The threat of global infectious disease was already a significant humanitarian concern when Ken Stuart set up his independent research lab in 1976. Now known as Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, Stuart’s lab directed the research spotlight on tropical diseases, such as malaria, at a time when few others had shown interest.

Fast-forward more than 30 years later: the Seattle region and Washington State have become known throughout the world as a nexus of global health innovation and entrepreneurship.

Original efforts decades ago by SBRI, PATH and the University of Washington have been joined by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the Institute for Systems Biology, the Infectious Disease Research Institute, Seattle Children’s Research Institute and its Global Alliance for the Prevention of Prematurity and Stillbirth program, Battelle/Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, Washington State University and, most significantly, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. These groups together now form a regionally based, yet powerful, alliance in the interest of global health. And as a result of their collaboration, this state has become the symbol of the United States’ compassion and goodwill to millions of people whose lives have been improved or saved.

This is not a statement we make lightly. It takes more than personal anecdotes of success to paint an accurate picture. So, we have created a map—a preliminary but precise accounting for the broad and deep impact that our state’s health research organizations have on global disease.

Researchers and health care workers in Washington state directly run 480 health projects in 92 countries, according to a study commissioned by the Washington Global Health Alliance, which examined nine of the state’s global health institutions.

These organizations are responsible for, among others, 183 different projects focusing on emerging and epidemic diseases and 105 vaccine and immunization programs. They work with 593 unique partners, including 44 foreign government entities, 60 corporate partners and 245 hospitals and universities.

To catalyze more effective and successful collaborations, researchers will leverage this study data to increase efficiencies and create new opportunities in their work. Businesses and philanthropists can see the direct impact of their investments and partnerships. Policymakers can use this information to demonstrate the strength of our state’s global health sector in the face of increasing competition. We will make the case for more federal funding and recruiting new global health researchers and organizations to the state, boosting our economy in the process.

This study measured data from all the organizations mentioned above with the exception of the Gates Foundation, which funds projects, but does not implement programs. Not included in those figures are the significant education and training programs spearheaded by our universities and community colleges, other state research organizations and humanitarian and relief organizations, such as World Vision or Mercy Corps. We expect to broaden the scope in future studies mapping global health efforts.

All told, it is clear the magnitude of Washington State’s impact on infectious disease and suffering is significant and exceptional. Ultimately, we hope this study leads to even greater progress toward our common vision-improving health for people regardless of where they may live. You can see the more detailed survey results at www.wghalliance.org.

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The local life sciences scene was pretty quiet this week, although we heard more than usual from medical device companies.

—Paul Yager, the University of Washington’s chair of bioengineering, offered a detailed status update on a tool called the DxBox his lab has been developing the past four years in collaboration with Redmond, WA-based Micronics, Seattle-based PATH, and Bothell, WA-based ELITech Group, all with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They are seeking to develop a portable, fast, accurate, and rugged diagnostic tool to help doctors in the developing world, and while there’s been a lot of progress, it’s entered the “put up or shut up” phase, Yager says.

—Seattle-based Dendreon turned in its complete application to the FDA for clearance to start marketing its first drug, sipuleucel-T, (Provenge) in the U.S. This filing came a bit earlier than Dendreon had forecasted, but it’s also a lot later than the company originally hoped when it first asked the FDA for approval, which you can read more about in this Dendreon history piece I did back in April.

—The Institute for Systems Biology said it has commissioned Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics to sequence the full genomes of 100 individuals as part of a Huntington’s disease experiment. This experiment is said to be the largest ever to use full human genome sequences.

—We’ve seen a few medical technology companies that are seeking to repair damaged tissues without leaving behind any implantable devices, and Bothell, WA-based QuantumCor is the latest. CEO Vern Dahl described his company’s plan to do this for a form of heart failure known as mitral valve regurgitation.

—Seattle-based Calypso Medical Technologies, the maker of a device to pinpoint radiation therapy for prostate cancer to minimize side effects, formed a collaboration with Siemens Healthcare. The companies will seek to develop the technology for pancreas and lung tumors.

—We also had an insightful guest editorial from Anthony Rodriguez, a Ph.D. bioengineering student at the University of Washington and an aspiring entrepreneur. He contends that it takes a village to raise an entrepreneur, and that while a few organizations have made some effort to cultivate young entrepreneurs at the UW, the business community could be doing much more.

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When somebody gets a fever in a poor country, there is no quick or easy way to tell whether it’s a symptom of flu, malaria, a bacterial invader, or some other bug.

And if you don’t what it is, then it’s hard to treat.

So it’s only natural that shrinking modern diagnostic tools into a lightweight box that’s fast, accurate, cheap, and rugged enough for the African bush is one of the big ideas the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has supported in the past five years. The instrument is now starting to take shape under the direction of a team at the University of Washington, through what’s called the DxBox, which looks a little like the popular video game console with a similar name. And this particular box is entering a delicate phase in which big decisions are being made about whether it is really ready for a prime time commercial push, in which it could help healthcare workers better diagnose millions of people.

The original Gates grant, worth $15.4 million over five years, went to a diverse collaboration between a pair of bioengineering labs at the University of Washington, global health experts at Seattle-based PATH, and a couple of commercial partners in Redmond, WA-based Micronics and what used to be called Bothell, WA-based Nanogen (now part of ELITech Group). Four years have now passed by since the first check arrived. As the lead scientist on the project, UW bioengineering chair Paul Yager, put it in a recent UW symposium, “it’s put up or shut up time.”

What he really meant is that enough work has been done that it’s time to size up the real-world commercial potential of the product, or maybe spend some more time back at the drawing board. “You have to take what’s in a lab here in Seattle and scrunch it down to that,” Yager said, pointing to a prototype sitting on a shelf in his office, when I followed up recently. “It’s probably about two years away.”

DxBox

So after all of the long hours from 40 UW graduate students and postdocs, another 60 professionals outside the UW, and a lot of trial and error to meet all the demanding requirements of a portable diagnostic, what can this DxBox really do?

It is made to take a pinprick of blood, which a health worker squeezes onto a cartridge that slides into an 8-pound prototype device. All the health worker needs to do is hit “run,” and the pumps and valves inside the little box perform two kinds of automatic diagnostic tests. One is an immunoassay test that uses conventional antibodies, not all that different from a pregnancy test, that are made to bind with certain microbial invaders or antibodies that people produce in response to a certain infection. The other test is a more precise nucleic acid assay, which is supposed to identify microbes at the DNA level. Both tests are made to spit out an answer on an LCD screen in whatever the worker’s native language is, within 30 minutes, to identify the patient’s illness, Yager says. And the machine can run a full day on a laptop battery in places without electricity, Yager says.

The DxBox was designed to screen for six common illnesses that are associated with high fevers—flu, malaria, typhoid, rickettsial infections, measles, and dengue. Even from the start, the machine wasn’t made to be comprehensive, since it doesn’t screen for two of the biggest killers …Next Page »

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Somebody forgot to tell the Northwest biotech community this is the height of vacation season. Our pages this week were packed with stories on financings, clinical trials, exclusive interviews and more.

—Rick Klausner, the former leader of the National Cancer Institute and the global health wing of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, provided some intriguing insights on cutting-edge biology that he’s been following in his new job as a venture capitalist. Deep into this story, Klausner explains why he thinks Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN) is just scratching the surface of what immune-stimulating therapies will be able to do in the future.

—Targeted Growth gets its share of publicity for its camelina seeds that are used to make jet fuel, but further in the future, Targeted Growth envisions making a bigger impact with genetically modified algae that can be made to compete on price with petroleum. We got the story from a conversation with Targeted Growth’s Margaret McCormick.

—Seattle-based Cell Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CTIC) raised about $40 million last month, and lo and behold, this week it found yet another lone institutional investor willing to wager another $30 million that this company has brighter days ahead. Cell Therapeutics has asked the FDA to approve its experimental pixantrone therapy for patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

—PATH, the Seattle-based nonprofit that works to improve health in poor countries, won the closest thing the humanitarian field has to the Nobel—the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize. PATH president Chris Elias envisions using the $1.5 million cash award as seed capital for a five-year, $25 million plan to support innovative new global health technologies, and to support geographic expansion in Africa.

—Amgen scientists in Seattle had something to celebrate a week ago, but just one week later the picture has gotten a little muddier. Earlier, we reported that the first big prospective clinical trial confirmed the company’s hypothesis that panitumumab (Vectibix) can slow the spread of tumors for colorectal cancer patients with normal forms of the KRAS gene (and that the drug doesn’t help those with mutated forms). This week a second clinical trial in a sicker patient population found the same pattern with respect to slowing the spread of tumors, although the treatment didn’t actually help normal KRAS patients live any longer.

—Seattle Genetics put the finishing touches on its big stock offering, which ended up generating a grand total of $136 million. The Bothell, WA-based developer of cancer drugs (NASDAQ: SGEN) said its underwriters exercised all their options to buy an extra 1.65 million shares. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs were joint book-running managers of the offering. (Apparently Seattle Genetics saw fit to use at least a little money to spiff up its website, too.)

—Seattle-based biotech consultant Stewart Lyman submitted another intriguing editorial for the Xconomist Forum on why Big Pharma companies have many reasons to make biologic drugs. Some of this is about science, but there’s politics and business to consider, too.

—Mukilteo, WA-based CombiMatrix (NASDAQ: CBMX), the maker of genetic analysis tools, is looking to hire an investment bank to consider whether the time is right to sell the company. Back in June, after it got crushed by bigger competitors selling DNA microarray tools, I profiled the company’s attempt to reinvent itself around cancer diagnostics.

— Light Sciences Oncology isn’t just about oncology anymore. The Bellevue, WA-based company said it has started enrolling patients in a clinical trial to see if it can treat benign prostatic hyperplasia, otherwise known as an enlarged prostate. The company’s technology uses light-emitting diodes, threaded into localized tissue, to activate a drug within a certain wavelength.

—Seattle-based Sound Pharmaceuticals, the developer of treatments for hearing loss, said this week it nailed down a $2.1 million contract from the U.S. Navy to continue developing its lead therapy. It’s the third grant the company has gotten from the Navy since 2005, and will enable it to beef up its pipeline of experimental treatments, says CEO Jonathan Kil.

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PATH, the Seattle-based nonprofit that works to improve health in poor countries, said today it has won the closest thing the humanitarian field has to the Nobel Prize—the $1.5 million cash award known as the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize.

The news was delivered at an exuberant press conference this morning with PATH president Christopher Elias, Bill Gates Sr. of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and officials of the Hilton Foundation. The prize, given annually since 1996, has gone to other big-name health nonprofits in the past like Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders. The story first appeared on The Seattle Times.

PATH, as I explained in this profile back in February, has such a broad portfolio of projects that it sometimes struggles to explain what it does in a sound bite. But essentially it seeks out clever, affordable technologies, and partnerships with clever entrepreneurs and government agencies, to help improve the health of have-nots around the world. It has developed or played a role in co-developing 85 different technologies being used to improve global health, such as needles designed to curb the spread of infectious diseases, simple diagnostic tests for common diseases, and stickers on vaccine vials that can tell whether the immunization has gone bad. We’ve written a lot about PATH in the past year, including its work to improve the nutritional value of rice, fix broken bones, purify water, and develop new vaccines that can withstand hot and cold temperatures.

“We were absolutely thrilled when we heard,” Elias said during a brief conversation after the press conference. “We’ve been nominated in prior years, but haven’t won.”

The award may not sound like a lot of cash for an organization with 800 employees and a $240 million annual budget, but Elias made it sound like he plans to get major bang for the buck. PATH plans to use the money to expand its field operations in Africa, to scale up big production of existing global health technologies, and to provide seed funding for new technologies.

He gave an example of what he means when he talks about leveraging resources. Five years ago, PATH wanted to compete for grants to improve health in South Africa, but couldn’t be a serious …Next Page »

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Some of the lesser-known names in Seattle life sciences made some noise this week, just when we here at the Xconomy biotech desk thought things might slow down a tad in the dog days of summer.

—AVI Biopharma (NASDAQ: AVII), the Portland, OR-based maker of RNA-based therapies, is now getting a new tagline as the Bothell, WA-based maker of RNA-based therapies. This company, led by CEO Les Hudson and chairman Christopher Henney, decided to move its headquarters to the Seattle area to tap into this region’s deeper biotech talent pool as it advances drugs through clinical trials for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, Ebola and Marburg virus, and other tough-to-treat conditions.

—Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN) has one of the most avid fan bases in the biotech industry, but few people realize it has a low-key neighbor across the lake in Bothell, WA, that has also produced some very impressive results against prostate cancer this year. Scott Cormack, the CEO of OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: OGXI) told me this week in an exclusive feature that he’s fielding “competitive” partnership proposals from a number of Big Pharma companies that want a piece of its action.

—Sometimes you have to strike while the iron is hot in biotech, and that’s what Seattle-based Oncothyreon did this week. The company (NASDAQ: ONTY) said on Monday that some follow-up data suggests its immune-boosting therapy for lung cancer was able to generate long-term tumor responses without causing any serious side effects. This boosted the stock 26 percent on Monday. One day later, Oncothyreon CEO Bob Kirkman seized on the newfound demand for his shares by selling some more shares, and refilling the company coffers with $15 million.

—Scientists over at PATH, the Seattle-based nonprofit that works to improve health in poor countries, were pumped up about a new formula they developed that was shown to protect hepatitis B vaccine from getting damaged by hot or cold temperatures. This work, financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, only adds one-tenth of a penny to the cost of a vaccine dose, and PATH says it ought to work just as well for a wide range of vaccines.

—Seattle-based ZymoGenetics (NASDAQ: ZGEN) said this week that second-quarter sales started to pick up, as expected, for its sole marketed product for surgical bleeding. The company reported $6 million in sales of recombinant thrombin (Recothrom), which puts it on pace to reach its full-year sales forecast of $25 million to $35 million.

—Buddhists and biotechies don’t usually go hand-in-hand, but this sort of unlikely alliance might yield some big future opportunities for biomedical entrepreneurs in mental health, according to Seattle’s Ben Shapiro. He’s the former executive vice president of worldwide research at Merck, who has been exposed to these ideas through serving on the board of the nonprofit Mind & Life Institute in Boulder, CO.

—Does the laid-back Northwest lifestyle keep this region from reaching its full potential as a dynamic hub of innovation and entrepreneurship? Janis Machala, the champion of startup creation at the UW TechTransfer office, stirred the pot last week with some thought-provoking comments about this idea at an event hosted by the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association. This generated a lot of comments, many of them quite thoughtful, at the tail end of the story.

—Seattle-based Amnis, the maker of an instrument for high-speed imaging of cells, said it closed on the first $839,000 out of a $1.5 million round of financing. The company, which has seen rising demand for its second-generation product, raised the cash from CVF LLC, MedVenture Associates, and OrbiMed Capital, and angel investors.

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Scientists at PATH, the Seattle-based nonprofit that works to improve health in poor countries, have found a cheap and simple way to tackle one of the vexing challenges of global health: how to keep vaccines from going bad when they get either too hot or too cold.

PATH scientists, with help from collaborators at U.K-based Arecor and University of Colorado, said they were able to develop a new formulation of hepatitis B vaccine that was able to withstand temperatures as high as 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) for a year’s worth of shelf life, while also remaining stable at temperatures as cold as -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit). The new formulation was well-tolerated in animals. The findings were published recently in the scientific journal Vaccine.

Public health officials have been searching for decades for practical methods to deliver vaccines into remote places of the African bush, where there’s no consistent source of electricity, or enough space in refrigerators. Current vaccines, except for the oral polio vaccine, must be shipped and stored in a “cold chain” that preserves them at temperatures between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees to 46.4 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the World Health Organization. Any method that allows major vaccines to be stored for a year at room temperatures, instead of in refrigerators, could make it much easier to store vaccines in hot, remote places, where millions of people live around the world.

Along with improved sanitation, mass vaccination is one of the key forces credited with raising life expectancies from about 47 in 1900 to about 77 at the turn of the millennium in wealthy countries. Vaccine technology has been improving in recent years, and raising its profile in the pharmaceutical industry. The market is estimated to grow from an estimated $10 billion in 2007 to some $24 billion globally by 2012, according to a research report from Kalorama Information.

“This could be very far-reaching. We hope this will impact the status quo in the future,” says Dexiang Chen, a senior technical officer for vaccine stabilization at PATH.

How did the researchers do it? After years of testing, the scientists found two …Next Page »

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Raising money and making deals were the trends of our life sciences stories this past week. And sometimes more than just business executives benefit.

—Greg reported that University of Washington spinoff company Bio Architecture Labs raised $3.4 million in equity funding this week. The company, which works to create synthetic biofuels and renewable chemicals, apparently has put the $1.5 million it raised last year to good use.

—Spun out of the same UW research lab (biochemist David Baker’s), Seattle-based Arzeda also had a good week. The company announced it is teaming up with chemical conglomerate Du Pont to make more productive crops. Arzeda develops artificial enzymes that both companies hope will improve the yield of agricultural plants.

—Greg also wrote about San Francisco-based Limerick BioPharma scoring $15 million in a Series C investment led by OVP Venture Partners, based in Kirkland, WA. Limerick is developing methods of cutting down on drug side effects for better outcomes. OVP expects that human trials will validate the investment.

—Water can be cleaned for drinking easily and cheaply, as featured in my story about Seattle-based PATH and Cascade Designs. The two organizations are working together to develop water purifiers for small, poor communities around the world. A Kenyan community with limited access to clean water is testing the latest prototype.

—The Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association wants to step up the success of local companies. WBBA president Chris Rivera is working hard to increase venture capital contributions in the area, and has been bringing in major VC players like SR One to show off the talent and try to entice funding for Washington companies, as Luke reported.

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Taking a sip from a kitchen faucet rarely causes someone’s heart to pound or adrenaline to flow, but for millions around the world, drinking the local water is just another version of Russian roulette. With every mouthful of water, people in developing countries imbibe bacteria and viruses that can and often do cause lethal diseases, especially in children. According to the World Health Organization, diarrheal diseases from impure water kill 4,100 children every day.

Seattle-based PATH is one of many organizations that seek to alleviate the poor health conditions found around the world. Distributing vaccines, educating about AIDS, and improving general healthcare in underserved parts of the world are all part of PATH’s mandate. In 2008, using a grant from the Laird Norton Family Foundation, PATH began exploring ways of using commercial water-purifying technology for small villages and towns. “We did a broad outreach and looked at different ideas,” said Kendra Chappell, manager of the pure water project at PATH. Eventually, PATH decided to partner with Seattle-based Cascade Designs, a company that makes camping equipment. Cascade, with money from the U.S. Defense Department, had developed a cheap and clean method of water purification through a process called electro-chlorination. “It was a good match,” Chappell said.

The purifier created by Cascade uses electricity to create chlorine, which quickly kills parasites, bacteria, and viruses. Salt is added to the unclean water, and then the mixture is zapped by a few volts of electricity. (The electricity breaks the salt into its component elements of sodium and chlorine.) “It turns brine into a powerful disinfectant,” said Laura McLaughlin, an environmental engineer and project manager at Cascade. The system carefully measures the amount of chlorine generated, so that only enough is made to clean the water—not so much that the water becomes undrinkable. “Our system is geared toward providing the right dose,” McLaughlin said.

Other methods of water purification are not usually as thorough or effective. Water filters cannot keep out viruses because they are much smaller than bacteria, and even iodine cannot kill all …Next Page »

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Many people thought tuberculosis had gone away. Unfortunately, it has not. Indeed, it is coming back strongly, and in a multidrug resistant form. This has occurred at a time of a vacuum in drug discovery and development for tuberculosis.

Fortunately, government institutions like the National Institutes of Health, non-governmental agencies like the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, PATH, and even pharmaceutical companies are investing in tuberculosis research.

Interestingly, pharmaceutical companies are doing this for the public good, as it is unlikely that this research could ever be turned into a profitable business for them. Nonprofit organizations like the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development are clinically testing new and more convenient treatments for patients.

Encouragingly, at the Pacific Health Summit, the Global Alliance and Johnson & Johnson’s Tibotec subsidiary announced a novel partnership devoted to the development of an innovative new drug for both drug-sensitive and drug-resistant TB [See Xconomy's earlier coverage].

Much of this work in research and development is being shepherded and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Scientists follow the money. If the money flows in to support TB, so too will high-quality scientists.

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Seattle’s biotech companies must be trying to get a lot done before Memorial Day weekend, because we had reports on deals, layoffs, and big strategic moves.

—Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN) has spent years trying to prove that its immune-boosting therapy for prostate cancer really works, and now it has to show it can make enough of it to meet coming demand. The company has just one commercial manufacturing facility, and it is rapidly trying to scale it up over the next 14 months so it can pump out a maximum of $500 million to $1 billion worth of Provenge each year, says CEO Mitchell Gold.

—Archus Orthopedics, the Redmond, WA-based developer of spinal implants that help people remain mobile after back surgery, has laid off most of its employees and significantly scaled back operations to conserve its remaining cash.

—Accelerator, the Seattle-based investment vehicle for biotech startups, bankrolled its 10th company, called Xori. The company raised $2.1 million out of a $4.5 million round, toward a goal of developing technology that will make antibody drugs much more quickly, and with better properties, than existing methods.

—Cancer drugs represent one of the most intense fields of interest in biotechnology, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that a lot of Seattle biotech companies have news coming out at this year’s meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology from May 29 to June 2. ASCO posted brief online summaries of a lot of clinical trial data to be presented, and I combed through the most interesting abstracts from companies in the Northwest.

—Bionavitas, a Redmond, WA-based developer of light technology to help algae grow much more efficiently, explained its strategy in this feature story. It sees more promising markets in using algae to make food additives and for toxic cleanup—at least in the early days—than for biofuels.

—I heard about an intriguing new startup called Presage Therapeutics, a spinoff from the Fred Hutchinson …Next Page »

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