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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

It’s been a while since our last data-driven news roundup of Bay Area business and technology news. Here are some of the choicest tidbits from the last few days, from biggest to smallest:

$134.6 million—The amount that San Francisco- and Portland, OR-based Jive Software hopes to raise in its upcoming IPO, according to a regulatory filing updated yesterday. The enterprise collaboration company plans to sell 11.7 million common shares at $8 to $10 per share, giving it a market capitalization of $515 million.

$88.6 million—New funding for Fremont, CA-based Soraa, which is developing more efficient gallium nitride-based lasers for consumer, biomedical, defense, and industrial applications. The funding was disclosed in a regulatory filing; the stealthy company’s main backer is Khosla Ventures.

$30 million—A Series E financing round for Fremont, CA-based solar panel maker Solaria, as reported today by Dow Jones VentureWire. Investors in the round were not named.

$4.5 million—New funding for San Francisco-based Academia.edu, an open publishing site where academics can upload and share scholarly papers and track who’s reading them. Spark Capital led the round, which was joined by True Ventures.

$4 million—New funding for Awe.sm, a San Francisco startup that just rolled out a technology to help developers build tools into their applications to track the effectiveness of social media marketing efforts. Foundry Group and GRP Partners led the round.

$4 million—Additional funding announced today for Miso, a San Francisco-based social TV platform where friends can share comments about the shows they’re watching. Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures, Hearst Interactive Media provided the funds.

$1 million—New seed financing for LawPivot, the Google Ventures-backed provider of legal services for startups. Vaizra Investments, Venture51, Quotidian Ventures, and individual investors participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $1.6 million.

30,000—The number of physicians now using Doximity, a secure “Facebook for doctors,” according to an announcement from the company. That’s about five percent of the total population of U.S. physicians. Xconomy profiled Doximity in June.

150—The number of people now allowed to join personal networks within Path 2, the new version of the Path photo sharing network introduced last year by Facebook alum Dave Morin. Path networks were previously capped at 50.

20—The number of new $100,000 Thiel Fellowships available to budding entrepeneurs aged 19 or under. Applications for the 2012 round of the “20 under 20″ fellowships, which are offered by the San Francisco-based Thiel Foundation, are due December 31. The foundation just posted the first in a series of videos about the 2011 fellows and their projects.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Melinda Moree, the Seattle-based CEO of a group that serves as a liaison between for-profit biotech and nonprofit global health organizations, is moving on.

Moree is stepping down as CEO of BIO Ventures for Global Health, a nonprofit seeks to help develop biotech innovations like drugs, vaccines and diagnostics that can be applied in poor countries where they otherwise wouldn’t be developed. Moree, who has been in the job for about two and a half years, is being replaced on Feb. 1 by Don Joseph, the organization’s chief operating officer. Moree, who had been CEO of the organization since July 2009, will stick around as a part-time executive chair of BIO Ventures for Global Health.

The move by Moree is the latest in a string of executive comings and goings in the global health community. PATH president Chris Elias announced three weeks ago that he’s resigning after 11 years at the helm of the Seattle-based nonprofit to run anti-poverty programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And Christian Loucq, the director of the PATH-supported Malaria Vaccine Initiative, is also leaving his position.

Moree didn’t immediately respond this afternoon to a request for comment about her departure. But Robert Chess, the chairman of Nektar Therapeutics and former chairman of the board at BIO Ventures for Global Health, said in a statement the executive moves were part of a planned process.

“My decision has been made much easier knowing that Don Joseph, with his passion and drive for solving global health problems, will be taking over as CEO,” Moree said in a statement. “I am very pleased to continue my involvement with BIO Ventures for Global Health through this new position on the Board.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

This Friday the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association (WBBA) will release findings from its 2010 Economic Impact Report at their Governor’s Life Sciences Summit and WBBA Annual Meeting. With the sometimes volatile ups and downs of our industry, these findings have the potential to propel WBBA forward in both current and new initiatives and strategies to build Washington state’s life sciences sector.

We know the life sciences industry has grown to be a significant part of Washington state’s economy. Even through tough economic times, we’ve seen employment numbers pass many of the traditional resource-based industries on which the state’s economy was founded. The life sciences industry is crucial not only because of its size, but also because of its potential for economic growth and improved health for individuals. As the trade association serving this industry in Washington, WBBA has been effective in supporting its members and companies as they work to translate innovation to realization. As I take over the reins as the next WBBA board chair, our goal will be to continue to advance the agenda that we have established thus far—to help all of our member organizations get access to additional financing to further their product development efforts.

Under Tom Clement and Chris Rivera’s leadership, the WBBA has done a good job of laying a solid foundation for establishing Washington state as a leader in the life sciences and in global health. We have one of the largest, most vibrant industry organizations in the country. However, in order for us to maintain our leadership role globally, we have to take a long-term approach by continuing to make investments in projects that have the potential to grow into bigger and more substantial development projects that benefit our healthcare ecosystem. This will require the help and support of all of our stakeholders—from WBBA members to our affiliate members, to local, state and federal elected officials, to patient advocacy groups, to healthcare providers and any other groups willing to join us. There is much to do in educating both the public and our elected officials so that they understand the long-term benefits of what our industry can provide in terms of hope and in terms of the life-saving healthcare solutions for patients and their families. Working together, we can develop sustainable policies that can be implemented now to support and grow our diverse life sciences sector.

Fundamentally we’ve come out of a pretty tough time. Right now, life science companies are facing substantial risks. The public markets haven’t … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Put high-quality cameras into devices with broadband wireless connections. Add powerful smartphone operating systems like iOS or Android and app-store ecosystems like iTunes and the Android Market. Mix in some sloth and disinterest on the part of established photo-sharing destinations like Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

Under these conditions, it was probably inevitable that entrepreneurs would create a slew of new mobile photo-sharing startups like Instagram, Picplz, and Path. Instagram, with somewhere north of 12 million users, seems to be the winner in this space so far; it’s getting smartphone owners used to the concept of snapping photos on the go, applying optional faux-vintage filters, and sharing instantly on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, or Foursquare.

Now comes the next logical step: video sharing apps and startups. All of the latest smartphones shoot high-definition video as well as photos, but so far, Instagram doesn’t let users share video clips—at least, not yet. That’s created room for even newer iPhone apps like Socialcam from Justin.TV, Vlix from Spotmixer, and Klip, from the Palo Alto, CA, startup of the same name.

All of these free apps let users record and edit short video clips and share them with friends. None have a gigantic following yet, and I don’t know which one will dominate. But if the contest were being decided on sheer elegance, the winner right now would be Klip.

I sat down recently with Alain Rossmann, the veteran computing and mobile entrepreneur behind Klip, and got a tour of the app and a glimpse of the thinking behind its design. (See the video below.) If there’s a single theme that differentiates Klip from the other video sharing apps, it’s Rossmann’s obsession with refining the user-experience details.

That’s a skill he says he began to develop at Apple, where he was on the marketing team for the original Macintosh in the early 1980s. One thing Rossmann says he learned from Steve Jobs—whose “genius was there even then, but also the difficult side”—was that “the last 10 percent of refinement gets you 90 percent of the market share.” Which explains why Klip includes seemingly obscure but aesthetically important features like face detection—to make sure that the profile photo that shows up alongside your uploaded videos is cropped properly. “When you see your friends, you want to see their face,” Rossmann insists. “To get that on a phone with retina-display resolution, you have to do face detection.”

Here’s a short video of Rossmann demonstrating Klip. Story continues after video.

Rossmann has five startups under his belt prior to Klip. Three went public, and two were acquired. That’s “more than any one man, or his wife, should have to bear,” he jokes. But he can’t seem to resist.

After Apple, Rossmann co-founded Radius with a group of other Macintosh team alums; the company made graphics cards and external displays for the Mac. Next came C-Cube Microsystems, which built the first chips for handling MPEG video compression. EO, which made a pen-based wireless communications tablet (like the iPad, but about 16 years ahead of its time) was next. Then there was Unwired Planet, which helped give birth to the Wireless Access Protocol for Web browsing on feature phones and ultimately morphed into OpenWave (NASDAQ: OPWV). And finally there was … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

This was a week of volatile ups and downs in Seattle biotech. Yeah, I know, what’s new?

—Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN), the cancer drug developer that so many people love to hate, gave its critics some more ammunition in its quarterly financial report. The company reported $64.3 million in third quarter sales, which slightly edged Wall Street expectations. But the company still only projects “modest” quarter-over-quarter sales growth for its prostate cancer drug—which isn’t what investors expected earlier this year when they gave Dendreon a market valuation of more than $5 billion. And the company is burning capital like a Ferrari goes through fuel. Dendreon vaporized $106 million of cash in the third quarter, and had $568 million left on the books at the end of September. Dendreon stock fell 20 percent in after-hours trading.

—Bellevue, WA-based Cardiac Insight is the latest University of Washington spinoff to leave the nest, with a technology license and $700,000 in a Series A financing. We had the inside scoop this week on how this company, led by CEO Tom Clement, seeks to detect a common cause of stroke with a low-cost, disposable adhesive device.

—Did you know that Al Gore came this close to being a VIP scientist for a day at Immunex? That was one of the fun bits of trivia I discovered as Immunoids have been coming forward with bits of memorabilia to display at our next big Xconomy event in Seattle on Dec. 1. If you’ve got some piece of Immunex swag, photos, papers, etc. that you think would be fun to share with the wider biotech community, please let me know at ltimmerman@xconomy.com. And please, tell me the backstory, which is always more fun than just looking at an old lab coat.

—Seattle Children’s Hospital had some big news: a $50 million anonymous donation to support its research efforts. The hospital also got another $15 million donation from Jean Reid to support nursing education and clinical care.

—PATH CEO Chris Elias, the guy who led the global health nonprofit to prominence over the past decade, is moving on to a new challenge. Elias said this week he’s resigning from his job at PATH to become the new president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s anti-poverty efforts. Elias starts the new job in February. PATH is now looking for a successor.

—”The Cancer Drug Dark Ages are Coming to an End.” That was the optimistic headline I slapped on this week’s BioBeat column, which talked about big leaps forward in personalized cancer medicine that all came in succession back in August. I think there’s strong evidence to support being optimistic, but for those of you out there who think I’m missing the boat, please post a comment at the end and let me know.

—Emerald Biostructures, which I think is the first and only company from Bainbridge Island, WA to get covered in these pages, had some good news to report. Emerald got a three-year contract extension from UCB, its largest customer, to deliver 3-D structures of biological targets that UCB wants to develop drugs against.

—Last but not least, we had a guest post from Stewart Lyman about how “Biopharma Industry Meetings Could Use Some Fresh Voices.” Lyman points that if the pharma industry is in crisis, it’s odd that everybody still looks to the same old folks from Merck, Pfizer, Novartis et al. for answers on how to get out of the mess.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

PATH president and CEO Chris Elias, who led the global health nonprofit to prominence over the past decade, is stepping down to become the president of global development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Elias joined PATH in 2000, when it had an annual budget of $44 million and a staff of 297 employees, according to a statement today from the Seattle-based global health nonprofit. PATH now has an annual budget of $295 million and more than 1,100 employees around the world, the nonprofit organization says.

PATH, as I described in it a February 2009 feature, essentially seeks out clever, affordable technologies, and partnerships with companies to help improve the health of have-nots around the world. The organization has grown rapidly in parallel with the Gates Foundation over the past decade, and it has received more than $1.3 billion from the foundation in its history for efforts to develop low-cost health interventions with big potential impact, like a malaria vaccine.

“Developing and delivering global health solutions with my colleagues at PATH has been an honor and a privilege. It isn’t easy to leave such a talented and committed team. But I leave knowing that PATH is an exceptionally strong organization with an even brighter future ahead,” Elias said in a statement. “I look forward to watching PATH continue to innovate and improve the lives of people around the world.”

