myhrvold, where one of his projects was the so-called “photonic fence.” This effort has gotten lots of media attention, most recently for an impressive demo at the TED conference in February. That’s where Myhrvold showed a video of a laser burning the wings off a flying mosquito in super slow-motion. The idea is this technology, implemented on a larger scale, could help prevent the spread of malaria or protect crops against flying pests.

But Nugent’s focus now is on something that might be more practical: power beaming. That means using lasers to deliver energy to remote sensors, vehicles, or base stations. It’s a two-way trick: the receiver has to have a solar cell to convert the laser’s energy into electricity. But as long as the solar cell is viable, the technology could be useful in any situation where installing a wire is impractical, where batteries run down, or where it’s too expensive to truck in fuel.

That’s really just the beginning, to Nugent’s mind. One of his ultimate goals is to be able to beam large amounts of solar power to Earth from space, presumably to help solve global-scale energy problems. For now, though, he’ll settle for beaming power to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other remote devices, including very early technology that could help scientists develop something called a space elevator. These ideas, in sum, have turned into a small company called LaserMotive, based in Kent, WA.

Before dismissing these projects as far-fetched, a little background is required. The idea of power beaming has been around for decades. But advances in cheaper and more energy-efficient diode lasers have made it possible to pursue the idea commercially in the past few years. Even the rise of laser hair removal products (which you might see on late night TV) have helped things move forward. So in 2007, Nugent and fellow physicist (and Intellectual Ventures veteran) Jordin Kare, an expert on laser rocket propulsion and optics who worked on the “Star Wars” nuclear-missile defense system in the 1980s—decided to make a business out of power beaming, and co-founded LaserMotive.

“We think we can produce revenue while we get experience,” says Nugent, LaserMotive’s president.

Their first project: tackling the power beaming aspect of NASA’s “Space Elevator Games.” If you don’t know what a space elevator is, that’s OK—it doesn’t exist yet. The über-futuristic idea is to have a cable anchored to the ground, extending thousands of miles into space, that could be used to launch payloads into orbit. The space end would be unattached, and the Earth’s rotation would keep it taut so a robot “elevator” could move up and down the cable, carrying equipment. Sure, this would take billions of dollars and a few decades to get working, but it could ultimately make space operations much cheaper than using rockets. That’s the idea, at least.

If a space elevator is ever going to work, it will need power at multiple steps along the way. So, at “Level 1” of the NASA Power Beaming Challenge, held last November in Mojave, CA, Nugent and Kare’s team used a ground-based infrared laser to beam energy to specially designed solar cells aboard an 11-pound robot (see photo, left) driven by an electric motor. (All power must come from the ground.) The robot climbed a 900-meter length of metal cable suspended from a helicopter. Nugent and Kare’s was the only team to make it to the top with an average climbing speed of more than 2 meters per second—their robot went nearly 4 meters per second (9 mph)—beating out two other teams, who failed to reach the top. The prize was $900,000 (before taxes, Nugent laments—yes, it’s that time of year).

The upcoming “Level 2” competition will be held later this year, … Next Page »

Comments (16) | Reprints | Share: