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

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

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When Xconomy first reported the launch of a new biotech company called Karuna Pharmaceuticals in January, the Boston startup declined to reveal much about what it was working on, except to say it had two drug-development initiatives in schizophrenia. Last week, Karuna unveiled one of those programs: a group of compounds that it has licensed from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The drugs may offer a completely new way of treating schizophrenia—a brain disorder that causes hallucinations, delusions, and a range of social disabilities.

Karuna was incubated at PureTech Ventures, and its CEO is ex-Pfizer executive Ed Harrigan, a neurologist by training. Harrigan is particularly excited about the Vanderbilt compounds because they appear to address all three classes of symptoms that schizophrenia comprises. “Positive symptoms” are hallucinations and delusions, while “negative symptoms” include the inability to experience pleasure or to carry on normal social interactions. Then there are “cognitive symptoms,” such as memory loss. “Current treatments are relatively good at addressing positive symptoms, but there’s a huge need to control the other symptoms, which can be debilitating,” Harrigan says.

Instead of targeting serotonin and dopamine receptors in the brain, as most schizophrenia drugs do, Vanderbilt’s compounds inhibit a protein called glycine transporter one (GlyT1). When this protein runs amuck in the brains of patients, it pumps glycine away from neurons. Blocking that pumping action may have a wide-ranging effect on schizophrenia, says Jeff Conn, a professor of pharmacology and director of the Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery at Vanderbilt. “We believe it has the potential to address all three major symptom clusters,” he says. “If that’s the case, it would be a breakthrough.”

The Karuna compounds operate in a part of the brain that has become a specialty at Vanderbilt: the “glutamate system,” a network of signals that control memory, learning, and information processing. In 2008, Cambridge, MA-based Seaside Therapeutics awarded the University … Next Page »

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At this time last year, Luke reported that San Diego’s BrainCells Inc. had acquired the compound sabcomeline from London-based Proximagen, and planned to study the drug as a treatment for depression.

Just a couple of months earlier, we reported that BrainCells was at a crossroads after a clinical trial showed that its lead compound for treating depression didn’t work any better than a placebo in a mid-stage trial of 90 severely depressed patients. Now, judging from the company’s website, it appears those were the last two press releases the company has issued—and BrainCells is again regrouping.

After a long quiet spell, BrainCells disclosed on Aug. 1 that it has raised nearly $995,000 of a planned $14 million round that includes debt, options, and securities, according to a regulatory filing.

The filing doesn’t indicate how the company plans to spend the new money, and acting CEO Robert Williamson did not respond to questions submitted yesterday by e-mail. The profile of Williamson on BrainCells’s website says he has been involved in starting and assisting public and private companies through his consultancy, LaSalle Venture Advisers.

James Schoeneck, who had served as BrainCells CEO since 2005, apparently left the company some time ago. In April of this year, Schoeneck was named as the CEO of Depomed (NASDAQ: DEPO), a Menlo Park, CA-based specialty pharmaceutical company where he also has served as a director for nearly four years.

A spokeswoman for BrainCells confirmed this morning that the chief scientific officer, Carrolee Barlow, also has left the San Diego company. She had no additional details, however, and said she could offer no information in response to other questions submitted to the company.

In the eight years since BrainCells was founded, the company has raised at least $77 million from investors that include Bay City Capital, MedImmuneVentures, New Enterprise Associates, Oxford Bioscience Partners, Technology Partners, Pappas Ventures, NeuroVentures, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Mizuho, and Alexandria Real Estate Equities.

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Massachusetts is expected to gain 350  jobs from Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) as the world’s largest drugmaker restructures its global research and development activities to cut $1.5 billion in spending, the Boston Globe reports. New York-based Pfizer—which employs 2,300 workers at two research hubs in Cambridge and a facility in Andover it acquired through its 2009 buyout of Wyeth—will be cutting 100 jobs in the Boston area while adding 450 jobs here through the relocation of its neuroscience and cardiovascular metabolic research groups from Groton, CT, the Globe reports. The company is now looking for a new site to house those research operations in the Boston area.

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EmSense, a San Francisco startup applying measurement methods from neuroscience to study how consumers respond to advertising, packaging, and content, has raised $4 million in equity-based financing in a round that could total as much as $5.43 million, according to a regulatory filing. EmSense raised $9 million in Series C funding from Technology Partners and Foundry Group in late 2009.