In his new job, Elias will help lead the Gates Foundation’s efforts to fight poverty in developing countries. He will stay at PATH through January. PATH chair Molly Joel Coye will lead a board committee that will search for Elias’ successor, PATH said in a statement.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

For vacationers who are unsure of where to go for their next trip, New York’s Wanderfly is bringing its recommendation technology to a broad audience of travelers. Last Wednesday, technology from Wanderfly began running on some 1,000 travel pages hosted by The New York Times, according to Christy Liu, co-founder and director of marketing for Wanderfly. Her company’s website and technology offers users ideas on where to travel based on such criteria as personal interests and price range. The new partnership puts Wanderfly in front of readers visiting The New York Times‘s travel section and makes good on the startup’s plans for funding it raised early this year.

Two-year-old Wanderfly raised $1 million in February from investors such as Charles River Ventures; MentorTech Ventures; Jason Calacanis, CEO and founder of Mahalo; and Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin. Part of that funding was put towards bringing Wanderfly’s technology on partner websites. Wanderfly has raised a total of $1.4 million, says Liu, since its inception.

Under the partnership with The New York Times, Wanderfly’s technology generates travel recommendations that appear in the left margin of the Web pages, based in part on the destinations the readers are already viewing. “If you are on the New York City page, you might also like L.A. or Milan,” Liu says. “That is powered by our data.”

Wanderfly’s website lets users choose a price range for a trip, and … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

I recently organized a MOHAI walking tour of South Lake Union to begin to explore the roots of the museum’s new neighborhood. My original intent was to explain the importance of South Lake Union as a biotech hub but a different theme emerged in the course of my research. It is true that Seattle has some success attracting biotech organizations to the city, and the prospects for our region are promising, but not stellar. Where our city, and the South Lake Union neighborhood in particular are “punching above our weight” is in our contribution to global health.

The most important asset for the city has been the University of Washington, which generates the intellectual feedstock that might foster either biotech or global health. Beginning in the 1960s, the school transformed itself from general education university to a formidable research institution. While the conventional wisdom is that Warren Magnuson funneled money to the school when he was head of the Senate appropriations committee, Lee Huntsman makes the distinction that Magnuson championed the growth in the National Institutes of Health and then informed the UW of what they had to do to compete for those funds. Needless to say, they learned to compete very effectively. UW is consistently among the top recipients of NIH funding.

The relative significance of global health may say more about our culture than our competence. While the UW is adept at winning grant money, it is less well known for launching companies. The saying is that “if you work at Stanford and get an idea, you call a VC. If you work at UW, you write a paper.”

Still, biotech is an attractive economic engine and the idea that biotech should congregate in South Lake Union goes back as far as 1985, according to The Seattle Times. But there is no evidence that when the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (the Hutch) moved to Fairview Avenue in 1994 they were influenced by the potential for the neighborhood. Most important to them was finding a site that was large enough and inexpensive enough to bring together their research groups. Likewise, when ZymoGenetics moved to the city’s former Steam Plant that same year (the “mother of all fixer-uppers”) it was for flexible space at a low price.

But by the time of the debate over the Commons project in 1995, Paul Allen envisioned the park surrounded by a collection of high-tech and biotech companies. After the failure of two referenda, Allen’s Vulcan Inc. redoubled its efforts to attract biotech facilities and it seemed logical to funnel software profits into the next big knowledge industry. It wasn’t until 2002 that the movement of Merck’s Rosetta Inpharmatics to Terry Avenue provided some validation for the skeptics.

In 2003 the city actively encouraged biotech by altering zoning regulations to allow for the higher ceilings and extra rooftop equipment necessary for laboratories. Yet in 2004, when Seattle BioMed moved to South Lake Union, the community was still less than alluring for many employees. The lingering decay and lack of lunch alternatives made the neighborhood unappealing.

But by the time that PATH was moving from Ballard in 2010, the neighborhood had reached a tipping point. The change was in part because … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

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

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Local biotech people and companies were moving onward and upward this week.

—Eric Schadt, the shorts-wearing, motorcycle-riding genomics brainiac, the guy who made his name at Seattle’s Rosetta Inpharmatics, is moving to the Big Apple to run a big new genomics institute at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Schadt, a co-founder of Seattle-based Sage Bionetworks, says this move should help him pour lots more data into Sage’s fledgling open source database for biologists.

