First of all, students should be studying what they are passionate about. Clearly, computer science will continue to spread into all aspects of human life. Within computer science, I believe machine learning and AI are perhaps the biggest study opportunity today. Biology and medicine are also undergoing vast changes. Personalized medicine will become a big issue; the understanding of the human genome and cell chemistry will open up entire new opportunities for innovation. So any study in the area of life sciences that connects to those new opportunities will be important. The will be amazing bioengineering opportunities, e.g., by developing materials and systems that connect with human tissue. Nanotechnology will become a major driver of new technologies in the future, with tons of great things to study at the intersection of new materials and human life.

I also believe some of the mundane aspects are ripe for overhaul, such as transportation and manufacturing. Studying robotics, rapid prototyping, autonomy in fields such as Aero-Astro, mechanical engineering, or computer science, should position students today to become the technology leaders of tomorrow. For students studying in humanities, I urge them to connect to the digital revolution that is unfolding right now. I am less excited about studying finance, since too many of us are already too creative in inventing new financial instruments that make society less stable.

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Former Wayne State University opthalmology researchers Raymond Iezzi and Rangaramanujam Kannan have developed a new way to treat age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa using injections of nanoparticles, the university announced earlier this month. Iezzi, who has since gone on to the Mayo Clinic, and Kannan, who is now with Johns Hopkins, are currently in the process of seeking patents for their groundbreaking treatment.

According to the National Institutes of Health, macular degeneration is the main cause of vision loss in older Americans, affecting more than 7 million people, while retinitis pigmentosa impacts an estimated 1 in 4,000 people nationally. There is no cure, so an effective treatment has the potential to help hundreds of millions patients across the globe.

Kannan says he and Iezzi began researching ways to treat macular degeneration after an ophthalmologist colleage mentioned that if he had a simple injection capable of treating the disease for even a month, he’d have a line of interested patients stretching around the block. Currently, doctors inject a small pellet into a patient’s eyeball containing a drug to treat the disease. This method leaves a lot to be desired, Kannan says, because it causes side effects, not the least of which is a 5 millimeter object floating around the eye.

“Treating the disease at the back of the eyeball was a problem, and treating the disease without side effects was a problem,” Kannan says. “But even before these problems are created, there’s the problem of neuroinflammation, which causes cells in the retina to go rogue.”

Kannan and Iezzi turned their attention to dendrimers, tree-like, non-cytotoxic nanoparticles that act as polymeric drug-delivery vehicles. They injected dendrimers attached to a steroid medication into the eyes of rats. The drug “walked right through” the eyes of healthy rats, but when injected into the eyes of rats with degeneration, the drug delivery system activated microglial cells, the immune cells tasked with cleaning up dead and dying material in the eye. Kannan says he and Iezzi were surprised to learn that the activated microglia in the degenerating retina appeared to eat the dendrimers selectively and retain them for at least a month.

“The idea is, the cells that cause problems consume poison and shut down,” Kannan says. “As little as .1 micrograms is effective for an entire month.”

Kannan didn’t expect the treatment to last longer than a month, but he and Iezzi’s research found that it did. The current formulation works for a few months with no side effects. Now the pair are working on adding compounds to the original formulation to see if the treatment effect can last even longer. Kannan says all of the research thus far has been conducted at Wayne State.

“There’s quite a bit of interest in this technology,” he adds. “It’s a very simple construct and an interesting way to use nanotechnology to target the disease process. Though there’s been a lot of work using nanotechnology in cancer-treatment applications, this is among the first for diseases involving neural degeneration.”

Kannan’s wife is a member of Wayne State’s medical school faculty, and he recently collaborated with her to prove that this same treatment approach works in degenerative brain diseases such as cerebral palsy. He’s seeking a patent for that too, though he expects the retinal application will be the first one commercialized.

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Geneticist Arthur Tinkelenberg has always been struck by the lack of strategy in scientific research. “Historically it’s been somewhat ad hoc,” he says. “For example, why do we study fruit flies? Because somewhere in the dim past, somebody did something interesting with a fruit fly, and now you have a whole field.”

So when Tinkelenberg was presented with the opportunity to lead New York-based biotech startup Enumeral Biomedical last spring, he jumped at the opportunity. Enumeral is based around technology invented by J. Christopher Love, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT who developed a way to measure how the human body responds to infection and disease. Enumeral’s technology, called “protein microengraving,” allows scientists to take cells from people who, say, have survived cancer, and then scrutinize those cells to identify antibodies involved in fighting the disease.

Enumeral’s startup team is marketing the technology as a completely new way to find ideas for innovative drugs—namely by studying real human cells, as opposed to fruit flies, bioengineered mice, or any of the other critters biotech researchers generally use. “We have to find better ways to validate drug candidates, and the way to do that is to start with human-based samples,” Tinkelenberg says.

Although it’s only been around about five months, Enumeral has already piqued the interest of venture capitalists and pharmaceutical companies. It has raised a total of $4.25 million from a group of investors led by Harris & Harris, a New York-based venture capital firm that invests in nanotechnology startups. And Tinkelenberg says the company is in ongoing discussions with potential pharmaceutical partners and hopes to have two to three deals locked up in the first quarter of 2012.

The quest to make drug discovery more human has been a major priority for Big Pharma in recent years. The industry has placed much of its hope in so-called humanized mice, which are rodents that have been engineered to possess fully human immune systems. Scientists expose the mice to human diseases and then extract … Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based Cerulean Pharma announced today that it has raised $15 million in a Series D financing round, which included one new investor: CVF, an affiliate of Henry Crown and Company. Also participating in this round were existing investors Polaris Venture Partners, Venrock, Lilly Ventures, Lux Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Cerulean’s lead drug candidate, CRLX101, is a “nanoparticle”—a tiny chemical package designed to burrow its way into cancer cells and kill them. In July, the company began a new Phase 2 trial of the drug in non-small cell lung cancer. The company plans to release top-line results from that trial next year.

Cerulean says it will use the new money to support the completion of that trial, as well as several others that will take place at academic medical centers. The company also plans to expand its platform to other opportunities, including RNA-based therapeutics.

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Two Boston-area startups—both of which emanated from the lab of MIT bioengineer and entrepreneur Bob Langer—announced today that they secured $25 million a piece in funding from Rusnano, a $10 billion Russian Federation fund that supports nanotechnology startups. The money went to Watertown, MA-based Selecta Biosciences and Cambridge, MA-based BIND Biosciences. Each company also added $22.25 million from current and new investors. Total it all up and it’s a huge haul: $94.5 million in the two companies combined.

Rusnano was founded in March of this year and is owned by the Government of the Russian Federation. The organization’s mission is to co-invest in nanotech projects that it believes will offer substantial economic and social benefits to Russia. As part of the deal, BIND and Selecta will each establish subsidiaries in Moscow. “They’ll be able to leverage the scientific and technical expertise, the clinical resources, and even the manufacturing resources in Russia,” says Noubar Afeyan, CEO of Flagship Ventures, which was a founding investor in both BIND and Selecta. “We see it as a multi-pronged opportunity.”

The seeds for the Rusnano deal were planted about three years ago, when Afeyan met some of the professionals who would ultimately come to manage the Russian fund. At the time, Afeyan says, he was serving on the board of the Skolkovo School of Management in Moscow. He arranged for his Russian contacts to tour Langer’s lab at MIT, as well as other institutions working on nanotechnology. “They were impressed with the potential of nano-medicine, especially in cancer,” Afeyan says.

The nanotechnology at the heart of this deal originated at labs directed by Langer and by Omid Farokhzad, a professor at Harvard Medical School. BIND and Selecta are pursuing different applications for the invention—nanoparticles that can hone in on specific targets in the human body and deliver drugs to them without … Next Page »

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Today, Cambridge, MA-based Aura Biosciences announced that it has raised $4.5 million from a group of private investors. The funding brings the total amount raised by the two-year-old company to $8 million. Founder and CEO Elisabet de los Pinos won’t reveal details about the investors, except to say, “It’s a small group of wealthy individuals who are all either CEOs or entrepreneurs in the pharmaceutical industry.”

When Xconomy first profiled Aura in 2009, we quoted chairman Edmundo Muniz calling its technology “an intercontinental ballistic missile” for treating cancer. Aura is developing tiny protein shells that can deliver cancer drugs directly to tumor cells, while avoiding healthy tissue.

Aura’s nano-particles resemble viruses, but they’re engineered so they won’t trigger dangerous immune reactions. “We retain the intelligence of the virus particles so they only target tumors,” says de los Pinos, a former fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management who worked in Eli Lilly’s oncology unit before founding Aura. “Because they are empty shells, they never replicate. We further modified them so the immune system won’t trap them.”

