Tech entrepreneurs are pushing pretty hard these days to improve education, from the Khan Academy to Codecademy to Altius Education to education-focused Startup Weekend events. And, of course, there’s the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has made education its primary domestic policy initiative—something Bill Gates discussed in his recent wide-ranging lecture and Q&A session at the University of Washington.

Washington state’s two-year colleges are putting some of those ideas into practice with the roll-out of a new digital system called the Open Course Library. The coursework was developed with instructors to give students a low-cost alternative to expensive textbooks for the most common introductory courses, and is available to other schools on a Creative Commons license. The state legislature kicked in $1.2 million for the project a few years ago, and that was supplemented with a $750,000 grant from the Gates Foundation.

Eventually, the project plans cover the course materials for 81 classes. The courses themselves are all put together slightly differently—here’s an example chapter from a free introduction to calculus text, for example. Others are offered as downloadable e-books and tools from traditional publishers or other providers, but the price per text is capped at $30. Other courses link to wiki-based data from other colleges, or even Khan Academy videos to supplement the coursework.

The websites for the open-source coursework aren’t exactly state of the art, but the heart of the idea is certainly there. State Rep. Reuven Carlyle, a Seattle Democrat and wireless industry veteran who spurred the project along, says K-12 textbooks may be next on the target list for an open-source, lower-cost makeover.

With the amount of education spending that’s been chopped by the state legislature in recent years, finding an innovative way to save money is probably welcome all around. Well, except in the offices of textbook publishers.

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Seattle Children’s Hospital probably has more fun than most hospitals every year on Halloween, but this year it has something really big to celebrate.

The hospital said today it has secured a pair of charitable donations worth a combined $65 million to support its research programs, nursing education, and clinical care. One $50 million gift is coming for research from an anonymous donor, while the other $15 million donation was made by Jean Reid of Bellevue, WA to support nursing education and clinical care.

The $50 million anonymous donation—the largest in Children’s history—will be used to provide an endowment for research at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. It will go toward critical infrastructure, recruiting and retaining top scientists, and investments in treatments for early stage treatments for childhood diseases, the hospital said.

Seattle Children’s established its research institute in 2006, and currently occupies the life sciences building at 9th and Stewart that was originally built for Seattle-based Corixa. One of the more visible projects at the hospital is a low-cost ventilator for premature infants that is being developed by a team led by Seattle Children’s CEO Tom Hansen, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Seattle Children’s got nearly $53 million in federal grants to support its research in 2010, according to its website.

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Billionaire Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is giving $10 million to establish a “Center for Innovation” at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, which is moving into a new headquarters next year near the new Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) campus in the South Lake Union neighborhood. The new center will focus on the legacy of innovation in business and global health in the Seattle area. In a news release, Bezos called out “the disproportionate number of extraordinary organizations” founded in the region, including Microsoft, Boeing, UPS, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

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Seattle Children’s Hospital said today it has received a two-year, $2.3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to continue development of its low-cost ventilator for premature infants that need help in order to breathe. More than 1 million infants die every year because of inadequate lung function, and the Children’s device aims to reduce that figure by offering a ventilator that is simpler to run and cheaper than the ventilators used in developed countries. I last wrote an in-depth feature on this technology, developed by Seattle Children’s CEO Tom Hansen and colleagues, last August.

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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 »

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What happens when a guy who got wealthy selling cars hands millions of dollars to a scientist and tells her how to spend it? Folks attending the American Diabetes Association conference starting today in San Diego are getting a hint of the answer to that question. Denise Faustman, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) immunobiology laboratory is presenting two abstracts from a clinical trial funded by the Boston-based Iacocca Family Foundation, established by former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca to support research aimed at curing type 1 diabetes.

Faustman’s data shows that low doses of an 80-year-old vaccine temporarily reversed type 1 diabetes in Phase 1 human trial. The vaccine is called bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG). It was developed to prevent tuberculosis and is now available as a generic drug. BCG induces the immune system to make tumor-necrosis factor (TNF), which kills the T-cells that cause the pancreas to stop producing insulin.

Faustman’s team went to Iacocca’s foundation for funding after repeatedly having the door slammed in their faces by drug companies. The MGH scientists had plenty of animal studies showing that it was possible to regenerate the pancreas, and therefore restore insulin production in diabetes models. But when MGH went to the pharmaceutical industry looking for funding to research a pancreas-regenerating drug, “everyone said, ‘you’re reversing the disease. How are we going to make money?’” Faustman says.