—Should biology move away from its close-to-the-vest tradition, and embrace the whole open source culture to develop better drugs? I’m going to put this question up for a debate between Sage co-founder Stephen Friend and MIT’s legendary biologist, Phil Sharp, at Xconomy’s biggest event of the year, XSITE, in suburban Boston on June 16. A few other familiar faces to readers in Seattle—Charlotte Hubbert of Accelerator, Norm Wu of Qliance Medical Management, and Mike Martino of Carefusion—will also be part of the agenda at the XSITE conference. More to come on what that’s all about in the weeks ahead.

—First things first, I’m running another event for Xconomy here tonight in Seattle called “Separating Hype from Reality in Alternative Fuels.” Yesterday, I laid out the program highlights, which include big ideas being backed by Boeing, Bill Gates, Waste Management, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, among others. Tickets are still available, and you can sign up here at the last minute.

—PATH, the Seattle-based global health nonprofit, said its vice president of external relations, Scott Jackson, is leaving to become the CEO of Alexandria, VA-based Global Insight.

—Seattle-based Resolve Therapeutics raised its first $2 million in venture capital this week, which may not sound like much. But the real story was in how CEO Jim Posada plans to put that capital to work. Instead of relying on a future IPO or acquisition, Resolve is seeking to generate returns through striking a licensing deal in a few years with a Big Pharma company.

—Bothell, WA-based Marina Biotech (NASDAQ: MRNA), the RNA interference company that’s like a cat with nine lives, raised another $6.9 million through a stock offering this week.

—Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN) continued to gear up during this big year of growth, by taking a seven-year lease on a new building that will cost about $7.7 million. The company, which is vying for FDA approval of a new drug for Hodgkin’s disease and a related lymphoma, started the year with about 350 employees, and plans to end this year with about 500, according to company spokeswoman Peggy Pinkston.

—Will biotech ever again captivate the public imagination like Facebook or LinkedIn? That was the question I posed in this week’s BioBeat column. Maybe I’m just being reflective now that I’ve been writing about this business for 10 years, and still haven’t seen a moment when this industry crossed over into mainstream public awareness like it once did. Commenters I’ve heard from aren’t very optimistic about whether this situation will change.

—We had a couple of strong guest op-eds this week that hit upon biotech-related themes, from very different perspectives. Barrie Carter, the president of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy and the former chief scientist of Targeted Genetics, offered an upbeat take on “The Resurgence of Gene & Cell Therapy” as a bit of a preview of his organization’s annual meeting, which is going on this week in downtown Seattle. Despite lots of encouraging advances like this in the local biotech and scientific community, Richard Gayle notes that the local job market in biotech is still pretty bleak for lots of people, and there has to be a better way to enable life scientists to remain gainfully employed.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

We have many problems in biotechnology but I think Seattle is well positioned to overcome those barriers. Bear with me as I work to one possible approach.

I think there are two problems weighing on the biotechnology industry producing the current melancholy – lack of sustainable employment over a career and the inability to change the drug development paradigm.

On Monday, Luke wrote about the discontented winter the biotech industry finds itself in. The excitement that biotech once had not only came from its possible ability to create new therapeutics. It also came from its promise to sustain a large industry of scientists and their support personal.

A few weeks ago, Luke wrote another article about careers in biotechnology and Ed Lazowska had a comment with a wonderful link to a white paper just released by the President’s office.

It shows that we are training about 10 times as many people in the life sciences as are needed by the open positions.

What are we training all these people for? Academia cannot really take up the slack and for-profit corporations simply do not have the need.

This is not a new problem. In fact, my first column for Xconomy discussed the poor career paths for young researchers today. But these numbers are quite stark.

A company such as Dendreon or Amgen may hire lots of people in the life sciences and may produce some very important therapeutics.

But one single successful company does not make an exciting industry. Twenty might.

Biotech used to have the promise of that twenty.

When I started in the biotechnology industry, there was a clear career path for researchers who wanted to move in a different direction than academia. Biotechnology companies could be well funded based purely on the research from labs.

The goal of many companies was to become a fully integrated pharmaceutical company – a single entity translating their own research through clinical trials and product development to manufacturing and sales.

They could then play with the big boys – the major pharmaceutical companies. With lots of employees and many novel therapeutics on hand.