After having spent the last couple of years in animal testing, Aura has now defined a clinical path for its technology. The company will focus on pre-cancerous conditions that are driven by the HPV virus. HPV is best known for causing … Next Page »

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We saw several headlines surrounding clinical development by New England-area drugmakers this week.

—Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) said that it nabbed a conditional approval from the European Commission to market a long-acting version of fampridine (Fampyra) to adult patients with multiple sclerosis who have walking disability. The agency has also asked Biogen to commission a study exploring the benefits, beyond improved walking speed, of the therapy—which Biogen said it had planned to do post-marketing.

—Xconomy East Coast biotechnology editor Arlene Weintraub wrote about how Watertown, MA-based EnVivo Pharmaceuticals is charging ahead with development of its Alzheimers drug—despite negative data reported by Eli Lilly in a drug trial of its own similar compound. EnVivo began Phase 1 testing on June 1 of its compound, EVP-0962, which reduced brain inflammation caused by Alzheimer’s, reversed behavioral defects, and appeared to have a better safety profile than gamma secretase inhibitors (which the Lilly drug is), during animal trials.

—Also perserverent, Cerulean Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, MA, is pushing ahead with its nanotechnology for drug delivery. The company began a trial this month of its cancer nanoparticle drug and is also continuing development of its technology for the field of RNA interference—which has struggled to realize its potential in the form of successful drugs.

—Natick, MA-based Boston Scientific (NASDAQ: BSX) announced second-quarter sales of nearly $2 billion and earnings of $.17 per share—beating Wall Street predictions by about a dime. The medical devices firm also announced plans to repurchase $1 billion of its common shares and (the day before its earnings announcement) revealed that it will be investing $150 million over five years in a manufacturing facility in China and will be upping its employee head count in the country.

—San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN) and Waltham, MA-based Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS) resubmitted their application for the FDA’s approval to market their drug exenatide once-weekly (Bydureon) as a new treatment for diabetes in the U.S. The FDA, which had previously asked the two biotechs to submit data indicating the drug doesn’t have an effect on abnormal heart rhythms known as the QT interval, will have about six months to review the application.

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We saw acquisitions in the life sciences, Internet, and mobile sectors, as well as financings for startups spanning high-tech industries in New England.

—Akiban Technologies, a Boston database software maker, added another $3.2 million to its $6.5 million financing from 2009. The company, whose previous investors include North Bridge Venture Partners and Foundation Capital, used to be called Akiba.

—World Energy Solutions (NASDAQ: XWES of Worcester, MA, said it was selling 1.5 million shares of common stock (at $3.60 per share) to several institutional investors, to put toward new investments and acquisitions in the energy management sector.

—Google’s $700 million acquisition of Cambridge, MA-based ITA Software, a developer of airfare pricing and shopping software, can now go through, thanks to a proposed settlement by the U.S. Department of Justice that includes stipulations requiring Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) to play fair with other travel site competitors. The settlement comes in response to a coalition of other travel technology companies opposing the deal last fall. The Department of Justice said Google must continue to license ITA’s software, and must offer it to other companies in the field, among other things.

—Cambridge-based Blueprint Medicines raised $40 million in a big Series A financing led by Third Rock Ventures. The stealthy company is focusing on personalized cancer treatments, using molecular and cancer genome data and a proprietary chemical-compound library.

—Zixi, a Waltham, MA-based maker of software enhancing the delivery of HD content over the Internet, said it raised $4 million from Schooner Capital, and TV execs Sidney Topol and Maurice Schonfeld.

—nSphere, a Boston firm focused on connecting users with relevant content from databases online, acquired Boston-based mobile couponing startup Peekaboo Mobile, for a sum reported to be seven figures.

—Digital Lumens, a Boston-based company combining LED lighting with networking software to lower commercial energy costs, got $10 million from its existing investors, Black Coral … Next Page »

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Nano Terra, a Brighton, MA-based company that works with industry on surface engineering and nanotechnology projects, said today that it has acquired the drug developer Surface Logix. The terms and details of the deal were not disclosed. Harvard University chemist George Whitesides (an Xconomist) is a founder of both Nano Terra and Surface Logix. “Surface Logix is an excellent fit for Nano Terra since our business was also built on intellectual property from the Whitesides lab,” said Myer Berlow, CEO of Nano Terra, in a statement. “We think we can achieve significant synergies through our proven co-development model. This acquisition opens the door to the use of Nano Terra’s technology in a variety of healthcare products.”