So MGH spent years looking for a generic drug that would stimulate the production of TNF. Iacocca’s foundation supported much of that work, which involved drawing blood from thousands of diabetes patients and proving that they could use TNF to kill the bad T-cells. “One day, Mr. Iacocca looked at me and said, ‘Denise, when are you going to cure diabetes?’” Faustman recalls.

Iacocca instructed Faustman to show the technique worked in a mouse study, so it could eventually be tried in humans. “No one had ever reversed diabetes in a mouse,” she says. “Philanthropy can take risks. He made it clear it was his money and he wanted risky therapies done.” Then the foundation put $10 million toward the Phase 1 human trial. All told, Iacocca’s group is the largest single donor to Faustman’s research.

MGH’s Phase 1 study was designed to answer four key questions about BCG, Faustman says. “Does it kill the bad T-cells? Does it induce the good T-cells? Does it change the pancreas? Does it restore insulin secretion?” The data, she says, “shows positive responses in all four outcomes.”

One caveat, Faustman says, is that the drug produces a transient effect. That means it will have to be given in repeated intervals, perhaps every four to six weeks. Still, says Faustman, “this will be the first data showing that the pancreas can be turned back on.”

Iacocca launched his foundation in 1984 in honor of his late wife, Mary, who died of complications from type 1 diabetes. The foundation declined to comment for this story. But Kathryn Iacocca Hentz—president of the foundation and Lee’s daughter–said in a statement “These results are very meaningful to the Iacocca Family. We have supported this work since the mouse studies first showed the reversal of longstanding diabetes.”

The foundation has made a gift of undisclosed size to MGH to support the Phase 2 program, which MGH is now planning. The hospital has raised $8.5 million of the $25 million it will need to support the trial over the next three years. Though Faustman says they’ll need other partners to kick in additional funding, she’s certain they couldn’t have come this far without the help of the former Chrysler CEO. “You have to wonder how a guy who built cars knew what we needed to do,” she says. “But he knew what risks to take.”

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UC San Francisco has received a $48 million donation from the estate of Nina Ireland, a longtime donor to the university who died in October. UCSF said the money will be put toward lung disease research and care, particularly strengthening the university’s research into complex pulmonary conditions such as interstitial lung disease and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

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Last night Silicon Valley icon Peter Thiel, of PayPal fame, gathered eight of his favorite future-oriented organizations and a couple hundred of his wealthiest friends in an auditorium at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts and made a magnanimous offer. For every dollar attendees contribute to the organizations before New Year’s Day, Thiel’s foundation announced, the billionaire investor-philanthropist will contribute another dollar, up to a limit of $1,000 per organization per attendee.

If everyone who attended Thiel’s so-called “Breakthrough Philanthropy” event gives a full $8,000, Thiel could be on the hook for a lot of money. My own rough estimate is that 200 people were on hand—and 200 times $8,000 comes to $1.6 million.

It was a bold, assertive way to promote the fortunes of these unusual groups, which included the Foresight Institute, Humanity Plus, the Santa Fe Institute, the Seasteading Institute, the SENS Foundation, the Singularity Institute, Singularity University, and the X Prize Foundation. But Thiel is known an iconoclast who’s attracted to long bets and radical solutions; he possesses the sort of optimism that often seems to be engendered by (or perhaps engenders) extreme self-made wealth.

In “lightning presentations” of about five minutes each, representatives of Thiel’s chosen groups described their goals. These range from the merely ambitious—harnessing nanotechnology, in the case of the Foresight Institute, or sequencing the human genome more cheaply, in the case of the X Prize Foundation—to the barely conceivable and arguably loony, such as transhumanism (Humanity Plus), reversing aging (the SENS Foundation), and establishing ocean cities that function as independent countries (the Seasteading Institute).

In remarks at the event, Thiel drew a distinction between “extensive” technologies, which “take things that are working and replicate them,” and “intensive” technologies, which try to “take the things that are best in the world and make them qualitatively and dramatically better.” All eight of the groups included in the donor challenge have agendas that, to lay people, may sound “really weird and really strange,” Thiel acknowledged. But he argued that “it may be in the nature of things that are ‘intensive’ that any time you are doing something singular that’s never been done before…it will be seen as weird.”

Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1998, made tens of millions after selling the company to eBay in 2002, and started the hedge fund Clarium, which he still runs. He’s also a major shareholder in Facebook (he was the company’s first outside investor) and is a partner in the Founders Fund, a San Francisco venture firm known for supporting early-stage Web companies. A chess prodigy and a self-described libertarian, Thiel founded the conservative Stanford Review when he was a student at Stanford University.

This fall the Thiel Foundation announced a new program called 20 Under 20, which will award two-year cash grants of $100,000 to 20 people under the age of 20. The program’s goal is to find budding visionaries and give them the resources and mentorship to pursue their ideas without having to wait until after college. “From Facebook to SpaceX to Halcyon Molecular, some of the world’s most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn’t wait until graduation,” Thiel said in a statement announcing the program.

“The future is not an abstraction,” Thiel summarized at last night’s event. “It is not something that just happens or that other people do. It is something we all participate in helping to create and forge and shape, and if we do that and set our minds to it, we can do a lot more.”

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Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, has been investing in biotech companies and basic neuroscience for many years, and now he’s set up a new program to put more money to work for scientists pushing the boundaries in those fields.

The Seattle-based Paul G. Allen Family Foundation is announcing today it is bankrolling seven research teams around the country with three-year grants worth a combined $9.4 million. This is the first round of grants for “Allen Distinguished Investigators” in what could become an ongoing program, according to Sue Coliton, a vice president at the foundation. The idea is that Allen will support cutting-edge research projects that haven’t been able to secure traditional funding from the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, yet have great potential to advance science, and enable the development of new medical technologies and products, Coliton says.

“Paul is really interested in asking big open questions in science,” Coliton says. “Our hope is these will lead to new knowledge in science that can be built on. We hope for breakthrough ideas, discoveries.”

The inaugural batch of Allen investigators come from MIT, Stanford University, the University of Washington, Caltech, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Much of the work they are doing reflects Allen’s longstanding interest in neuroscience, which he has been supporting in a big way since he committed $100 million in 2003 to establish the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. But the grants being announced today stretch beyond neuroscience, and will also support development of new laboratory tools that could see broader use.

While Allen is best known as the co-founder of Microsoft and for making investments in technology companies (including a few high-profile flameouts like Charter Communications), fewer people realize he has a longstanding interest in life science investing too. Allen is well familiar with the high-risk, high-reward character of biotech, through his investments in a number of well-known companies, including Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN), Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN), South San Francisco-based Cytokinetics (NASDAQ: CYTK), and Brisbane, CA-based BiPar Sciences (acquired a year ago by drug giant Sanofi-Aventis), to name a few. Last month, he bet another $20 million on Seattle-based Omeros (NASDAQ: OMER). Through getting to know biologists over the years, Allen has picked up the basics of what the NIH will pay for, what venture capitalists will support, and all kinds of interesting things that fall through the cracks.

“A year ago, I started searching for programs with potential for major breakthroughs but which had struggled to find funding through traditional sources,” Allen said in a statement. “The inaugural Distinguished Investigators are working on some of the most exciting research in biology and neurology and I’m proud to be able to help keep that work going.”

The Allen Distinguished Investigator program got started about a year ago, when Allen himself sent an e-mail around to a number of scientists he stays in touch with, says David Postman, a spokesman for Vulcan, Allen’s investment company. Before long, the Allen Foundation put together a request for proposal, and got back 120 applications for projects to pick from. The foundation sought help from scientists to vet the projects, but Allen himself made the final decision on who got the grants, Coliton says.

Allen plans to keep tabs on the progress of the grant winners, and bring them together once a year to talk about their results, Coliton says. After about 12 to 18 months of seeing how the program works in practice, the foundation plans to take a closer look at whether the program will become an ongoing, enduring sort of thing. “It will evolve over the next couple of years,” Coliton says.

With that, here are the seven original grant winners, with a thumbnail description of their work:

—David Anderson, Caltech, $1.6 million.

Anderson, one of the original advisors to the Allen Brain Institute, has secured funding to “localize, identify, characterize, and turn on” neurons in the mouse brain associated with attack and aggressive behavior.