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An economic report shows federal funding for medical research has become a substantial factor in fueling the innovation economy in San Diego. And as if on cue, the National Cancer Institute issued a couple of grants here. We have the rest of your life sciences news in queue here:

—The board at San Diego’s Cypress Bioscience (NASDAQ: CYPB) unanimously rejected a slightly higher buyout offer from Ramius Value and Opportunity Advisors, a private equity firm in New York. In a nod to unhappy shareholders, though, Cypress said its board would conduct a broad evaluation of the biotech’s strategic alternatives to maximize shareholder value. The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Keith Darcé provided an in-depth look at the situation.

—Federal health sciences funding for research in San Diego increased by 38 percent over the first quarter of 2010, to $341 million during the quarter that ended June 30, according to the Connect Innovation Report. That was the highest level in more than two years. But the almost-40-page report shows that venture capital investing in San Diego continues to be anemic.

—Ophthonix, a vision correction technology company based in Vista, CA, raised $5.4 million toward a $12.1 million round of equity, rights and securities.

—The National Cancer Institute has renewed a grant for the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute that will provide a total of $21 million through 2015. That’s a 21 percent increase over the cancer institute’s previous grant, according to the Sanford-Burnham.

—The National Cancer Institute also awarded $3 million to Advanced Targeting Systems, a privately held San Diego company that specializes in reagents for neuroscience researchers. ATS has developed a reagent called SP-PAP that targets chronic pain transmission, and the company plans to use the funding to initiate clinical trials for treating cancer pain.

—San Diego’s Amira Pharmaceuticals has filed an FDA application to begin clinical trials of a new drug for fibrotic disorders in the lungs. The company is seeking to run tests in healthy volunteers on AM152, an experimental blocker of a target called LPA1.

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There was no obvious reason for us to focus on the $575 million buyout of INC Research, a contract research organization based in Research Triangle Park, NC, that was announced last week.

But the acquisition by Avista Capital Partners, a New York private equity firm, and the Ontario (Canada) Teachers’ Pension Plan’s private capital group, represents a substantial return for San Diego’s Enterprise Partners Venture Capital. Enterprise’s managing director, Drew Senyei, tells me the San Diego VC firm was among the first-round investors in INC Research, which was founded in San Diego in 1996 by Kenneth Selzer, a neurologist and pain specialist.

Selzer, who was a biomedical researcher at UC San Diego at the time, says he raised initial funding of $2 million to $3 million from Enterprise, Crosspoint Venture Partners (which has offices in Irvine, CA, and Woodside, CA), and InterWest Partners of Menlo Park, CA. Selzer says INC expanded its business rapidly, and he estimates the company raised a total of only $20 million in venture funding. Crosspoint and Adams Street Partners (which has offices in Chicago, Menlo Park, CA, London and Singapore) were identified as INC’s lead investors at the time of the sale.

Selzer says he founded INC Research to help pharmaceutical companies expedite their clinical studies of potential drug candidates by tapping the expertise of private physician groups that specialize in neurology, psychiatry, pain, and neurosurgery. Because these medical groups tended to be large and had lots of patients, Selzer says they proved to be an ideal way to help drug companies conduct clinical trials of compounds being developed for pain, depression, and other neurological conditions.

“I was the CEO through 2001,” Selzer says. “Then we moved the company to RTC (Research Triangle Park) and recruited a professional CEO, Jim Ogle.” The company went from a business plan to $400 million in projected (2011) revenue and $60 million in profit, says Selzer, who is now a venture partner with San Diego’s Finistere Partners. Today, INC Research manages mostly late-stage clinical trial programs for drug development companies, and about 60 percent of the work is done outside the United States. It employs 2,000 people in 40 countries.

Enterprise Partners’ Senyei declined to discuss the firm’s return on its investment. But he concedes it was a happy outcome, saying, “If it wasn’t, I don’t know what is.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week’s tech news was dominated by a certain new device from Apple, but we found quite a few other things to write about on the San Diego tech scene.

—Our in-house gadgetphile, Wade Roush, previewed the market introduction of Apple’s iPad with a survey of Xconomy readers, and followed it up with a story about his victorious experience in buying one on opening day. There are comments all over the map here on whether this new thing is revolutionary or evolutionary. I haven’t checked out the tool myself, but I will say that Jay Flatley, the CEO of San Diego-based genomics powerhouse Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN), told me on Thursday that he was excited to get his iPad over the weekend. Flatley made a bold prediction that the iPad will be better for reading books than Amazon’s Kindle.

—San Diego-based Hookit, a maker of social networking tools for action-sports players, has been on a torrid growth curve, according to this feature story from freelancer Nathan Bomey. The growth is all the more impressive given how Hookit has been embroiled in a trademark dispute that could have caused serious trouble.