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Maybe it’s a line they hand out to every Michigander, because I have heard it several times in various configurations. But it’s heartfelt. It’s a message to people around the country complaining about current economic conditions. The gist goes something like this: “You think you had it bad? Michigan’s recession began years ago—and it was a lot worse than what you’re feeling. We’re over our grieving and are hard at work, and you should be, too.”

[Editor's note: This article is a slight modification of Nature Abhors an Entrepreneurship Vaccum, written by Xconomy founder Bob Buderi for the Kauffman Foundation's recently released Kauffman Thoughtbook 2011. Many of themes raised in the article will be discussed on April 14 at Xconomy's Michigan 2031 event, which Bob will co-moderate with Xconomy Detroit editor Thomas Lee.]

I’m not from Michigan. And until last year, when I began planning a Detroit expansion of our high-tech news network, Xconomy, I hadn’t been in the Wolverine state since 2005. Now, with Xconomy Detroit successfully launched this past April, I’ve made several trips to southeastern Michigan and talked to scores of people in the state, both in person and on the phone or through e-mail. The economic pain that has been felt in the state is obvious—and hard for an outsider to comprehend in its depth. It is clearly reflected in the state’s psyche. But equally apparent is the determination to plow on and overcome by finding new ways to create jobs and growth. I can’t help but think of a corollary to the famous “Nature abhors a vacuum” saying most often attributed to 16th century French monk Francois Rabelas:

Nature abhors an entrepreneurship vacuum.

Or, perhaps more accurately–Nature abhors an innovation vacuum–because what I believe is unfolding in Michigan encompasses far more than entrepreneurs starting and growing new companies. I think that since virtually every fabric of the state has been affected by the auto recession/meltdown, the need for innovation is also pervasive—and that people and organizations of all stripes are responding. Maybe my theory is naïve. My company has been in the state less than a year. Yet we have put out hundreds of stories in that time—all of them laser-focused on innovation. Many of these stories were about entrepreneurs and their startups. But we’ve also written about innovative approaches to venture capital, such as the Renaissance Venture Capital Fund, a fund of funds that only invests in other venture firms that invest in Michigan, and innovative non-profit organizations from TechTown to the Michigan Women’s Foundation who are testing new models designed to spur innovation and entrepreneurship from a non-profit angle. As I wrote this, in fact, the Michigan Women’s Foundation was announcing a new angel fund designed to help women entrepreneurs.

Put it all together, and if I had to bet on the upside of any place in America right now, it would be Detroit—and, by extension, all of Michigan. I’m not saying Detroit or Michigan will fly the highest and have the strongest economy in America or somehow beget the new Silicon Valley. I am saying the state has the potential to show the biggest gains on a percentage basis. To put it another way, if Detroit/Michigan were a stock, I would buy a bunch of options on it.

Xconomy began eyeing Michigan in late 2009—sensing that some sort of major transformation was in the air. Our goal is to build a series of local news sites covering the business of technology and innovation in key clusters around the world—and weave them into a global network. Detroit was not in our original business plan. There were the obvious major and semi-major clusters: Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, Austin, Research Triangle Park, even Pittsburgh or Minneapolis. But no Detroit.

But our view changed, not because of what had happened—but because of what … Next Page »

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Michigan may be many things, but lazy isn’t one of them. A prominent investor told me the other week that the state boasts an incredible work ethic, one that rivals the frenetic pace of Silicon Valley.

Given the automobile industry’s long decline, the state has made several bets on its economic future: clean energy and software in Ann Arbor, medical devices in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, high-tech manufacturing in Detroit, and nanotechnology and defense in Troy and Oakland. But will any of this hard work really pay off? Will the seeds planted now and over the past few years enable Michigan to be a leader in key fields of technology some 20 years in the future? What else needs to be done to ensure that they will?

Xconomy would love to find out. On April 14, from 5:30-7 p.m. (with networking to follow) at TechTown in Detroit, we’re hosting a forum called Michigan 2031, where some of the state’s most prominent entrepreneurs, academics, and venture capitalists will brainstorm what Michigan’s economy will look like in 20 years.

