Yesterday Bob told you about a special report we put together by canvassing the Xconomists—some of the world’s leading innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors—for their thoughts on what students should study to be prepared for the future.

Well, the report is now live, here, with 22 thought-provoking responses. Computing, the scientific method, culture, Chinese, and how to start something are among the areas Xconomists think students can learn to be prepared for a rapidly evolving economy. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, so be sure to delve into the full report to see what innovators like Vinod Khosla, David Baltimore, Lisa Suennen, Robert Langer, and Desh Deshpande have to say on the subject.

And we’d like you to chime in, so please share your answer to the question: What should students be studying now to prepare for 10 years from now?

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

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

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The world is only going to become more technological and more global in the next decade. Students should be getting a solid enough grounding in mathematics, probabilistic thinking, physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering that they understand these ways of thinking and the values of these fields. They also need a liberal arts grounding and, particularly, well developed verbal and writing skills.

Finally, they need enough experience with the rest of the world that they are comfortable interacting with people who come from different cultures and in foreign venues. A foreign language is often a very valuable asset and for people who have backgrounds in multiple cultures—learning the languages of their parents can be an extremely effective preparation for a global career.

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I think learning the fundamentals of a discipline is the most important thing that students can do to prepare themselves for jobs both today and tomorrow. That discipline may be biology, bioengineering, chemistry, chemical engineering or others. I also think doing research is great preparatory experience. Furthermore, I believe the opportunities offered by the convergence between biology, medicine, and engineering are rapidly increasing.

Thus, courses and research at this interface may be increasingly attractive. At MIT, for example, training at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research or the Broad Institute or the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program may be very helpful. At many universities, there are also special programs or activities that students can be involved in that may be useful. At MIT such programs include the $100K business plan competition. At Stanford they have a Biodesign Program. Finally, summer jobs in companies involved in biotech or pharma or medical devices can offer great experiences.

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Here is my advice to students considering pursuing science:

—Learn how to learn (science is progressing so rapidly that whatever field you are focused on today will inevitably be different 10 years from now)

—Learn how to develop focused attention (i.e. avoid modern day distractions like Twitter)

—Master multiple science disciplines—If you can bridge disciplines you will become invaluable.

—Develop a fundamental understanding of scientific principles versus learning the latest scientific tool.

—Learn how to articulate science to all different types of stakeholders—this will be essential to getting the funding you need to pursue your discoveries.

—Science is an apprenticeship business, so find mentors early—even though science is based on rational thought it is conducted in an irrational environment.

—Learn how to embrace serendipity—most of the important discoveries don’t come from linear thought

—Grasp an early intuitive feel and understanding for extremely large or small numbers (10^ -20 and 10^ 20) and probabilistic phenomenon—Science exploration occurs at these extremes so it is just as important to understand these numbers as it is to understand what a 10 Trillion dollar debt is.

—Learn the history of science—All great new things come from combinations of old things.

—Future scientist needs to also be engineers—The best scientist will need to be able to engineer their own tools.

—Attend the 2022 USA Science & Engineering Festival!

(Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital also contributed to this post)

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According to the National Science Foundation, eighth grade girls are half as likely to be interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers as boys—a dramatic change from second grade, where the numbers are roughly equal. This trend continues through high school, college and into the workplace, as even women with advanced science degrees tend to leave the field at higher rates than their male counterparts. The numbers also show that careers of men and women in bioscience progress at markedly different rates; while women and men each hold about half of the graduate degrees in biology, far more senior leadership roles are held by men than women (17 percent vs. 83 percent, respectively.)

Women In Bio Greater Boston (WIB-GB) is one group that is trying to change that. It is the newest chapter of a fast-growing international trade association aimed at fostering leadership, entrepreneurship and careers of women in the biosciences. Comprised of professionals across the career continuum—from those just starting out to industry veterans—the group plans to leverage the region’s strong biotechnology supercluster to provide career development opportunities for women in New England. Programming being planned for 2012 includes networking, mentoring and educational events specifically geared at the interests of and challenges faced by women working in this industry.

Similar WIB chapters in Washington, DC/Baltimore, Research Triangle Park, Seattle and Chicago are enjoying enthusiastic participation in both social and career-enhancing programs, such as an expert lecture on IP in Chicago and a national team entry in the Walk for the Cure in DC. In addition, Washington/Baltimore, RTP, and now Boston have organized a special series aimed at young girls interested in science, called Young Women In Bio (YWIB).