—Edward Boyden, MIT Media Lab and McGovern Institute for Brain Research, $1.3 million.

Boyden’s team will attempt to develop “new devices for creating real-time electrical maps of the brain in three dimensions,” according to the foundation.

—Michael Dickinson, University of Washington, $2 million.

Dickinson plans to use the grant support “to develop new instruments to expand the body of knowledge in the field of measuring and quantifying complex group behavior in the relatively new field of study called “ethomics.” I must admit that was a new “omics” to me; you can read more about it in this paper in Nature.

—Christof Koch, Caltech, $600,000.

Koch plans to look at neural networks that enable worms (C. elegans) to move.

—Jennifer Nemhauser, University of Washington, $1.4 million.

Nemhauser, according to the Allen Foundation, plans to “reverse engineer a cell-to-cell communication system from plants, construct a modular molecular signal processing toolbox for synthetic biology, and to use the toolbox to genetically engineer the single celled organism S. cerevisiae, to exhibit multi-celled behavior.” S. cerevisiae is a form of yeast used in baking and brewing.

—Mark Schnitzer, Stanford University, $880,000.

Schnitzer, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, will seek to use his new money from Allen to “develop miniaturized, mass-producible, fluorescence microscopes that can create real-time imaging of neurons in the brain.” If he can do that, the plan will be to look at what’s going wrong at the neural and cellular level in schizophrenia.

—Tony Zador, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, $1.6 million.

Zador’s lab will study “the use of viruses to transport bar-coded nucleotides across synapses and map the connectome of a living animal.”

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San Diego businessman Art Brody has pledged $1 million to the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute to help the academic center turn some of its basic science discoveries into new healthcare products. The gift is being used to create the Art Brody Innovation Fund, which will support promising research that otherwise might not advance with the help of federal grants or venture capital. The Innovation Fund will provide seed capital for spinoff companies from the Sanford-Burnham.

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After last week’s resurgence of activity surrounding Seattle-area technology companies, I have to say I’m somewhat surprised by how few deals were made this past week. But just because there weren’t very many straight deals over the last few days, doesn’t mean there weren’t any big news stories—or big dollars—being tossed around the local tech scene. This past week we’ve seen a number of key players in local business shuffle in and out of executive positions and a local billionaire pledge the majority of his money to charity, and we’ve gotten a number of interesting glimpses into the future of Seattle-area startup culture and the emerging industries that seem to be taking center stage. Take a look at the highlights:

—Seattle-based energy retrofitting company EcoFab joined the McKinstry Innovation Center, becoming the third cleantech company to set up shop at the still growing “accelerator” for clean and alternative energy startups. This announcement, however, falls into a larger context about the future of northwest industry. Could the emerging green sector become Seattle’s newest boom industry?

—Stealthy Seattle-based startup PhotoRocket hired on its interim president Gary Roshak as the company’s first CEO. Though founder and chairman Scott Lipsky, former Amazon executive and aQuantive co-founder, hasn’t revealed exactly what the company will be doing yet, this recent announcement may be a sign that the company, which says it is planning on “changing the landscape of the photo sharing space,” may be coming out of stealth soon.

—Madrona Venture Group managing director Tom Alberg has been appointed to President Obama’s new National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The 26-person council, which includes co-founders from big web companies including Yahoo!, AOL, and Zipcar, is charged with helping the administration develop policies to foster entrepreneurship, create jobs, and drive economic growth.

—Paul Allen threw some big money around this last week. The Microsoft co-founder commemorated the 20^th anniversary of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation by giving $100,000 in special grants to the founders of five local nonprofits and vowing to donate the majority of his own estimated $13.5 billion estate to philanthropy. Allen, 57, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma last fall and said he intends to ensure that his “philanthropic efforts will continue after my lifetime.”

—Microsoft Research Redmond named Peter Lee as its new managing director, succeeding Rico Malvar, who will stay on as chief scientist. Lee was previously the director of the Technology Office at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and head of Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department.

—TechStars, a startup mentorship program and seed-stage investment with operations in both Boulder, CO, and Boston, is opening up a Seattle program in August. Before leaving for Boston himself, Greg got a sneak peek at TechStars Seattle’s new 14,000-square-foot South Lake Union space, fully equipped with a bar put in by the former tenant, who had been planning to open a speakeasy of sorts in the basement. What better environment to foster Seattle’s next generation of tech startups?