—Anybody looking for the next big thing in San Diego 20 years from now ought to take a look at computational neuroscience. That was one of the bits of advice we heard from legendary biotech entrepreneur Paul Schimmel of The Scripps Research Institute at Xconomy’s San Diego Life Sciences 2030 event last week.

—Regular readers know we love to dig up news you can’t find anywhere else about San Diego’s innovation community, and here’s a good example. We found four small financings of interesting local companies, with some help from our partner CB Insights.

—Denise offered up a timely profile of a San Diego company that is looking to seize on the trend toward more cost-effective healthcare. NextImage Medical is seeking to increase the efficiency of radiology exams, which is part of what drives up the costs of worker’s compensation insurance in California.

—We learned from scanning the SEC filings that IO Semiconductor, a San Diego fabless chip design startup, has raised $1 million in debt and equity-based funding, out of a $14 million planned offering.

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The image of the double helix has captivated the public imagination for a long time. But biotechnology today actually requires what you might call a triple helix of money, people, and ideas, according to John Mendlein, the chairman of San Diego-based Fate Therapeutics.

All three ingredients were in one place Wednesday night for Xconomy’s event on the 20-year outlook for the San Diego life sciences industry. About 175 people packed a commons at Biogen Idec’s San Diego campus to hear a panel discussion that featured Mendlein, Paul Schimmel of The Scripps Research Institute, Dan Bradbury of Amylin Pharmaceuticals, and Rusty Gage of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

“We get to peer into the future,” Mendlein said in his opening remarks. “Everyone in this room is responsible for our collective future. It really is all in our hands.”

Yes, I know, it sounds like weighty stuff, and it is. But Mendlein reminded people not to take themselves too seriously with this crystal ball stuff: “If you have questions about the future, these three gentlemen have all the answers,” Mendlein deadpanned. “You can ask them what their company stock prices will be five years from now, or 10 years from now, or 20.”

Once these guys settled into a groove, they offered up a lot of fascinating insights. Here are some of the highlights, edited for length and clarity as always.

Paul Schimmel on why he left MIT in the late 1990s to come to Scripps:

“I had many wonderful years at MIT. It’s a big place. A great place. I was well-supported. But I wanted to go back to being a seed again. I wanted to go to a place that was smaller, that would support me, and in my case [that was] The Scripps Research Institute, where there was at least the illusion of a lot of resources. But where the structure was such that you could feel you were in a scientific playground, and could start from scratch again.”

“The difference for me between Cambridge and San Diego was, when I went to Cambridge, it was a different era, but many seeds had already grown. You were basically finding your way among all these trees and trying to get new trees established. Here, there were fewer big trees. In that sense, for me it opened up more creative possibilities. It forced me even to a greater extent, into self-reliance, and freedom of thought.”

Dan Bradbury on what the San Diego biotech scene looked like when he arrived to join Amylin in the mid-90s:

“San Diego at that point had two pretty major … Next Page »

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AFraxis, a mostly stealthy San Diego biotech, is getting ready to come out with a big announcement in the next week or so, but CEO Jay Lichter previewed some key parts of the story yesterday during a presentation before the San Diego Venture Group. He says the biotech has completed pre-clinical testing of a promising compound for treating a form of autism related to Fragile X syndrome.

Lichter, who does double duty as a managing partner of San Diego-based Avalon Ventures, founded aFraxis in 2007—shortly after researchers identified a possible drug target for Fragile X, a family of related mental disorders caused by a defect (or multiple defects) in a single gene on the X chromosome.

Of course, finding a compound that fits a single molecular target (the way a key fits into a lock) is no simple matter. The process can require screening millions of compounds, and then researchers must determine if candidate compounds are reasonably safe for initial use in humans and show the relevant pharmacological activity that justifies commercial development.

“The goal is to make a single exploratory compound and test it in a mouse, and we’ve done that,” Lichter says. The aFraxis CEO didn’t provide a lot of new details about the science. The target, which was identified at MIT in Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa’s laboratory, is PAK, a specific group of enzymes that catalyze neural reactions. Lichter says the same mechanism appears to be in play with schizophrenia. As Denise reported earlier this month, Fragile X Syndrome, which is the most common known cause of autism, is believed to be caused by defects in the gene that produces this group of enzymes.

Lichter’s presentation was instead focused mostly on the ultra-lean company-building approach aFraxis has taken to get this far. After three years, he says the biotech has only a handful of employees, and Avalon has invested a total of roughly $6 million to basically get to a stage where the company could submitt an application to begin clinical trials. “We started from scratch from a paper in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” Lichter says.

The pre-clinical research was done in record time—and at a savings of roughly $4 million—by joining forces with … Next Page »

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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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