This is Xconomy’s first public event in Michigan—and we are really excited about this great evening. As an added bonus to our featured discussion looking out over the next two decades, we are planning an investor-entrepreneur lightning round to examine the current climate for innovation and what is hot now—and how the innovation that’s afoot today might pave the way for Michigan’s sustained success in 2031.

Here’s a list of the confirmed participants so far:

• Randal Charlton, Executive Director, TechTown
• David Cole, Chairman Emeritus, Center for Automotive Research
• Roger Newton, Founder, President, & CEO, Esperion Therapeutics
• Chris Rizik, CEO, Renaissance Venture Capital Fund
• Don Runkle, CEO, EcoMotors
• Ann Marie Sastry, Co-founder and CEO, Sakti3
• Charles Rothstein, Co-founder and Senior Managing Director, Beringea
• Dug Song, Co-founder and CEO, DUO Security

As you can see, it’s a who’s who of entrepreneurs, investors, and other innovators across information technology, life sciences, energy, and more. I’m really looking forward to it myself. Please register here and I hope to see you on April 14.

Tom out.

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Xtalic, a Marlborough, MA-based maker of nanostructured alloy coatings for electronics components, has raised $8 million in equity-based funding, according to an SEC filing. The funding comes from eight investors, according to the document. In 2008 Xtalic raised $10 million in Series B funding, with investments from North Bridge Venture Partners and Matrix Partners.

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Palo Alto, CA-based Nanosys, which said in August that it had raised $25 million in Series E financing from new investor Samsung Venture Investment Corporation and existing investors Arch Venture Partners, El Dorado Ventures, Polaris Venture Capital, and Venrock, announced a “second and final close” of the round today at $31 million. No additional investors were named. The company said it will use the funding to scale up manufacturing of its products for improving the color output of LED displays and the capacity of lithium-ion batteries.

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Cerulean Pharma has made lots of progress since its early days in 2007 when I first visited the biotech startup, then called Tempo Pharmaceuticals, and company chairman Alan Crane broke out his laptop to show me an animation of the newly hatched firm’s nanoparticle drugs congregating inside tumors and killing them.

The Cambridge, MA-based startup, which has raised $37 million, is now working on building clinical-trial evidence that its lead nanoparticle drug can kill tumor cells for real. Oliver Fetzer, Cerulean’s chief executive, also told me that the firm is working on raising a new funding round to bring the drug, dubbed CRLX101, further into clinical development for treating solid tumors while developing earlier-stage molecules as well.

There’s been lots of hype about the promise of nanotechnology in medicine. Cerulean is a rare case of a firm that has shown its nanoparticles could be safe for humans while delivering some of the hoped-for benefits of the tiny molecules. The company reported late last month that its lead drug was well tolerated in an initial human study. With that data, it has begun enrolling patients into its next, Phase IIa, clinical trial, which aims to provide more evidence of the drug’s ability to treat solid tumors such as lung cancer, Fetzer said. Cerulean is further along in clinical development that its local rival in the nanoparticle-based cancer drug field, Cambridge-based Bind Biosciences.

Already, Cerulean has seen how its lead nanoparticle, which contains the anti-cancer compound camptothecin, helps keep the active drug inside tumors for much longer than if the patient received the compound alone. The nanoparticle also large enough to keep it from being removed from the body by the kidneys, where it could cause side effects, but small enough to enter tumor cells to deliver the cancer-killing agent. Development of camptothecin as a stand-alone cancer drug had been scrapped years ago because of the compound’s toxic side effects, but Cerulean’s nanoparticles might be able to limit those effects by keeping the drug concentrated in the tumor cells and away from healthy tissues.

“Cerulean is at this point the only the company that has an … Next Page »

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A former pharmaceutical chief has taken the top job at Watertown, MA-based biotech startup Selecta Biosciences, a developer of nanoparticle vaccine technology. Werner Cautreels began work as chief executive of the startup in recent weeks, just months after leading one of the larger acquisition deals in the pharma industry this year.

At the same time, Selecta says it won a $3 million grant from the NIH’s National Institute of Drug Abuse to research an advanced nicotine vaccine for people addicted to cigarettes (more on that below). The grant builds on the $33 million the two-year-old startup has raised from such venture investors as Flagship Ventures, Leukon Investments, NanoDimension, OrbiMed Advisors, and Polaris Venture Partners.

Cautreels, 57, was previously the CEO of Belgium-based Solvay Pharmaceuticals, until shortly after health products giant Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) bought his company for $6.6 billion in February. His new job is a switch from a big company with lots of products and resources to a 25-employee outfit in pre-clinical development. But the startup’s new chief says there are perks to being at a young company versus an older one.

“The change is rather positive,” Cautreels says. It’s “more dynamic, less red tape, more direct contact with people.”

Bob Bratzler, who had served as executive chairman of Selecta since its founding in 2008, resigned from that post several months ago, according to the company. The firm did not have a … Next Page »

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Palo Alto, CA-based Nanosys, the nanotechnology startup that has struggled to regain altitude after a high-flying debut in 2001, is switching on the afterburners this week.

To finance a move to a larger facility where it will have more space to manufacture its nano-engineeered materials for lighting and digital displays, the company is about to close a $25 million Series E venture round, with $5 million more potentially to follow by October 1, CEO Jason Hartlove told Xconomy on Monday.

Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, is supplying $15 million of the new equity investment through its affiliate Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. The rest is from the company’s existing investors, and the $5 million second tranche is reserved for new investors. [Correction: In an earlier version of this paragraph, the second tranche amount was listed as $10 million.]

At the same time, Nanosys is announcing two other agreements with Samsung. There’s a multi-million-dollar licensing deal that will give Samsung access to Nanosys technology that could help it manufacture more efficent thin-film solar panels. And Samsung will also fund work at Nanosys to develop new quantum-dot crystals—the core of the startup’s technology for lighting enhancement—that don’t contain cadmium, a toxic element whose use is restricted in Europe and other regions.

The deals are critical ones for Nanosys, which wandered for years without a commercial product and brought in Hartlove as a turnaround CEO in 2008 (see this July 21 profile). The agreements give the startup more resources to expand into the two markets—displays and batteries—where Hartlove believes it can most quickly commercialize its own work, while at the same time allowing it to cash in on unexploited parts of its patent portfolio, particularly in solar technology. “This is a strategically important deal for us,” Hartlove says.

Gearing up to move to new quarters has been one of Hartlove’s highest priorities. The company has won a contract to supply the quantum dot phosphors inside the “QuantumRail,” a component that increases the brightness and efficiency of LED backlights for mobile device displays, to Korea’s LG Innotek, and is pursuing additional customers. That means it now has to make the phosphors in industrial quantities. But in its current location—tucked into a Palo Alto office park with burgeoning Web and software companies such as Facebook a stone’s throw away—the startup is “basically out of capacity, really footprint-limited and fire code limited,” says Hartlove.

The company will use the growth capital round to open a new facility in a larger industrial park. “It’s here, still, within the Bay Area,” Hartlove says. “We haven’t announced a site yet, but that’s what the new capital is for, the capacity expansion to meet our 2011 revenue goals.”

The next problem is an environmental one. Manufacturers of smartphones and notebook computers can use the QuantumRail technology to tune the frequencies emitted by the LED backlights in their liquid crystal displays, resulting in a far richer range of colors. But there’s a downside—the quantum dots, which are actually nanocrystals made of cadmium selenide. Cadmium is a … Next Page »

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San Jose, CA-based ultrathin-film PV developer Solexant said Tuesday that it has chosen to build its first commercial-scale nanocrystal manufacturing facility in Gresham, OR. The 100MW 100,000 to 150,000-square-foot plant will be the largest nanotechnology manufacturing facility in the world and the state’s first thin film solar manufacturing space. Solexant said it plans to receive a $18.75 million Business Energy Tax Credit (BETC) and a $25 million SELP loan from the Oregon Department of Energy (ODOE), the largest loan amount in the 30-year history of the state’s energy loan program. The funding, alongside another $64 million in equity financing Solexant has raised to date, will enable it to build the new manufacturing line in 2011, as well as additional 100MW lines in the future. The new plant will employ up to 200 Oregonians.

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BIND Biosciences has a knack for selling high-profile investors on its idea of targeting cancer cells with nanoparticle drugs. The Cambridge, MA-based startup has added to its list of marquee backers with the closing of a $12.4 million Series C round of funding, according to the company.

Endeavour Vision, the Swiss venture firm, is the latest outfit to join BIND‘s investor syndicate. Eric Milledge, a venture partner at Endeavour who was in on the BIND deal, was previously the chairman of the health care systems group at Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ). BIND says that all of its previous backers—including Arch Venture Partners, DHK Investments, Flagship Ventures, NanoDimension, and Polaris Venture Partners—participated in its third-round financing as well.

The company, which has now raised a total of about $42 million, plans to use some of the new funding to usher its first drug-loaded nanoparticle into a Phase I clinical study for treating solid tumors. If the FDA gives its nod to BIND’s plans, the trial is likely to begin in the fourth quarter of 2010, says Scott Minick, the company’s chief executive. The firm is also pursuing uses of its technology—which came from the labs of founders Bob Langer, the renowned MIT biochemist, and Omid Farokhzad of Harvard Medical School—for treating cardiovascular conditions and inflammation. The firm also wants to use its nanoparticles to overcome the monster challenge of delivering RNA-interference (RNAi) drugs deep into the body.

BIND’s technology “is a true product engine,” says Minick, who became CEO of the company last year, after initially serving as an investor and board member on behalf of Arch Venture Partners. “We’ve shown already that we can develop more than 15 different … Next Page »

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When you hear the phrase “cleantech,” you generally think of green hills studded with wind turbines, or buildings sheathed in shiny solar panels. The oil sands of Alberta—where mining companies foul vast amounts of freshwater while extracting crude oil from surface deposits, leaving behind huge, toxic tailings ponds—don’t usually come to mind.

But the way inventor/entrepreneur David Soane sees it, the global economy is going to stay hooked on petroleum for quite some time. So the more scientists can do to make oil extraction cleaner, the less damage we’ll do to the planet during the transition to a post-fossil-fuel future.

At his latest startup, Cambridge, MA-based Soane Energy, the former U.C. Berkeley professor is applying his knowledge of polymer chemistry to do exactly that. The company’s “ATA” technology—for “activation, tethering, and anchoring”—uses custom polymers that efficiently remove oil-bearing particles from the water used in oil extraction. The technology works great in Soane’s lab, and now the startup is collaborating with several operators to see whether it will work on the huge scale required in Canada.

“I believe that in the distant future, ideally, all energy should be renewable,” Soane says. “I’m a firm believer that we should continue to invest in solar, geothermal, and wind. But there is a transition period that may last 50 to 100 years. Meanwhile, we can’t blindly continue to do things they way they’ve been practiced. This technology is one little example, hopefully Soane Energy’s contribution, toward managing this transition period.”

Soane is probably most famous for founding Nano-tex, the Oakland, CA, company that supplies polymers used by clothing makers such as L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer to render textiles water- and stain-resistant. It is interfaces—in Nano-tex’s case, the interface between the polymer-protected cloth and water—that really fascinate Soane, and believe it or not, there’s a direct connection between the textile technology and the idea of cleaning up tailings ponds.

Polymers, which are basically chains of repeating chemical units, are useful at interfaces because chemists can splice together chains from two halves with different chemical properties. One end of such a chain might be tailored to attached to a substrate, such as a piece of cloth, while the other might be designed to be … Next Page »

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Early round venture funding dominated the deals news this week, but there were still announcements of partnerships, acquisitions, and IPOs to mix it up.

—Newton, MA-based energy storage company General Compression announced it had closed more than $17 million in commitments to its Series A round, but did not reveal how much of that money was in new equity investments. The funding came from U.S. Renewables Group and Duke Energy, and will go to building the company’s first commercial-scale wind power storage unit.

—Marathon Technologies, a Littleton, MA maker of fault-tolerance software, brought its Series B funding round up to $13.5 million, thanks to a third close, a regulatory filing revealed last week.

—Stealthy life sciences startup Ra Pharmaceuticals raised $10.3 million of a planned $27.6 million round of equity-based financing, according to an SEC filing. The company is incubated at the Boston office of Morgenthaler Ventures and is lead by Doug Treco, who co-founded former Transkaryotic Therapies, a Cambridge, MA company acquired by Irish drugmaker Shire in 2005.

—Intrinsic Therapeutics raised $18 million of a $20 million round that included equity, options, and warrants. An SEC filing listed New Enterprise Associates, Spray Venture Partners, and New Leaf Venture Partners as directors of Woburn, MA-based Intrinsic, which develops spinal implants to treat disc herniation.

—-Athenahealth, a Watertown, MA-based maker of Internet software for medical practices, and doctors-only social networking company Sermo announced a partnership early this week, but didn’t disclose financial terms of the deal. Athena plans on … Next Page »

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