—Speaking of blossoming startup scenes, Seattle seems to brimming with new group buying deal-a-day sites—from Tippr, DealPop, and Yubit to the national names, Groupon and LivingSocial. And while this may not exactly be a deal, the onslaught of new daily deals and bargain sites in the local sphere definitely makes for an interesting analysis of where this market is going and what it means for consumers seeking new deals in the local marketplace, and merchants looking for ways to draw in new customers.

—In perhaps the only actual deal this week, Portland, OR-based Puppet Labs, a developer of data center automation software, raised $5 million in Series B financing led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture firm out of Menlo Park, CA. The completed funding round came at the same time as the open-source software startup rolled out its newest product, Puppet 2.6, which improves upon its flagship product and targets the needs of “enterprise environments.”

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Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen said today that he intends to donate the majority of his estimated $13.5 billion fortune to philanthropy. In a statement commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Allen said he had long planned this move, which will ensure that his “philanthropic efforts will continue after my lifetime.” The 57-year-old philanthropist, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma last fall, said he plans to continue with his foundation’s work and the funding of  nonprofit scientific research. In honor of the foundation’s anniversary, Allen also announced a total of $100,000 in special grants that will be awarded to the founders of five notable local nonprofits, amounting to $20,000 each. Over the past 20 years the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation has provided more than 3,000 grants totaling over $400 million. Read more about this announcement at The Seattle Times.

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Technology Underwriting Greater Good, an organization launched last fall by Jeff Fagnan of Atlas Venture and Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst Partners, will hand out $10,000 to one of three non-profit organizations at its first annual “Spring Fling” fundraising event this Wednesday, June 9. With a self-declared mission to pursue “open source philanthropy,” TUGG mainly supports organizations helping inner-city and underprivileged teens. The groups competing for the $10K prize are Bikes Not Bombs, techBoston, and More Than Words.

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In a move that borrows a page from Intel’s “Rock Stars of Engineering” advertising campaign, a San Diego non-profit group is organizing a program that will bring the aspiring rock stars of San Diego’s life sciences industry into local classrooms.

The pilot program, funded by a $100,000 grant from the Cambridge, MA-based Biogen Idec Foundation, will recruit entrepreneurial founders of early stage biotech companies to talk about their breakthrough innovations and why they started their companies. The idea is to get young people excited about studying science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), says Duane Roth, who heads Connect, the 25-year-old non-profit organization that supports technology and entrepreneurship in San Diego.

“So many things have been tried before,” says Roth, who frets that American students just don’t relate to STEM education or see the career possibilities. “We think young people—7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th-graders—relate more to products than to lectures.” By arranging to have entrepreneurs talk about their technologies, Roth says, students can grasp how inventions gets commercialized, and what it takes to bring a product to market.

One early recruit, for example, is Jack DeFranco, CEO of San Diego-based Targeson, which invents ultrasound contrast agents used to detect disease at the molecular level, before someone who is ill even shows any symptoms.

The real Ajay Bhatt

The speaker program is reminiscent of last year’s Intel ad campaign that has swooning workplace groupies surrounding a wonkish, middle-aged man as a screen graphic reads, “Ajay Bhatt, co-inventor of USB,” which is followed by a message that says, “Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars.” (An actor was portraying the real Ajay Bhatt.) I’m also reminded of a photo spread in GQ magazine last year of the “Rockstars of Science” that paired Eric Topol, the prominent Scripps’ cardiologist and translational medicine researcher, with real-life singers like Seal, Sheryl Crow, and Josh Groban.

I think it is a great idea,” says Larry Bock, a longtime life sciences venture investor in San Diego who heard about the pilot program in March. As executive director of the non-profit USA Science & Engineering Festival, which is scheduled to take place this fall in Washington, D.C., Bock has focused much of his time on … Next Page »

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The namesake family foundation that launched San Diego’s West Wireless Health Institute last year with a $45 million donation has just announced another $20 million grant to support biomedical engineering research in mobile health.

Word of the latest bequest from the Gary and Mary West Foundation came out of today’s closed session of the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance Convergence Summit, which is restricted to CEOs and other high-level industry officials who can foot the $1,250-per-person tab to attend the presentations and discussions of long-range strategies in mobile health. The donation is detailed in a press release on the West Institute’s website.

In addition, the West Institute is announcing today that GE Healthcare is joining Qualcomm and Scripps Health as a partner in the institute’s global research, technology, and educational initiatives. West Wireless spokeswoman Michele Guthrie says the GE partnership, like the institute’s partnerships with Qualcomm and Scripps Health, is collaborative and does not involve financial support for the institute’s operations. “We’ve agreed to work on a variety of projects together,” Guthrie says. The non-profit medical research institute has been forging such partnerships to help advance the emerging field of wireless health, with a goal of improving healthcare while reducing costs.

It took the West Institute nearly a year to recruit former Johnson & Johnson executive Don Casey as its inaugural CEO. Casey discussed the grant at a luncheon presentation today during the WLSA Convergence Summit. Last month, the institute also named a former J&J vice president of emerging technologies, Joseph Smith, as its chief medical and science officer. In recent months, the West Institute also named former Cardinal Health strategist Amir Jafri as its chief operating officer and Mitul Shah, who led technology partnerships at the United Nations Foundation, as its senior director of engineering programs and partnerships.

With much of the institute’s senior administration in place, and a sign attached to the outside of the organization’s remodeled building, the West Institute is clearly moving to identify which technologies and services to push in its effort to advance the field of wireless healthcare. The institute also plans to provide contract services to companies developing innovations in mobile health technologies

The additional $20 million grant from the Gary and Mary West Foundation is intended to support internal research and development, as well as a post-doctoral program, all of which is overseen by Mehran Mehregany, who is executive vice president of engineering and chief of engineering research. In a statement released by the institute, Mehregany says the grant “allows us to continue to bring top talent in a broad spectrum of fields to the institute, and gives a major boost to our development efforts.”

Mehregany’s team is focused on three core areas: applied research, engineered solutions, and advanced training. Guthrie says the $20 million grant also allows institute administrators to take a long-term approach in determining how to make the institute financially self-sustaining.

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Last week I wrote up Part 1 of my interview with David Egner, president of the Detroit-based Hudson-Webber Foundation and executive director of the New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan. The coalition of 10 community and philanthropic organizations is working to support economic diversification efforts in the Detroit region. Egner talked about the attitude of complacency and entitlement that left the region ill-prepared to recover from the auto industry’s decline, and about the political divides that have long held back cooperative efforts to develop promising sectors such as advanced manufacturing and logistics.

In our conversation, Egner described how the organizations behind the New Economy Initiative realized that were all working to solve parts of the same big puzzle, and how they might accomplish more if they worked together. (The foundations have pooled $100 million in grant funds for projects that support entrepreneurship, retooling, and workforce development and education.)

In the second half of the interview, which appears below, we talked about the need for better bridges between the region’s high-tech innovators and potential funders such as venture capital firms. We also discussed the future of the automotive business—still Detroit’s anchor industry—and ran through the New Economy Initiative grants and projects that Egner considers the most promising.

One intriguing subject running through my talk with Egner was the fine line that the initiative is trying to walk between making bets on specific industry sectors that may help to define Detroit’s future—areas like alternative fuels, life sciences, manufacturing, and logistics—and merely clearing the way for the marketplace to make those bets. Egner talked over and over about the need for stronger “connecting institutions” in Detroit: groups that could get researchers at Michigan’s top universities talking more often with venture capital partners, creating more opportunities for ideas to blossom into companies. These conversations are so frequent and continuous in Xconomy’s other home cities of Boston, San Diego, and Seattle that it’s easy to take them for granted. But in Detroit, such basic parts of the ecosystem seem to be withered or altogether missing.

Xconomy: We’ve been talking so far about the need for the government, non-profit, educational, and corporate sectors to work more closely together to solve Detroit’s problems. What role does high-tech entrepreneurship play in all that?

David Egner: That’s a crucial component. I think how you do it becomes an interesting discussion. You’ve got within 70 miles of each other, three tier-1 research institutions taking in hundreds of millions of research dollars that are producing tremendous ideas. How we get those three to play in this space becomes, I think, one of the most important issues. The infrastructure already exists inside those institutions. The New Economy Initiative has to help determine how we can develop an infrastructure outside those institutions to aid tech transfer and speed it along. That includes accessing capital.

Having said that, looking at economic development efforts across the last several decades in the United States, it seems that those who have picked specific sectors [to develop] have really struggled, because you can’t guess what tomorrow’s economy is going to be about. NEI is making an investment in a general infrastructure and trying not to get in the way of the marketplace. Ultimately, the market needs to drive innovation, and we need to make sure the building blocks are in place.

X: What types of building blocks are you talking about?

DE: We’re finding that the infrastructure that should naturally exist here, because of the years of neglect, and because we have become so entitled, needs to be rebuilt and repositioned. For example, if you talk about the life sciences—other than the universities, there is still not a natural institution working in the area to push a high-tech life sciences strategy. There is a lot of talk about it, but not a  … Next Page »

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said today that it is pledging $10 billion to foster more work on research, development, and delivery of vaccines over the coming decade. The goal is to save the lives of more than 8 million children by 2020. Bill and Melinda Gates made the announcement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We must make this the decade of vaccines,” said Bill Gates, in a statement. “Vaccines already save and improve millions of lives in developing countries. Innovation will make it possible to save more children than ever before.”

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San Diego’s life sciences sector had a busy week. Allow me to recap it for you.

—Working with Assay Depot, a San Diego-based online marketplace for CRO services, Bruce found 144 companies in San Diego that provide contract services to life sciences companies, providing a glimpse of what appears to be a thriving new sector. CRO stands for contract research organization.

—Zogenix, a specialty pharmaceutical company that raised $71 million last year, led Xconomy San Diego’s 2009 list of top venture financing deals. Total venture investment in San Diego startups during the fourth quarter increased over the same period in 2008, when the economy was in deep recession.

—The San Diego-based nonprofit formerly known as the Burnham Institute for Medical Research is now the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, thanks to a $50 million donation pledged by philanthropist T. Denny Sanford.

—I had an interesting chat with Kurt Gustafson, CFO of San Diego-based Halozyme Therapeutics (NASDAQ: HALO), which is developing a portfolio of products around its recombinant enzyme hyaluronidase. Separately, Roche announced plans to manufacture a device that would deliver a cancer drug reformulated with Halozyme’s enzyme.

—San Diego Xconomist Duane Roth proposes some ideas to address the funding challenge facing the innovation economy.

—Elevation Pharmaceuticals, a San Diego-based biotech co-founded by serial entrepreneur Cam Garner, raised a tranched $30 million in Series A venture funding.

—Helixis CEO Alex Dickinson told Luke the Carlsbad, CA-based startup plans to market its desktop PCR machines over the Internet. The first orders will ship in April. The technology was spun out of the Caltech laboratories of Nobel laureate David Baltimore and Axel Scherer.

—San Diego-based Somaxon submitted a revised application for its experimental sleeping pill doxepin (Silenor) to the FDA and expects a decision by March 21.

—Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN) CEO Dan Bradbury told Luke the company is ready and able to launch once-weekly exenatide. An FDA decision on Amylin and Eli Lilly’s application to market the drug is due March 5.

—Prometheus Laboratories, a San Diego-based specialty pharmaceutical and diagnostics company will sell Novartis’ aldesleukin (Proleukin) in the United States. Prometheus is in registration for a $100 million IPO, according to PE Hub.

—Matt Emmens, CEO Cambridge, MA-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX), talked with Luke about his path to the top. The biotechnology company employs 175 in San Diego.

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Big news is out this morning from the Burnham Institute for Medical Research. The San Diego-based nonprofit says it’s getting a $50 million donation from T. Denny Sanford, enough for the whole institution to be re-named in honor of the philanthropist.

The center will now be called the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute. That decision was made now that Mr. Sanford, who made his fortune in the private equity business, has committed to donate $70 million to the research center over the past three years. Besides his direct support of the Burnham, the financier gave another $30 million in 2008 to create the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine to support stem cell research in San Diego.

This is really just the latest coup for the Sanford-Burnham Institute, which has been on a roll over the past couple of years. The institute scored a six-year $98 million grant from the National Institutes of Health in September 2008 to establish one of four new drug discovery centers at academic centers around the U.S. Its annual budget has seen double-digit annual increases in recent years, climbing to $154 million. The staff has grown to 1,000 people at campuses in San Diego, Santa Barbara, CA and Orlando, FL. The institute loves to talk about how its scientists were ranked No. 1 worldwide in terms of impact over the past decade, as measured by citations in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

That’s all impressive stuff when scientific publications are the coin of the realm, but the Burnham is also well aware its research has yet to deliver a major breakthrough for human health like, say, Novartis’ imatinib (Gleevec) for leukemia. So over the past year, the center has intensified its push to pursue that lofty goal by hiring two key people: One is Michael R. Jackson, a former Johnson & Johnson drug discovery expert; the other is Paul Laikind, a former biotech CEO, to negotiate more deals with drug companies with the money and expertise to create the next generation of Gleevecs. So the Sanford donation is really about fueling a transformation engine that can help the Burnham cross the gap between basic research and real-world applications.

Paul Laikind

“Denny Sanford’s continuing generosity will help us make a greater impact on human health,” said John Reed, the Institute’s president and CEO, in a statement.

As it so happens, I heard about this big donation just as I was sitting down to write a feature about how Burnham intends to do a better job of applying its ideas in the wider world, by hiring Laikind as its new chief business officer. Laikind is a biochemist by training, with a 25-year track record as a biotech startup executive, most recently as the CEO of San Diego-based Metabasis Therapeutics (acquired by Ligand for $3.2 million in October). I’ve written a lot in the past couple years about academic centers around the country trying to do a better job of this notoriously tricky business of relating to the business world, including the University of Washington and The Scripps Research Institute, so I was curious to hear Laikind’s perspective.

Donations like the one from Sanford—spread out over five years in $10 million annual chunks—provide a certain amount of budget stability, and could enable researchers there to get tantalizing early experimental data that can be used to help win further federal grants, and maybe entice … Next Page »

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It feels like the dawn of a new era. As of yesterday, Bill Gates is officially on Twitter, where he has already attracted more than 235,000 followers in the first day or so. Gates also just announced a new website, called the Gates Notes, where he will be sharing his thoughts (that extend greater than 140 characters) on what he’s working on and the societal issues he’s passionate about—global health, education, the environment, and so forth.

The Microsoft co-founder and chairman—also the co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—has always communicated extensively through memos, speeches, and books. Now he will be using social media and the Web to reach an even bigger, more mainstream audience, and to impart his message on a wide range of global issues he’s dived into since leaving his full-time job at Microsoft in June 2008.

To me, this feels like a big deal—like social media has passed another threshold. Gates being on Twitter means even the world’s richest man cannot hide from this mode of interactive communication. The world’s most influential people can no longer operate solely behind the scenes. I don’t know about you, but I don’t necessarily want to know what Gates is thinking about on a daily basis. Part of what makes certain leaders special is that you don’t know what they’re working on all the time. In any case, let’s hope his Web writings truly reflect his personal views and analysis, and are not just the product of a finely honed advisory staff and PR team.

The Gates Notes site is currently divided into a number of nevertheless intriguing sections: “What I’m thinking about” (including ways to deal with carbon emissions through innovation in transportation and electricity); “What I’m learning” (including references to books by Vaclav Smil, a global energy and population expert); and “My travels” (including his impressions of health care in India).

Gates says the site is an extension of the annual letter he writes for the Gates Foundation—this year’s will be posted on Monday, Jan. 25. “I decided to write an Annual Letter because in 2008, Warren Buffett encouraged me to find a way to share my thinking more broadly about the foundation’s goals and to assess as frankly as possible our progress toward achieving these goals,” Gates writes on his site. “I wrote my first Annual Letter in 2009, and I have to admit I was surprised by the outpouring of interest after it was published.”

For a little more context, Gates’s introductory note on his new site reads, in full:

“Since leaving my fulltime job at Microsoft to dedicate more time to our foundation, a lot of people have asked me what I’m working on. It often feels like I’m back in school, as I spend a lot of my time learning about issues I’m passionate about.

“I’m fortunate because the people I’m working with and learning from are true experts in their fields. I take a lot of notes, and often share them and my own thoughts on the subject with others through e-mail, so I can learn from them and expand the conversation.

“I thought it would be interesting to share these conversations more widely with a website, in the hope of getting more people thinking and learning about the issues I think are interesting and important. So, welcome to the Gates Notes.”

And welcome to a brand-new era of transparency in thought leadership.

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