As part of the YWIB series, Biogen Idec opened its doors as host to 25 curious middle school girls from across Massachusetts on December 1. It was an educational, fun program designed to provide the students with first-hand knowledge of the biotechnology and life sciences industry. Nadine Cohen, Biogen’s senior vice president of regulatory affairs, provided a welcome and an overview of the company, biotechnology, and the field’s range of career paths. Community lab director Tracy Callahan, and lab manager Jennifer Greenberg took the visitors on a site tour, engaged them in a hands-on lab experiment (involving M&Ms!), and visited the purification lab to share information about the crucial assays used in biotechnology. A shadow experience demonstrated a “day in the life” of several Biogen employees. Scientist mentors led the visitors to their individual work areas as they explained their roles, shared how they became interested in science, displayed and explained a variety of lab equipment, and answered insightful questions from the inquisitive young ladies.

Lisa Geller, program chair of the Women in Bio Greater Boston chapter, explained why the group is spearheading these events. “As successful women who are passionate about working in the biotechnology industry, we hope to fuel a similar interest in the next generation of female scientists and business leaders. We hope that our Young Women In Bio program blossoms into an ongoing series for girls from early middle school into high school to continue keep them interested as they get older.”

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When Paul Allen and company discussed their vision for a new kind of private space launch on Tuesday, they made a few nods to an audience member who knows something about the subject: Former Microsoft chief software architect Charles Simonyi, the only private citizen to fly in space twice.

While Allen said that he’s planning to wait some time before journeying beyond Earth himself—even on one of his own Stratolaunch vehicles—Simonyi said he’s actually lobbied the Microsoft co-founder to take the leap.

“I’m urging him to take weightless flights,” through parabolic airplane trips that allow passengers to briefly experience zero-gravity. “Do it step by step, that’s how I did it.”

Seats on a spaceflight when Simonyi went were being quoted in the neighborhood of $25 million-$35 million, but the cost now has risen to above $60 million. Asked if he’d fly on a launch from Allen’s new company once it gets up to speed with possible human crews, Simonyi said he’d be game “if my wife agrees and if the price is right.”

“I think it’s very audacious. I think it’s doable,” Simonyi said of Allen’s project. “The people are all within their sphere of competence, and integrating it together, I think, will be a successful project.”

“It’s a whole different (thing) than what I’ve been flying on, which was a legacy vehicle that had practically 50 years of history. It was a second-generation for the soviets, the Soyuz,” he said. “So this is much more advanced, and the training requirements will be minimal compared to the training that I had to go through.”

So, of course it has to be asked: What’s it like to be in space? “It’s an amazing thing,” Simonyi said.

“What was it the first time that one flew on an aircraft, and looking at the fields and the houses and the city from the air? It’s a whole different experience. And space is not unlike that. It’s just that it’s like a super wide-angle lens, and you see so much.

“Things change very fast. Daytime is only 45 minutes, and then you see a fantastic sunrise or sunset, which itself plays out 16 times faster than on Earth because you are doing 16 orbits a day.

“You know, one minute you are over Australia and 15 minutes later you are on the West Coast. You make radio contact from amateur radio, and soon you are talking to somebody—first you are talking to Seattle, and when you finish the conversation, you are in Florida. It’s just amazing.”

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Here in Boston, we like to tout our universities, our faculty, our students. The academic community is one of the crowning strengths of the New England economy, not to mention a major driver of its global impact. But what have universities done for the local startup and business innovation community lately?

I’m not going to give a full answer here—it’s one of the broader themes I’m exploring around town—but I’ll give you a piece of the puzzle.

Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development has what it calls an “Accelerator Fund” that has been chugging along for four years now, and it has achieved some notable results. As of last month, the $10 million fund has given out $5.2 million in grants, which have supported more than 30 projects over five annual cycles. It’s still early to add up the returns on this investment, but already it has led to more than $10 million in partnership money for the university, and several startups that have received outside venture funding. (The Harvard office declined to give specifics on licensing revenues to date.)

What’s more, the model apparently has proven successful enough that the team is about to begin raising a much bigger fund, in the $20 million to $30 million range. And unlike in the past, when Harvard developed a laggardly reputation when it came to commercializing its research, universities around the country are starting to look at the school as a possible role model for technology transfer and startup development practices.

The Accelerator Fund, which Xconomy wrote about in early 2008, was created to help Harvard scientists commercialize their inventions by forming industry partnerships, licensing technology, and starting new companies, primarily in life sciences and biomedical fields. As technology development head and senior associate provost Isaac Kohlberg puts it, “The pipelines of Harvard were empty.” The school “suffered from a branding issue with stakeholders about the role of technology development,” he says.

Kohlberg and his team, which includes Curtis Keith, chief scientific officer of the Accelerator Fund, were brought in to overhaul Harvard’s tech transfer and development offices. Kohlberg joined … Next Page »

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[Correction: 10:22 am 5/24/11] Bluebird Bio is one of those fortunate companies that can say the top peer-reviewed journals in biomedical research—Science and Nature—have run articles featuring its two lead drug candidates while they are still at the earliest phase of development.

CEO Nick Leschly doesn’t want to sound ungrateful—the buzz doesn’t hurt—but he seems like he’s had enough already.

“We can all go crazy, and write publications and talk about it all we want, but let’s enroll more patients and continue to prove it,” Leschly says.

Cambridge, MA-based Bluebird Bio (formerly Genetix Pharmaceuticals) has raised $65 million in the last 14 months to support its programs for gene therapy, so there are some pretty high expectations that it’s going to have to deliver on at some point. I caught up with Leschly for a quick update while he was in Seattle on Friday for the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy conference. He said he’s focused on pushing hard and fast on things that matter less to the basic scientists and more to the folks who oversee clinical trials at the FDA.

Here are the highlights of the two programs we discussed:

—Beta-Thalassemia. This is a genetic blood disorder that makes people unable to produce enough hemoglobin to carry oxygen through the bloodstream so that they can live active lives. People can be cured with a bone marrow transplant today, but not all patients are eligible, and there can be dangerous complications with the approach.

The Bluebird treatment is designed to circumvent those issues with a different approach. It extracts a patient’s blood-forming adult stem cells and exposes them in the laboratory to the gene therapy. Bluebird uses a genetically engineered lentivirus to deliver a copy of a gene that essentially programs the cells to start producing hemoglobin on their own. Then the properly functioning blood cells get re-infused into the patient.

Nick Leschly

Last September, Nature published an article about how this approach worked for the first patient who enrolled in a clinical trial. The patient, a young man in Paris who goes by the initial PLB, was soon able to produce enough hemoglobin on his own to quit getting blood transfusions that he had depended on since the age of four.

[Corrected, with updated time frame] Three years later, the young man is still living without the need for transfusions, and no adverse events have popped up to dampen the enthusiasm, Leschly says. “No news on him is good news,” he says.

The bigger issue is that since this is gene therapy, and there have been safety concerns with other approaches in the past, doctors and regulators are inclined to tread carefully. So far, … Next Page »

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Seventeen companies in 18 years. That’s about as prolific as any entrepreneur-VC partnership in history. And when you’re talking about an MIT Institute Professor (and his collaborators) and the co-founder of Polaris Venture Partners (and his colleagues), that adds significant weight to the achievement.

Earlier this month, Bob Langer from MIT and Terry McGuire from Polaris treated Xconomy and our “VC65” event audience to a discussion of their collaboration over the years. They talked about their formula for creating and building life sciences companies based around six elements: platform technologies, tangible products, pioneering science, patents, real data, and a collaborative team environment. (You can also check out video of an earlier in-depth chat with Langer and McGuire, moderated by my colleague Wade, for more on how the duo goes about building companies.)

McGuire also presented a series of slides that captured the history and impact of the two-decade collaboration (see below). Call it the Langer-Polaris family tree—it shows their 17 startups in roughly chronological order (newer ones at the top), with branches that signify contributions from key collaborators and founders such as MIT’s Michael Cima (MicroCHIPS, TransForm, T2, Taris) and Ram Sasisekharan (Momenta, Cerulean, Visterra), and Harvard’s David Edwards (AIR, Pulmatrix).

“To be clear, I am not the only Polaris person to work with Bob, and some of the branches of the tree lead to companies where Bob is not the principal founder (such as Cerulean),” McGuire told me via e-mail. “Still, they all started with the relationship to Langer.”

From what I can tell, all the companies are either still in business or have been acquired—which is impressive in itself. Still, it’s hard to say if there has been a home run among the companies yet (we’re willing to give them a little more time). Some of the bigger financial hits have included AIR (bought by Alkermes for more than $100 million in 1999), Momenta Pharmaceuticals (IPO in 2004), and TransForm Pharmaceuticals (bought by Johnson & Johnson for $230 million in 2005).

Here are three snapshots of the company tree: The first shows the scientists and Polaris VCs involved with each company; the second shows the types of therapy they’re developing; and the third shows the companies’ potential impact on patient populations (a total of more than 1 billion lives potentially affected).

Companies and founders:

Primary therapeutic areas:

Potential lives touched (estimates of patient populations, in millions):

And below is a full list of the 17 companies, with links to our coverage:

Acusphere (NASDAQ: ACUS)

AIR (Advanced Inhalation Research, acquired by Alkermes in 1999)

Arsenal Medical

BIND Biosciences

Cerulean Pharma (formerly Tempo Pharma)

Kala Pharmaceuticals

Living Proof

MicroCHIPS

Momenta Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: MNTA)

Pervasis Therapeutics

Pulmatrix

Selecta Biosciences

Seventh Sense Biosystems

T2 Biosystems

Taris Biomedical

TransForm Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2005)

Visterra (formerly Parasol Therapeutics)

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Last weekend, FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) held a Regional Robotics Competition for 53 teams at Boston University’s Agganis Arena. High school students were challenged with the opportunity to test themselves as engineers and problem solvers. The game, called LOGO Motion, pits alliances of three robots against each other and awards points for placing each balloon, which is in the shape of a triangle, circle, or square on an appropriate peg to form the FIRST logo.

Preliminary rounds are scheduled Thursday, which help get the robots fine-tuned and then certified by the judges. Friday and Saturday morning the teams run through qualifying rounds to determine seeding for the final alliance selection. I coached the Newton Ligerbots, FIRST Team 2877 (sponsored by PTC, Raytheon, Textron, and NDEP). The matches were very exciting, with the Ligerbots playing solid defense while their alliance partners scored, but the trio lost in the quarterfinal round.

FIRST is about more than drive-trains, chassis, elevators, mechanical-arms, electrical systems, and computer programs. Below are some of my other takeaways from the event:

—Challenges: It was hard for the students to assess the level of difficulty involved in the design and strategy of their solution to this year’s problem. Additionally, the team found it difficult to evaluate the time required to build, because of the snow days that forced us to have six days off. However, this is the reality of engineering and FIRST creates an environment that simulates what students will see at work.

—Lessons Learned: As our team ages (we are currently a third-year team) more responsibility for decision-making is passed from the coaches to the students. We have students writing grants, scheduling the season, maintaining our Web page, and managing the development of the robot’s components. This all requires a significant level of teamwork and communication.

We never stop trying to enhance our product, and we pass our knowledge on to help others. It becomes apparent that … Next Page »

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Fifty-three teams battled it out on Saturday at the Boston regional edition of the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition, a robot-building contest for high school students celebrating its 20th anniversary season year. The nonprofit behind the competition was founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen.

Each year, student teams get a robot parts kit and a fixed amount of time before the showdown to build their machines. The robots are built to compete in a game created by FIRST that often contain elements of other sports like basketball (2009′s games) and soccer (last year’s competition). In this year’s game, “Logo Motion,” the robots earned points for student teams by hanging as many triangle, square, and circle balloon pieces in the playing field as possible, with bonus points going to the robot that could hang the pieces to form the FIRST logo. Student teams had the chance to score additional points by  designing and building a “mini-bot” that could race to the top of a vertical pole. Three robots and high school teams partnered on each side (a “coopetition”), as part of FIRST’s mission of fostering both a sense of healthy competition and teamwork.

Below is a list of the winners who will be competing in the FIRST championships in St. Louis, MO, later this month. Full details can be found here

Winner  1—Team 88, Bridgewater, MA
Winner 2—Team 1099, Brookfield, CT
Winner 3—Team 78, Newport County, RI
Engineering Inspiration Award winner—Team 1100, Northboro, MA
Rookie All Star Award winner—Team 3466, Westford, MA
Regional Chairman’s Award winner—Team 246, Boston, MA

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Cognitive dissonance is defined as “an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously.” I’m suffering from a serious case of discomfort as I try to figure out which is the bigger problem facing biotech scientists: too much information, or too little.

Information overload is a serious issue in biomedical research, if not virtually all high tech fields. Simply put, there is too much to read, and too little time to read it. Recently, however, I have become aware of what may be an equally serious affliction: information underload. I thought I was possibly coining this term, but a quick Google search revealed that the phrase has been used before, notably by Bill Gates in a 1995 speech. I define information underload as a situation where an individual lacks access to timely, critical information that they need to optimally do their job. Information overload usually results from time constraints, whereas information underload arises from accessibility issues.

I uncovered this information underload predicament when I called a friend at a local biotech company to discuss a newly published paper on stem cells. His response stunned me. “No, I haven’t seen the paper,” he replied “because we don’t have a library here.” I queried “No library? How to you and your colleagues keep up with the literature, with how science is progressing, with what your competitors are doing?” The simple answer was: they generally don’t, at least on a day-to-day basis.

When I shared this story with friends and acquaintances at other small biotechs, they chimed in with a pretty similar response. No library to speak of. Subscriptions to a very restricted number of biomedical journals. Limited online access. Yes, there was a small budget to purchase journal access on an article-by-article basis. However, they were highly frustrated by this approach. They couldn’t really determine if the information in a given paper would be truly useful until they had paid for it. This is like getting to take a test drive only after you have purchased the car. So how do scientists at smaller biotech companies keep up with the scientific literature, with their peers, with their competitors? At a time when more and more papers are published, when information overload is a given, does a lack of access to the information become an equally large problem?

As research scientists know, keeping up with information in our various disciplines has become increasingly difficult. The problem is not just reading and thinking about the latest scientific papers; it’s being able to afford access to them. The cost of subscriptions to a broad spectrum of biological journals has become, in a word, expensive. Excessive, exorbitant, and prohibitive also come to mind. The overlapping nature of disciplines within the biological sciences means that someone developing a new cancer treatment will often need to keep up with the literature in specific areas of biochemistry, genetics, toxicology, computational biology, developmental biology, cell biology, immunology, stem cell biology, and, of course, oncology. This is all in addition to keeping up with general development trends in the industry as well as technical advances in experimental reagents, devices, and methodology.

The growth in the number of published scientific journals has been proceeding apace for at long as such journals have existed. Scientific societies and for-profit publishers both contribute to this expansion. In recent years there has been an explosion in the number of biological science journals. Twenty-five years ago, at the very minimum, you wanted to keep current with at least three journals: Cell, Science, and Nature. Much of what was done on the cutting edge of biology was published in the Big Three. Yes, you also wanted to keep tabs on papers published in a number of … Next Page »

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[Editor's Note: This post was co-authored with Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital]

1. The Rise of Celebrity Science

Nations, cultures, economies all get what they celebrate. Celebrate celebrities and we’ll have another generation of over-consumptive, over-indebted, overweight, underemployed citizenry. But celebrate scientists: thinkers, doers, achievers, explorers, inventors, creators and we stand a shot at restoring the very human capital that led to the rise of what made our nation great. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. So I founded the largest-ever celebration of science, the USA Science & Engineering Festival, to inspire and galvanize a force of young scientists keen to invent, explore, discover and create. 1 million participants is a good start, just 299 million to go.

2. The Rise of the IPO

Nearly a decade has passed without a blockbuster set of IPOs. Hints abound that the resurgence of an IPO market is upon us. The rise of secondary markets swapping shares of Facebook and other social-networking darlings prove there is pent-up demand and that capital is ready, willing, and able to once again fund high-flying companies that didn’t exist a few years ago and are the essential companies of tomorrow. Groupon, despite having 500 competitors and being founded only two years ago may be the fastest company in history to get to a billion dollars in revenue.

3. The Rise of the Tablet

The iPad was just the start. Samsung’s Galaxy and a slate of other touch tablets will continue seizing netbook and laptop share. When we get over the buzzword and just start calling the “cloud” the “Internet” again, people will also see that the prophecies of George Gilder and Sun’s Scott McNeely—that the network is the computer—were correct all along.

4. The Rise of Nuclear & EVs

My partners at Lux Capital always tell entrepreneurs to shave with Occam’s Razor: find the simplest solution. In energy it’s nuclear power, and the electrification of everything, including cars. Watch for just-out-of-stealth startups like Kurion that are solving … Next Page »

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Scientists are finding new and amazing evidence that networks of bugs, bacteria, and other microbes in our bodies might help us maintain healthy immune functions—and the absence of them could make us sick. Vedanta Biosciences, a newly formed startup in Boston, is emerging from top-secret status to reveal its goal of developing treatments based on the relationships between microbes and our immune system.

PureTech Ventures, a Boston firm that specializes in founding life sciences startups based on new scientific discoveries, has formed Vedanta this year with leading academics in the fields of immunology and microbiology, according to Daphne Zohar, a managing partner at PureTech and acting CEO of the company. Vedanta is now coming out of stealth mode as a paper co-authored by one of the firm’s major scientific contributors, Kenya Honda of the University of Tokyo, is being released today in the journal Science.

The paper explains the discovery, which Vedanta is working to commercialize, of how a class of bacteria or “Good Clostridia” in the gut might prevent the immune system from going awry and causing inflammation, according to the startup. (Clearly, these good-guy bacteria don’t include the harmful Clostridia such as C. diff.) The scientists show how feeding the bacteria to mice stymied the development of certain allergies and inflammatory bowel disease. Their study found that the bacteria help recruit regulatory T cells to the gut whose job is to prevent such ailments caused by unchecked immune responses.

Vedanta is working with its scientific advisors to translate this discovery into potential treatments for human diseases, says Bernat Olle, a PureTech senior associate who co-founded Vedanta and serves as the its vice president of operations. “We think that the work Honda has done makes a strong case for” developing drugs for “allergies and inflammatory bowel disease,” Olle says. “We’re in the process of now prioritizing the [health] conditions we want to go after.”

The startup, which is incubating in PureTech’s Boston office, appears to be tapping a highly energized field that is rapidly providing clues about why allergies and autoimmune diseases have been on the rise in the U.S. and other developed countries. The so-called “Hygiene Hypothesis” suggests that a … Next Page »

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Cancer cells pull many dirty tricks to resist therapy and stump researchers. One is a madcap reshuffling of the 3 billion letters of DNA that make up the genome found in healthy human cells. But now that genome sequencing has become so cheap and fast, Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics is trying to enter a new market that would have been impossibly expensive a couple years ago: It is now seeking to help scientists pinpoint what’s different in the complete genome of a tumor, compared to a healthy cell.

Complete Genomics (NASDAQ: GNOM)—the sequencing company backed in its early days by San Diego’s Enterprise Partners Venture Capital and OVP Venture Partners in Kirkland, WA—is announcing today it is amping up its efforts to sequence entire human genomes as a service to cancer researchers. In addition to its sequencing service, the company plans to run basic computational analysis for all the copy number variations, and structural variations that pop up in tumors gone wild. This is essentially an extra computational feature that Complete Genomics is throwing in, at no extra cost, to its basic $10,000-per-genome sequencing service.

The idea in the beginning, CEO Cliff Reid says, is to save researchers the time and hassle of performing their own sequencing runs, and then looking around for proprietary or open-source software to help interpret that mother lode of data.

“This gives researchers a new avenue for understanding the genetic causes of cancer,” Reid says.

This strategic push into cancer is the first peep of news out of Complete Genomics since the company nailed down its initial public offering last month. Complete raised $54 million in that deal to move forward with its quest to become one of the leaders in the fiercely competitive field of super-cheap, super-fast DNA sequencing. The current market leaders—San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) and Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE)—have been built on business models in which they sell sophisticated instruments to researchers, plus chemical reagents to operate them. A highly-touted new entrant, Menlo Park, CA-based Pacific Biosciences (NASDAQ: PACB) is following a similarly proven business model, with a different technology that seeks to raise the bar on speed, and lower it even further on cost.

Cliff Reid

Complete is taking a clearly different approach in its business model. Instead of following the razor/razor blade model, it hopes to achieve super low cost and high efficiency by asking researchers to ship samples to its centralized lab where the sequencing and basic computing work gets done. This new business model for sequencing “is a change the industry is still digesting,” Reid says.

Part of what Complete is betting on here is that biologists will essentially want to farm out the heavy computational lifting that it takes to detect signals in datasets with 3 billion data points. Before Complete started offering this service commercially over the summer, the only alternative for researchers who wanted to look at variations in tumor genomes was to do the sequencing runs on an instrument, and either write their own software, or look around for a proprietary or open-source software program to help separate the signal from the noise, Reid says.

This is especially hard to do with cancer, Reid says, offering some basic science to help explain. Most healthy cells have two functioning copies of the genome. Sometimes they get deleted or possibly amplified five, 10, or 20 times over in tumors, through … Next Page »

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Engineering has an image problem. Sure, it’s the technical backbone of many things people use every day, from airplanes, cars, and buildings to new medicines, mobile devices, and the Internet. But it doesn’t always attract the best and brightest young people interested in solving society’s biggest problems or changing the world. That’s because people often have a narrow view of what engineering entails, or think it’s too boring, geeky, or technically difficult to pursue.

Enter the “grand challenges summit” organized by the National Academy of Engineering, which is coming to Seattle next week on May 2-3. This is part of an ongoing series of six NAE events around the U.S. this year that are meant to inspire students and rally faculty, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors around some of society’s most important problems. The plan is to concentrate on big ideas like improving healthcare, producing clean energy, providing access to clean water, restoring urban infrastructure, preventing nuclear terror, and making computer systems secure.

The Seattle event features an all-star cast of speakers, including Bruce Montgomery from Gilead Sciences, Larry Smarr from Calit2 and UC San Diego, Ed Crawley from MIT, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin (now at the University of Alabama), and former NASA astronaut Bonnie Dunbar (now CEO of the Museum of Flight). They will be joined by engineers from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and General Electric, as well as prominent scholars from the UW, including Matt O’Donnell, dean of engineering, Ed Lazowska from computer science & engineering, and Suzie Pun from bioengineering. The sessions will focus on how engineers can make better medicines, as well as better tools for scientific discovery in computing and aerospace.

O’Donnell, who helped bring the summit to Seattle, says the number of students interested in engineering has been declining for the past couple of decades—in particular, the percentage of U.S. students (compared with international students) enrolled in the nation’s graduate programs. “Engineering ain’t too sexy in society,” says O’Donnell, a biomedical engineer with expertise in ultrasound and other diagnostic imaging technologies. “A lot of folks in engineering are worried.”

He says the idea behind the grand challenges is, “Let’s excite people about what engineering can do for society. It’s not just about having your startup and making money—which is cool, and we all love that. But it’s not just the next PDA or iPhone app.” The goal, he says, is to “sexify” engineering and show that “it’s a way of thinking and analyzing systems, integrating quantitative [methods] with real-world concerns. You can build a bridge or PDA, but you can also think about sustainable systems, urban development, or how you put markets together.” (The NAE summits strike me as an adult complement to the FIRST Robotics competitions for middle-school and high-school kids, which are also about inspiring a new generation of engineers and changing the popular culture around engineering.)

The first grand challenges summit took place in early 2009 and was the brainchild of Tom Katsouleas, the dean of engineering at Duke University. O’Donnell was invited to moderate a panel on engineering new medicines. “It was absolutely a blast,” he says. “But then the kids and professionals in … Next Page »

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Two years have passed since GlaxoSmithKline anointed a startup called Regulus Therapeutics as a leader in the bleeding-edge world of microRNA drugs, and now the pharma giant has made clear it likes what it sees so far.

Regulus, a Carlsbad, CA-based spinoff from neighboring Isis Pharmaceuticals and Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, is announcing today it has clinched a second collaboration with Glaxo to develop a microRNA drug for hepatitis C. The new deal provides undisclosed upfront cash, milestone payments potentially worth $150 million, and escalating royalties worth a double-digit percentage of worldwide sales if the drug reaches the market. Glaxo’s upfront payment reimburses Regulus for its R&D work to date, and the big company will assume the expenses of clinical trials.

This is the second time Glaxo has pulled out its checkbook for Regulus, after it agreed to pay as much as $600 million in April 2008 to develop drugs against four microRNA targets for inflammatory diseases. It was a strong statement for the field of microRNA therapies, which are thought to have broad potential as a new class of treatment because they can affect not just one gene or protein in isolation, but full networks of genes—which might be useful in treating complex diseases like diabetes or cancer. Regulus hasn’t yet advanced any of these drugs that work this way into a clinical trial. But this new deal will allow it to move its lead candidate, a blocker of microRNA-122, into its first clinical trial as a hepatitis C therapy in the second half of 2011, according to CEO Kleanthis Xanthopoulos.

“GSK really made a bold and visionary move in the fledgling field of microRNA a couple of years ago, and by selecting us as the lead company,” Xanthopoulos says.

Kleanthis Xanthopoulos

Xanthopoulos picked Glaxo as the partner on this lead program partly because it shows the big company is happy with Regulus’ progress, the terms were good for a single drug program, and he personally knows Glaxo’s senior vice president of anti-infectives, Zhi Hong, has the right expertise to move ahead with the miR-122 blocker.

Regulus and Glaxo are moving ahead fast with this program partly because of the work done by a competitor, Denmark-based Santaris Pharma, Xanthopoulos says. Santaris published a big paper in Science in December that said its own miR-122 blocker produced a powerful effect against the hepatitis C virus in chimpanzees—an animal model that is thought to be highly predictive of what will happen next in humans. That study confirmed what Regulus was seeing in its own animal experiments, and helped accelerate its program by providing some more clarity on the appropriate dosing, Xanthopoulos says.

The unhappy result of the Santaris paper is that it potentially puts the companies on a collision course over who owns the relevant intellectual property. Regulus contends … Next Page »

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From the seas to the stars, Microsoft Research is trying to increase its impact. The Redmond, WA-based computer science research organization is releasing new software tools aimed at helping scientists manage and visualize huge amounts of information, and make discoveries in fields as diverse as astronomy and oceanography. The announcement of the free tools, called Project Trident, is being made today at the 10th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond.

Everyone knows information overload is a huge issue. Just try being a scientist these days. With increasing amounts of data available from the Internet, satellites, telescopes, cameras, gene sequencers, and networked sensors, researchers—and organizations in general—are looking for ways to cut through the deluge and focus faster on doing the analysis and getting results, rather than sorting through data.

It’s also a problem faced by big companies, financial analysts, and medical institutions. So, ultimately, Project Trident is not aimed at spearing purely scientific research problems—it’s software that also could yield big results for business down the road. “If we look back at the challenges faced in business, scientists were facing them years if not decades before,” says Roger Barga, a Microsoft researcher and principal architect on Project Trident. “We’re getting an early look at what our business customers will expect in their products in 3-5 years. It’s pushing another Microsoft [Windows] platform into new areas.”

Project Trident started around 2006, when Barga began collaborating with legendary Microsoft researcher Jim Gray (who was lost at sea in January 2007) on tools to help oceanographers make sense of volumes of data on things like temperature, salinity, and the physics of seafloor hydrothermal vents. “There’s a clear understanding of the science and how to put instruments in the ocean, but there’s a gap in how to convert data streaming in from the ocean to useful analysis,” Barga says. “Jim had this vision of … Next Page »

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The President of the United States is supposed to know the differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims. But somehow, as Richard Muller points out, nobody expects America’s commander in chief to know the differences between uranium and plutonium, or between gasoline and hydrogen.

That’s why he teaches “Physics for Future Presidents” at UC Berkeley, a course for non-science majors that Muller relishes as his opportunity to inform the business majors and liberal arts students who represent our future leaders. The longtime Cal physics professor turned his idea for the class into a textbook, and more recently into a popular book with the same title.

Now he’s on a roll. Muller was the featured speaker at Xconomy’s premiere event in San Diego Monday night, just a week or so after meeting with global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (He even got to fly home aboard the Google jet).

With “Physics for New Presidents” as his theme, Muller assumes a role that could be described as an equal opportunity “Debunker in Chief.” In rapid succession, he separates some core, inescapable scientific truths from the myths surrounding them. He started by dispelling fears sown by Dick Cheney about terrorists planting nuclear bombs on U.S. soil and ended by puncturing Al Gore’s inflated interpretations of the scientific evidence for global warming. Among the chestnuts he shucked:

—Nuclear bombs are extremely difficult to make, even for industrialized countries. Muller says he’s far more worried about another “low tech” terrorist act involving 60 tons of gasoline and a crowded football stadium on a Sunday afternoon.

—U.S. reserves of coal and oil shale far exceed the amount of crude oil remaining in Saudi Arabia and most other countries combined. “This is great news for energy independence and bad for global warming,” Muller says. Nevertheless, he says the United States should develop all of its energy resources, using “clean coal” technologies and other innovations to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

—The scientific consensus, presented by an authoritative study on global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, concluded that the warming trend from 1850 to 1957 cannot be attributed to human activities. From 1957 to 2007, the study found a 90 percent likelihood that human activities caused a global average temperature increase of only about 1 degree Fahrenheit.

—Weather data do not show an increase in the number of hurricanes over the past century, nor do the data show an increase in the number of major category hurricanes. Today, hurricanes are detected by weather satellites and sensors in mid-ocean. Such observations were impossible before the first weather satellite was launched 49 years ago.

—Carbon dioxide emissions in developing countries, especially China and India, represent the biggest source of the predicted increase in greenhouse gases. It is a far more intractable problem in terms of curbing emissions, because coal is a cheap and bountiful energy source and clean energy technologies are too costly in comparison. “The only solution that I can think of is that we have to pay developing countries to use clean energy,” Muller says. Otherwise, they won’t use it.

As for energy development in the United States, Muller says his counsel is, “Don’t be greener than thou. Don’t bicker that ‘My technology is greener than yours. ‘ We need all of them. We need clean coal. We need nuclear. We need solar and wind. We need them all.”

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