Immunex was one of the few that actually achieved that goal – thousands of employees with a wide portfolio of therapeutics. Of the multitude of hopeful organizations that started in the 80s, Amgen is perhaps the only one still standing that realized the dream of becoming a major, independent and fully integrated pharmaceutical company.

Biotech today cannot provide long term livelihoods for all the people who want to enter the industry. Many companies are simply looking for an exit strategy and will be gone from the landscape in a few years – whether they are successful or not.

Possibly exciting for investors but not for the general public and not for the people who make up the industry.

In addition, another promise – that biotech would change the paradigm of drug development – has simply not emerged, dampening the excitement further.

A paper in Nature Reviews discusses the ugly numbers. Almost all of … Next Page »

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

Scott Jackson, the vice president of external relations at Seattle-based PATH, is leaving to become the CEO of Global Impact, an Alexandria, VA-based humanitarian organization. Jackson, who oversaw PATH’s advocacy, visibility and fundraising efforts the past five years, will now oversee an organization that has raised more than $1.3 billion for 58 U.S.-based charities, according to a PATH statement. Jackson will stay at PATH until September.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

We had one pretty noteworthy acquisition in the Bio/IT community this week, and a smattering of news items from the world of global health, biotech drugs, and biofuels.

—Seattle-based Geospiza, one of the mainstays of the bioinformatics industry, agreed to be acquired by PerkinElmer (NYSE: PKI), the giant life sciences toolmaker in Waltham, MA. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but there were smiles all around, as this company achieved a return for investors after 14 years in business (some of them lean years).

—PATH, the Seattle-based global health hothouse, got some good news this week when the GAVI Alliance said it has committed $100 million to disseminate a new meningitis vaccine through three more countries in Africa. PATH spearheaded the development of this new vaccine over the past decade, with support from a $70 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

—Margaret McCormick gave me the lowdown on the new startup she’s leading, Seattle-based Matrix Genetics, which is seeking to genetically modify single-cell algae organisms to make biofuels and specialty chemicals. This company is being spun out of Targeted Growth, where scientific work has been progressing the past three years. Jim Roberts, a professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who advises the company, said he thinks this effort can compete with well-funded, well-known outfits like Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics, and Cambridge, MA-based Joule Unlimited. You can hear more from McCormick about the state of the algae biofuel business at Xconomy’s alternative fuels event on May 19.

—Halosource, the Bothell, WA-based maker of technology for purifying drinking water in developing countries, said this week its technology has secured a first-of-its-kind regulatory approval from health authorities in China. The company is now moving ahead with plans to commercialize its products in China, hoping to build on the momentum it had had in India, which enabled it to go public on the London Stock Exchange last year.

—Why are drugs getting such weird brand names? That was the question that got me started on last week’s BioBeat column, and led me to some pretty interesting answers. This column stirred up lots of votes on the best and worst drug names that have come out in the last year or so. Read on to see how your favorites did in this entirely unscientific poll.

—Speaking of interactivity, I took a little time last week to remind readers to check out our new-and-improved Xconomy fan page on Facebook. We are still experimenting a bit with this other mode of distributing the content we produce each day, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can tailor this page to make it even better for you.

—Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN) gave a pretty uneventful update in its first-quarter financial report, although I noted that it ended March with a whopping $456 million in cash and investments in the bank. Investors were probably most interested in the new brand name for brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris), which, frankly, is partly what inspired to write the column about weird drug names. In this case, brentuximab vedotin is the weird scientific name—and there are a lot weirder brand names out there now, in my opinion.

