One of the big opportunities in biotech over the coming decades may come from neuroscientists who team up with Buddhists. That might sound odd at first, but it’s no joke. This is one of the big ideas on the radar of Bennett Shapiro, the former executive vice president of worldwide basic research at Merck, who lives in Seattle, and serves as a senior partner with Boston’s PureTech Ventures.

Researchers are beginning to get a stronger sense of physiological differences in the brains of Buddhists who have been practicing mind training techniques like meditation for years, as compared to, say, the average brain of a distracted American, Shapiro says. These insights, based partly on brain imaging tools like functional MRI, are sparking new ideas about how to combine meditation techniques with neurological drugs, offering potential to do a better job of treating mental health problems, he says.

“If you want to think about the future in biotechnology, you would want to think about how you can help people regulate their emotions and attention,” Shapiro says. “If one can employ mind training in combination with pharmacologic therapies, one might be able to enhance their efficacy and thereby relieve the suffering of millions of people.”

Shapiro, 70, a longtime Seattleite who I met at a coffee shop near his house in the Magnolia neighborhood, sees these unusual connections between neuroscientists and Buddhists at close range. He serves on the board of the Boulder, CO-based nonprofit Mind & Life Institute, alongside the Dalai Lama himself and top neuroscientists like Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin. The Institute is trying to encourage research beyond the current drug regimens, like with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac, which Shapiro calls “blunt instruments” aimed at treating the most complex, differentiated organ in nature, the brain.

Even though the current drugs don’t work for everybody, and placebos often do remarkably well in clinical trials, these “blunt instruments” still add up to a lucrative market for drug companies. Pfizer alone generated $6 billion last year from neurology drugs, a 17 percent gain from the prior year, making this a faster-growing product category for that company than cardiovascular disease, pain, or cancer treatments. If drugs could be made that were more effective, presumably the market would get a lot bigger. About one out of every four adults in the U.S. suffer a diagnosable mental disorder each year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

But what Shapiro is talking about could go a lot further than just diagnosable mental disorders. He’s thinking much more broadly about combinations of mind training and drugs that can help millions of children and adults. He says this sort of mind-training would be self-initiated and driven, not the coercive, frightening stuff from the movies like “A Clockwork Orange.”

If this is done the right way, Shapiro says, “Think about how people who meditate can control their emotions,” as well as their attention spans, Shapiro says. This could transform the educational system, …Next Page »

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At least in the world of finance, Brain Cells Inc. can make a credible claim that it has a little more going on upstairs than your average biotech company. The San Diego-based startup had flawless timing, by completing a $50 million Series B financing back in April, before venture capital became really hard to come by this fall.

I learned more about the company’s science and business strategy from CEO Jim Schoeneck on a visit to the company’s new headquarters a few weeks ago on General Atomics Court. The company has attracted some big-name investors to the same door, including New Enterprise Associates, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, MedImmune Ventures, Bay City Capital, Oxford Bioscience Partners, Technology Partners, Pappas Ventures, and NeuroVentures.

Brain Cells was formed in December 2004, when technologies from the labs of Fred Gage at the Salk Institute, and Rene Hen and Eric Kandel of Columbia University were merged. Gage’s long body of work debunked conventional wisdom in the 1990s that said adults don’t grow new brain cells. The next step is to show he can coax immature brain cells to become adult brain cells. Hen’s research showed how serotonin (a neurotransmitter) interacts with receptors in the brain, and how that’s connected to depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders. If the work is on the right track, they should be able to sharpen scientists’ understanding of why certain depression treatments work. Then Brain Cells could be off and running, develop new drugs that work better against mood disorders because they stimulate new neurons that grow, migrate, differentiate, and survive in the brain to fight off disease.

“We are at the beginning of understanding the biology that underlies mood disorders,” says Schoeneck. “It’s been a black box for a long time.”

Want to know how little is understood about the basic biology of mood disorders? Something like 11 percent of drugs that enter clinical trials ever make it through all the trials needed to become an FDA approved product, and that number is even lower, about 5 to 6 percent, for psychiatric drugs, Schoeneck says. The only classes with even worse batting averages are cancer treatments and women’s health drugs, he says.

Figuring out the basic biology of these diseases is time-consuming and risky, and venture capitalists certainly don’t like to plunk down that much money for a set of science experiments. So Brain Cells is trying …Next Page »

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The minute I walked into an auditorium at Microsoft Research in Redmond last night, I knew this was going to be a fun event. In foot-high letters, someone wrote on a white board, “FOOD BEHIND THIS WALL. EAT.”

It turns out that that someone, who clearly had an innate sense for how to get people to mingle, was the University of Washington’s Yoky Matsuoka, the MacArthur “genius” grant winner, and Xconomist. She was trying to light a spark for the opening session of a three-day summit she organized with Rajesh Rao of the UW, and Desney Tan of Microsoft Research. The National Science Foundation is also helping sponsor the convention.

The goals of this effort, called the Pacific Northwest Center for Neural Engineering, are to foster more collaboration among the region’s engineers, physicists, biologists, computer scientists, and neuroscientists. About 145 people signed up for the conference, including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, although I didn’t see him last night. Too bad—he missed out on a fascinating talk about neuroscience of insects, specifically moths, by UW researcher Tom Daniel. He noted that insects like moths acquire, process, analyze, store, and retrieve vast amounts of information through their neurons to control actions like flying. “Tiny brains do amazing things,” he said.

This clearly got people at Microsoft thinking and talking, exactly what the organizers had in mind. “People need to talk. If we can get people together to talk, we’re achieving something here,” Matsuoka says.

There were lots of lively conversations early on—conducted over mini-hamburgers—that could lead to new experiments, industry partnerships, or grants, Matsuoka says. She and the other organizers also note that many companies are forming research teams, and partnerships with academic labs, to develop neural engineering products like implantable chips and human-device interfaces for personal assistance and rehab. “The time is right for uniting the neural engineering efforts of academia and industry in the Pacific Northwest region,” the organizers said in a letter to attendees. “Our vision is to build a center that will be the No. 1 destination for students, researchers, and companies that want to be at the forefront of human and assistive device integration and the neural engineering field.”

Daniel, who resembles Apple CEO Steve Jobs with the wire-rim glasses and black turtleneck, truly gave a riveting (and often humorous) talk about monitoring neural activity in moths during flight—work that has been funded by various military agencies and published in Science. He even passed a live moth around the audience, which seemed to give people the willies. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said.

Then people in the audience threw some terrific questions at Daniel after his talk—always a hallmark of a lively event—including a couple that stumped him. (This was over my head, but it had something to do with the efficiency of electrical stimulation of neurons compared with chemical stimulation.)

It seemed like Daniel knew he was going to face some really keen questioning from this audience, since he started out saying, “I feel like Daniel in the neuroengineer’s den.” It looks to me like the neuroengineering den is getting livelier around here.

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GlaxoSmithKline, the world’s second-biggest drugmaker, said it agreed to invest $25 million over five years in the Harvard Stem Cell Institute for a collaboration to develop new treatments. London-based Glaxo (NYSE: GSK) said the collaboration will spur research at Harvard and at least four affiliated hospitals to study neuroscience, cancer, diabetes, obesity and musculoskeletal diseases. “We have carefully chosen the Boston biomedical community to collaborate with on this important venture. It has the highest concentration of leading stem cell scientists,” GSK’s head of drug discovery, Patrick Vallance, said in a statement.

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