—Lastly, we had another hard-hitting guest editorial from Stewart Lyman, titled “Pharma/Academic Alliances: What the Numbers Don’t Tell You.” Stewart raised some important questions about how these deals get structured, which generated some back-and-forth commentary with Regis Kelly, the director of QB3, the organization that seeks to commercialize inventions from the University of California.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The GAVI Alliance, the Geneva, Switzerland-based global health organization, said today it has committed $100 million to support the use of a meningitis vaccine developed by Seattle-based PATH. The vaccine, MenAfriVac, was developed through a $70 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and a 10-year development effort. It has been widely used in recent months in Burkina Faso, and now GAVI said it wants to further disseminate it in Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria. For more of the background on the meningitis vaccine effort, check this feature I wrote back in December.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

It used to be that purchases began depreciating in value the moment you bought them. A new car, for example, might as well come with a little Kelley Blue Book countdown under the odometer showing its declining resale price. Indeed, the idea that property depreciates is so universal that it’s built into our accounting methods and tax codes. Traditionally, there have been only a few categories of things that don’t automatically drop in value over time, such as homes (up until 2008 anyway), precious metals, and maybe fine art and other collectibles.

But in the realms touched by software and the Internet, something different is happening. These days, many of the tools that modern consumers depend on, such as computers, smartphones, and entertainment devices, actually grow more useful and more valuable over time, thanks to a) the constant stream of new applications that exploit the devices’ capabilities in innovative ways, and b) the relatively new tradition of free updates for applications or operating systems you already own. In fact, when it comes to digital technologies, we’ve entered what you might call the Age of Appreciation. You can buy a gadget like an iPhone, an Android phone, or an iPad, and then sit back and watch it get more powerful without having to spend another cent.

It’s true that hardware itself still ages, breaks, grows obsolete, or loses its luster. Lord knows that my iPad, which seemed so shiny and magical just a year ago, looks a tad antiquated in my eyes now that the iPad 2 is out. I’m definitely not arguing that we can or should stop buying new stuff.

But I do think it’s worth slowing down to acknowledge the amazing situation we’ve created for ourselves, only 70 or so years into the era of electronic computers. In the Appreciation Age, objects containing computers grow in value because their value resides mainly in the software code they run, and that code can be so easily replaced, supplemented, or upgraded.

What got me thinking about all of this was a pair of relatively routine upgrades to Apple TV, the little black box that lets you play TV shows and movies from the iTunes Store on your big-screen TV. Last November, Apple updated the firmware inside the Apple TV from version 4.0 to version 4.1. And then, just a couple of weeks ago, it upgraded again to version 4.2. We’re so accustomed to such decimal-point changes these days—and they usually happen so automatically, quickly, and painlessly—that they often pass unnoticed. But these two updates definitely came with enough goodies to catch my attention.

The biggest change was the addition last November of something Apple calls AirPlay. This feature connects different devices over a home Wi-Fi network so that, for example, a music or video file stored on a Mac or a PC can be streamed to your TV. I like this feature because it has turned my TV into the sound system for my whole apartment. I can start an album playing on iTunes on my Mac or my iPhone, tap the AirPlay button, and throw the audio over to my TV, which (thankfully) has decent speakers. I also like to buy season passes for a couple of TV series on iTunes and download the episodes to my iPad. When I’m at home, AirPlay lets me watch those shows on the big screen, where they belong.

The more recent 4.2 update came with a big bonus for sports fans: Apple added the ability to watch live, on-demand Major League Baseball and National Basketball Association games for people with … Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doug Holtzman

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

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

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

When most people hear the word “earmark,” they probably think of a bridge to nowhere, gilded Pentagon plumbing fixtures, or a dubious construction project in some fat-cat congressman’s hometown.

But federal earmarks can also fuel innovative research and development in life sciences, high tech, and clean energy—at least, they could until President Obama vowed to veto any of the direct grants in last month’s State of the Union speech.

I thought it would be interesting to see just what kind of spending the president would be cutting off for Washington state’s innovation community, so I put together this list.

It shows 25 projects that were seeking $2 million or more in earmarked spending, and the details are pretty interesting. Among the requests that stood out:

• Seattle’s PATH, a nonprofit global health R&D center, was hoping to get money for an array of projects, including $5 million for work on malaria vaccines and $2 million to develop large “electrochlorinator” devices, which use simple battery power to produce chlorine for purifying drinking water—a major global health concern.

• At Washington State University, researchers were seeking $3 million to support their work on capturing and storing high-energy positrons, $2.5 million for turning algae into biofuels, and up to $5 million to examine the ways that environmental toxin exposure can affect how genes are expressed in children.

• The University of Washington and Vancouver, WA-based Renewable Energy Composite Solutions were each hoping for $4 million or more to advance work on tidal energy technology for the Navy.

A little background for those unfamiliar with Capitol Hill lingo: Earmarks are specific, noncompetitive grants that members of Congress put in the federal budget to make sure dollars flow straight to the projects they want to finance back home.

Earmarks often become a political hot potato, but in reality experts say they only make up about 1 percent or less of the federal budget.

Howard Grimes is a vice president for research at WSU. He says the loss of earmarks isn’t leading to dramatic cuts or shutdown of the projects we listed. But it certainly crimps researchers’ … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

It’s hard to believe that the biggest recession in U.S. history officially ended almost two years ago. For many regions the road to recovery has been rocky at best. Washington State is no exception. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, our state’s unemployment has hovered around nine percent for the past six months. Still, while many markets like financial services and construction have been hit particularly hard by the recession, the life sciences industry not only weathered the storm quite well, it has grown.

In fact, the life science industry in the Pacific Northwest is a hotbed for innovation and has been an important part of our overall economic recovery. Between 2007 and 2009, the number of life sciences jobs grew nearly 5 percent to 26,300, while jobs in Washington’s other private sectors decreased by 4 percent.

We attribute much of this success to the scrappy, entrepreneurial spirit that has become a hallmark of our state. Washington ranked second in the country in the “2010 State New Economy Index,” published by the Kauffman Foundation. The high scores were reflective of our strength in software and aviation but also an acknowledgement of the innovative environment that has developed here in many sectors, including life sciences.

And despite the reality of today’s economy that has made private investment in research and development even harder to come by, Seattle is among some of the country’s leading life science hubs, including the Bay Area, Boston and San Diego, that are bringing in VC funding. Last year while other sectors struggled, life science companies across the nation raised record levels of capital, according to the Burrill & Company report on Venture Capital Funding. Investment also came in the form of acquisitions. Five of the area’s life sciences companies were acquired last year, most notably, ZymoGenetics, acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb for $885 million. Encouragingly, in January, Bristol-Myers Squibb announced it would keep ZymoGenetics open in Seattle, retaining more than 200 jobs.

Across Washington State, 72 cities host life science and research companies, which create more than 25,000 jobs directly linked to life sciences and 55,000 indirect jobs. A typical life science job pays twice the average salary in Washington State. In addition to job growth in the life sciences, there are many hopeful signs that our life science industry is flourishing.

• Just this month, Seattle Genetics raised $178 million in a stock offering.

• In 2010, three of the FDA’s twenty-one approved drugs were discovered and developed by Seattle biotechnology companies, including Amgen’s Xgeva through Amgen’s acquisition of Immunex, Gilead’s Cayston through their acquisition of Corus, and of course Dendreon’s Provenge.

• The National Cancer Institute awarded $11.5 million to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to lead a breast cancer research consortium.

• And last September, the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association (WBBA) signed an historic agreement with the Beijing Pharmaceutical Profession Association to encourage investment, partnering and research collaboration between Washington State and China.

On March 2, the WBBA and Burrill & Company will co-host Life Science Innovation Northwest 2011 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. The event brings together members of the life sciences community from 15 states and eight countries including Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, India, Japan and the United Kingdom to address some of the critical issues facing the industry. The goal is to stimulate ideas and excitement about the Northwest’s innovative life sciences corridor. We’ll tackle the issue of early stage funding, providing ideas for fueling innovation through public, angel and VC sources. We’ll also discuss ways to encourage global investment in the region.

We have an exciting and challenging opportunity before us. We are fast becoming one of the world’s leading innovation hubs for life sciences. We are uniquely positioned for this role because of our world renowned expertise in research (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Washington Center for Commercialization, and Oregon Health & Science University), global health (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle Biomed, Institute for Systems Biology, and PATH) and agriculture (Washington State University) as well as our proximity to growing markets like Asia. We have a vibrant community of private sector companies and are working with our state and local governments to encourage a climate that enables entrepreneurial people and companies to convert innovative ideas into marketable new products, services and jobs.

[Editor's Note: This post was authored with input from Steve Burrill of Burrill & Co.]

Comments | Reprints | Share: