Here’s an interesting development involving figures in the medical devices scenes of Boston and San Diego. Topera Medical, a secretive startup launched in 2008 in San Diego, has established a new headquarters in the Boston area to develop a catheter system for rapidly identifying the source of irregular heart rhythms in each patient. The Lexington, MA-based firm, which was founded to commercialize the inventions of physician Sanjiv Narayan at the University of California, San Diego, has also hired former Boston Scientific executive Edward Kerslake to be its CEO.

Kerslake, who used to evaluate emerging technologies as a corporate vice president at Natick, MA-based Boston Scientific (NYSE:BSX), says that he joined Topera as its chief executive in December 2010. The company has raised a small, undisclosed amount of Series A financing recently from a group of individual investors that includes veteran medical technology executives. Plans are to expand the round later this year with additional investments.

Topera has been operating with a low profile for most of its existence and only recently put up a website. Work on the firm’s technology has until now been conducted at UCSD, where chief scientific officer Narayan is an associate professor of medicine, and at the VA San Diego, where he is director of the electrophysiology. (Narayan, whose diverse training includes a master’s degree in software engineering, was a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School and a faculty tutor for the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences Technology program.) Ruchir Sehra, a medtech consultant who serves as the chief medical officer of the Carlsbad, CA-based medical devices firm PhotoThera, is also a co-founder of Topera.

Topera’s executives are keeping many of the details about the firm’s technology under wraps until the large Heart Rhythm Society annual meeting in San Francisco in May, when the firm plans to release details about the clinical use of its system for identifying patient-specific sources of irregular heart rhythms. Yet people with knowledge of the technology provided me with some general information about it.

Using catheters inserted in the heart, Topera detects electrical signals from the heart. Its software analyzes the signals to provide physicians with a two-dimensional electrophysiological map of the heart. The aim is to show how electricity is flowing in the heart, providing a way to view the abnormal electrical flows that can sustain arrhythmias such as atrial flutter and atrial fibrillation.

Atrial fibrillation, the most common of the arrhythmias, affects about 2.7 million Americans and is a cause of stroke and heart failure. Treatments for the complex disease include drugs to thin the blood and control heart rhythms as well as surgery for cases in which the drugs aren’t effective. But many such procedures, which involve using catheter-based tools to ablate the heart tissue involved in the disease, end in failure. Part of the challenge is knowing which tissues to target.

Existing systems have been able to give physicians three-dimensional maps of the heart to aid in the treatment of irregular heart rhythms. The large providers of such technologies include St. Jude Medical (NYSE:STJ) and Biosense Webster, a Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) company. And Burlington, MA-based startup Rhythmia Medical has been working to improve the speed and resolution of 3D heart-mapping tools.

Hopefully, Topera will have some interesting data come May that will shed more light on its technology and its ability to aid in the treatment of arrhythmias.

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A complicated financing deal led by New Energy Capital of Hanover, NH, has provided $23.5 million for a renewable energy project in San Diego that uses methane gas from a sewage treatment plant to generate electricity from advanced technology fuel cells.

Construction is scheduled to begin next month on a “biogas” purification system developed by BioFuels Energy, an Encintas, CA, startup founded in 2007 to process gas generated at landfills, sewage treatment plants, and at large livestock facilities into usable methane. The plan calls for installing the gas processing at the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant and the South Bay Water Reclamation Plant, which are both operated by the City of San Diego. The city currently flares methane gas generated during the sewage treatment process.

Molten carbonate fuel cells made by Danbury, CT-based FuelCell Energy (NASDAQ: FCEL) will be installed at the two treatment plants and on the campus of UC San Diego, according to Byron Washom, UCSD’s director of Strategic Energy Initiatives.

The fuel cell power plants at the three locations will be configured to provide heat and electricity, and excess methane gas will be injected into the natural gas pipeline delivery system operated under an energy credit initiative approved by the California Public Utilities Commission.

Methane needed to operate the largest fuel cell, a 2.8 megawatt plant at UCSD, will be supplied by San Diego Gas & Electric under the arrangement. Washom said the energy credit scheme, which is a first in California and probably nationwide, is comparable to withdrawing cash from an ATM in San Diego after making a deposit elsewhere. In this case, methane gas from the sewage plant is being processed to meet utility standards and injected into a gas pipeline near the sewage treatment facility in Point Loma. Meanwhile UCSD is withdrawing a similar amount of gas elsewhere for its power plant in La Jolla. The City of San Diego also plans to withdraw gas to power a sewage pumping station in Otay Mesa.

“We’re taking a waste product that is currently being flared and using it to … Next Page »

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Tom Clancy, the founder of San Diego-based Tao Venture Capital Partners (and not the author of “The Hunt for Red October”), recently gave me a glimpse of advances in analytics software that will be on stage next week at the San Diego “Supermath” conference on analytics.

As the conference chairman, Clancy has a job that might be described as “Get Them to the Geek Fest.” He’s been working with other organizers to broaden this year’s analytics conference, previously known as the San Diego Forum on Analytics. More than 100 companies in the San Diego area are developing pattern recognition software, neural networks, and related technologies that are used to analyze data and to predict certain types of outcomes—such as the likelihood that a credit card application is fraudulent. Yet Clancy says the world of software development doesn’t recognize how the specialized analytics expertise in San Diego can be integrated to dramatically enhance the user experience with social media, mapping, and other types of everyday programs.

Tom Clancy

“We made a conscious decision to focus on practical applications this year,” Clancy told me over coffee. “At the same time, we wanted to encourage people who are building apps to interact with the developers who are building analytics software. What we’re trying to do is open the minds of the broader application community as to how analytics can be incorporated in their programs.”

Analytics software is being used these days to dissect everything from hospital infection rates to runaway wildfires and urban traffic patterns. “San Diego has an incredibly rich history of producing analytics innovations and talented teams, and this is the first conference to bring … Next Page »

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Here we are, trapped between Halloween and Election Day. Good thing we have some interesting biztech news, or there would be nothing fun to do.

—Memjet, the San Diego-based startup developing super-fast color inkjet printing technologies, says it is launching its on-demand printing technology for the label and packaging markets at the Pack Expo International 2010 Conference, which began yesterday in Chicago. As I reported in July, Memjet has developed what CEO Len Lauer calls “truly disruptive” technology—its print engine technology is used in the SpeedStar 3000 label maker, which prints high-resolution product labels at a rate of 12 inches per second.

—New sources of online data this year will total 1.2 zettabytes (or 10²¹), Facebook has more than 500 million subscribers, and there are 85 million Twitter “tweets” per day, according to Darryl McDonald, Ohio-based Teradata’s executive vice president of development and marketing. McDonald, who was in San Diego last week for the 2010 Teradata Partners User Group Conference & Expo, says those are all examples of the “tsunami” of unstructured data that innovative retailers and other businesses can take advantage of as part of the “socialization of data.” More than 3,000 people—a record crowd—attended the conference last week at the San Diego Convention Center.

—The William J. von Liebig Center at UC San Diego, the City of San Diego, San Diego State University, and Cleantech San Diego launched the second San Diego Cleantech Innovation and Commercialization Program last week. A $50,000 grant was awarded to each of three cleantech projects for proof-of-concept studies and prototype development, and the von Liebig Center’s business advisors will assist the innovators prepare and execute a plan to commercialize their technologies. The winners are: Doug Grotjahn of SDSU for technology to make hydrogen from water; Yuvraj Agarwal of UCSD for technology to reduce computers’ energy consumption; and Stephen Bennett of UCSD for advanced climate and meteorology solutions for business decisions.

—San Diego’s Connect, the non-profit organization for technology and entrepreneurship, was among four groups honored last week by the U.S. Commerce Department’s 2010 Innovation in Economic Development Awards. Since the California Governor’s Office of Economic Development designated San Diego as one of California’s seven Innovation Hubs (iHUB), Connect has served as the leader of San Diego’s local iHUB effort. The federal economic development award singled out Connect as an exemplar in regional innovation clusters.

—An ad hoc group of 30 San Diego CEOs have signed an open letter to local voters concerning their views on Proposition 23, an initiative on the California ballot tomorrow that calls for suspending the state’s landmark clean energy law, known as AB32. The letter urges voters to vote against the proposition, saying the state mandate to develop clean energy and clean technology solutions has created more than 500,000 new jobs and $9.1 billion in private equity investments in the state. The signers include Envision Solar CEO (and San Diego Xconomist) Robert Noble; Startup Circle CEO Robert Reyes; SafeList CEO Karim Pirani; Camille Sobrian; Connect CEO, Mario Larach; Kai Bio Energy CEO; and EcoDog CEO Ron Pitt.

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A collaborative program coordinated by the San Diego mayor’s office will provide a total of $150,000 in grants to help commercialize cleantech technologies being developed by three research teams at UC San Diego and San Diego State University.

The pre-seed funding comes at a time when local VC funding has evaporated, and many local technologists and entrepreneurs are struggling like hard-scrabble farmers to raise capital. The three $50,000 grants awarded by the San Diego Clean Tech Innovation and Commercialization Program are intended to fund proof-of-concept studies and prototype development, according to Jacques Chirazi, cleantech program manager for San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders. Each of the three university research teams also will get business mentoring services from advisors working through the William J. von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

The three grants, which were culled from 13 proposals, represent the second round of funding since 2007, when the city launched a cleantech initiative in collaboration with the von Liebig Center. The program awarded its first three $50,000 grants in late 2008, when it was called the The Clean Tech Innovation Challenge, as the nationwide recession was tightening its grip and the San Diego regional economy was in a free fall. The three recipients are:

—Software technology developed by UCSD computer science and engineering professor Rajesh Gupta and UCSD research scientist Yuvraj Agarwal helps reduce energy consumption in computer networks and server farms by enabling the machines to “sleep” when they’re not in use.

—Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Alexander Gershunov, postdoctoral scholar Kristen Guirguis, and Stephen Bennett have developed new ways to forecast severe cold weather by as much as 40 days. The researchers’ technology could be used to develop customized risk assessments of supply chain management and energy consumption by using decision-support software that links weather and climate research.

—San Diego State University chemistry professor Douglas Grotjahn is developing and testing low-cost catalysts for generating hydrogen from water. The catalysts can be used in a system that uses water and sunlight to produce hydrogen.

The San Diego Clean Tech Innovation and Commercialization Program is a collaboration that includes the city of San Diego, UCSD’s von Liebig Center, San Diego State University, Cleantech San Diego, and UCSD’s Sustainable Solutions Institute. Lead sponsors of this year’s program include the Sempra Energy Foundation, the Kaplan Family Trust, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the Knobbe Martens Olsen & Bear law firm.

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He got the beat. Yu “Mike” Chi, a graduate student in electrical engineering at UC San Diego, put a quarter-sized wireless sensor over his suit jacket and displayed the resulting electrocardiogram to win the UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge.

The live demonstration on June 2 of technology that Chi had developed for his research thesis (and the business plan for commercializing it) won the top prize—$25,000 in startup funding and $15,000 in legal services—for Cognionics. The team, which included graduate engineering and MBA students at UCSD and Ph.D students from UC San Diego, the Salk Institute, and The Scripps Research Institute. Of 75 student teams that began the competition last fall, five made it to the finals of the 4th annual student-organized competition, which is held at UCSD under the auspices of multiple academic departments and research institutes. Cognionics also won the audience choice award for its demo and “executive summary presentation” in the finals, which was worth an additional $1,000, and best entry in the high-tech track, worth another $2,000.

Cognionics Sensor (Courtesy UCSD)

Cognionics uses a wireless sensor to detect “biopotentials,” tiny voltage signals that emanate from electrically active cells, such as neurons and cardiac cells, that propagate to the skin through the conductive media of the human body. The device also uses wireless networks to transmit the cardiac data to computers for review.

The panel of judges awarded second prize to Halo Imaging, a student startup team led by Rady School student Byron Myers. Halo presented a plan for commercializing technology that makes it possible to conduct a CT scans in emergency vehicles, which could save vital time for traumatic head injury cases in transit. Halo won $10,000 in startup funding and $10,000 in legal services, after winning $2,500 in cash and $5,000 in legal services for best business summary in a previous round of the competition. The also won $2,000 for having the best business plan in the life sciences category.

Third place went to Moki Health, led by recent UCSD Medical School graduate Brian Lichtenstein, for a mobile platform that organizes patients’ medical information for easy access by any medical provider. Moki got $5,000 in cash and $5,000 in legal services. The technology uses proprietary software to integrate electronic health records. Interra Energy, a team led by Rady student Thomas Del Monte, won in the category of clean technology. Intera’s technology converts biomass to energy and sequesters carbon in soil to improve soil quality. The winner in the social/consumer product category was Shopparel, which combines social networking with a shopping website that allows a user to see what your friends buy.

The UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge awarded a total of $80,000 in prizes this year to student-led teams. The challenge, described as a “mini-MBA” program of free seminars, workshops, and networking events, encourages UCSD students to form multi-disciplinary teams of engineers, scientists, and business-minded students, to develop their business and technology commercialization plans.

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Almost from the moment that Thomas Edison had the first filament of an idea, the light bulb has been a symbol of invention—and of the Eureka! moment that comes with innovation. But as public awareness of green and clean technologies has gained currency, the incandescent light bulb of yore might just as easily serve as a symbol of traditional energy sources, burdened with all sorts of hidden and not-so-hidden costs.

In other words, light bulbs are out. LEDs are in.

At Xconomy, we’re anticipating waves of similar innovations that incorporate smarter and more efficient ways of using energy to heat and light buildings, to transport people and goods, and in both supplying electricity and operating the power grid. And as Internet pioneer Larry Smarr pointed out Tuesday afternoon, there also are smarter ways of applying what he calls ICT, information and communications technology, to use less energy.

Calit2 Director Larry Smarr

“Energy is one of the remaining industries that has not been transformed by digital information technologies,” Smarr said. He cited a “Smart 2020″ report prepared by UCSD and UC Irvine that found “ICT’s largest influence will be by enabling energy efficiencies in other sectors, an opportunity that could deliver carbon savings five times larger than the total emissions from the entire ICT sector in 2020.”

Smarr provided an overview of what such innovations could look like as he kicked off the Xconomy Forum: The Rise of Smart Energy Tuesday afternoon. More than 125 people attended the afternoon conference at UC San Diego’s Calit2 (the California Institute for Information Technology and Telecommunications at UC San Diego), where Smarr has served as founding director since 2000. As several attendees told me afterward, his opening keynote talk laid out several prevailing themes that threaded through the presentations and discussions that followed.

Those themes unspooled in a panel discussion about the kind of innovations that will be needed in sensor networks, IT infrastructure, and software analytics as California utilities struggle to provide electricity to customers in 2020, when a third of the energy on the grid must come from solar panels, wind turbines, and other intermittent sources of renewable energy. Jan Kleissl, a UCSD assistant professor of engineering, explained how a sensor network that measures radiant sunlight in real time could help utility operators cope with precipitous drops in … Next Page »

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Engineers are not salespeople. They are certainly not sound-bite machines either. If they were either of the above, there would have been a flurry of media stories coming out of Seattle this week centered around the National Academy of Engineering’s “grand challenges” summit held here on Sunday and Monday. Maybe that’s why it took me longer than usual to synthesize what I heard into a coherent wrap-up.

Alas, the meeting was probably disappointing to most journalists. But if you are a scientist or a savvy businessperson interested in the future of technology, you should have been there. Its goal was to inspire students, researchers, and entrepreneurs to solve some of society’s most important problems—and it did. But it did so in a unique way—with some very high-level, thought-provoking talks and discussions that went far beyond what I was expecting as a casual observer. (OK, I’ll admit I’m an engineer by training, and still think like an engineer in many ways.)

It’s not exaggerating to say engineers have created the world we live in, and that they hold the future of the planet in their hands. They can also make you a lot of money if you work with them in the right way. A lot of tech entrepreneurs have other ideas, but I think the gap between technology researchers and startups needs to be bridged, for the good of society. This week, local summit organizers Matt O’Donnell, Ed Lazowska, and Bonnie Dunbar took a step in that direction, and got a lot of people buzzing about the future of technology and society.

Without further ado, here is my top 10 countdown of highlights from the summit, which focused on engineering better medicines and advancing tools for scientific discovery in computing and aerospace:

10. Eat broccoli.

During the medicine panel, Buddy Ratner, a University of Washington professor of bioengineering, raised an issue from the audience. “What’s the business model for preventive medicine?” he asked. His point was that companies pour billions of dollars into new drugs, but some of the advances that have had the most impact on improving overall health in society are low-tech things like washing hands before doing surgery, providing people with clean drinking water, and eating broccoli to help prevent cancer.

9. The new drug pipeline is broken—except when it’s not.

This was a point of contention on the panel. Lonnie Edelheit, former senior vice president of R&D at General Electric, argued that “if we don’t worry about cost, it’ll stay confusing until the system breaks completely.” Nicholas Peppas, chair of biomedical engineering at University of Texas at Austin, countered, “I don’t think the system is broken. It is still an excellent system, it works relatively well. This country has produced most of the great drugs and made them available at relatively low cost.”

8. Not everyone loves Dendreon.

Seattle’s biotech darling, which just made history by winning FDA approval for a new kind of prostate cancer drug, has its share of detractors. In discussing how to fix the drug pipeline, Bruce Montgomery, senior vice president at Gilead Sciences, said, “The problem is the reward system for … 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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Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day in the United States, an occasion that is now observed by just about every country on the planet. Within the past four decades, we have witnessed the price of crude oil careen from about $3 a barrel in the early 1970s to almost $148 a barrel in the summer of 2008. Yeah, prices have fallen since then. But the experience of paying more than $4 for each gallon of gasoline had a widespread and galvanizing effect on all of us. We all know which way this trend is headed, regardless of political wrangling over the science underlying projections of global warming.

That’s why I am excited to announce our next Xconomy event in San Diego, an afternoon forum on “smart energy” set for Tuesday, June 8. What is smart energy? It begins, in the broadest and most pragmatic sense, with the realization that we can be smarter—we must be smarter—in the way we use energy. For us at Xconomy, smart energy is especially about technology innovation, and we have pulled together a group of energy visionaries, industry veterans, startup CEOs, and other experts to help explain the innovations that are already underway—and also will be needed—in every sector of our energy economy.

Along with incisive keynote talks and case studies, we have organized a discussion focused on the future power grid. That will include Terry Mohn, the chief innovation officer at Balance Energy, a micro grid energy business started in San Diego by the British aerospace contractor BAE Systems; Jan Kleissl, assistant professor of environmental engineering at UCSD; and Michael Zeller, the CEO and co-founder of San Diego-based Zementis, a startup developing software analytics for the grid. Brian Kremer, the cleantech and energy analyst at Roth Capital Partners, will moderate.

The stage for this afternoon session is the 200-seat auditorium in Atkinson Hall, home of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, where we held our successful forum on biotech innovation in December. Calit2, which is an event co-sponsor, also has graciously lent us its founding director, Internet pioneer (and San Diego Xconomist) Larry Smarr, to serve as a keynote speaker. Among other things, Smarr is a co-principal investigator of the National Science Foundation’s GreenLight project, which is intended to develop new green energy strategies for an IT industry that is estimated to consume as much energy as the airline industry.

As it turns out, many of the technological advances that are needed to make us smarter about using energy—including new capabilities in our IT infrastructure, sensors, wireless communications, data warehousing, and software analytics—represent new market opportunities for many of San Diego’s renowned innovation clusters.

So, to round out the agenda, we have scheduled case study presentations about … Next Page »

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One notion that emerged at Xconomy’s event in San Diego last week was that biomedical informatics might have a promising role to play in the region’s economic future. There is no consensus on this as yet, as Luke discovered when he talked with Illumina CEO Jay Flatley.

Among the true believers is UC San Diego’s Lucila Ohno-Machado. No surprises there—since last year, she has been director of biomedical informatics at the medical school. Before arriving in San Diego, she was director of the Harvard-MIT-Tufts-Boston University biomedical informatics training program.

We caught up with her this week via e-mail to find out more about the technology, what it means for the U.S. health care system, and the role she sees for San Diego’s innovation community.

Xconomy: What is biomedical informatics?

Lucila Ohno-Machado: Biomedical informatics is a scientific discipline focused on the development of new algorithms and/or new approaches to organize, visualize, and interpret health-related data in order to promote health and alleviate the burden of disease. The discipline is placed at the intersection of health sciences, biology, computer science, and statistics.

San Diego is in a unique position due to the accumulation of human talent, high-tech companies, and a collective interest in improving healthcare for all. It has all the ingredients to become the number one biomedical informatics center in the country.

X: How is it different from computational biology, which we’ve also been hearing a lot about?

LOM: Computational biology usually relates to the development and application of algorithms and computational strategies to analyze biological data at the molecular level. In biomedical informatics, we develop new algorithms and systems that relate to the full spectrum of data: from molecular to individual to population levels. We often refer to bio-, clinical- or public health-informatics for algorithmic developments and strategies targeting … Next Page »

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The La Jolla Research & Innovation Summit held yesterday at the Salk Institute was a smaller and a much more modest affair than the inaugural summit that Connect CEO Duane Roth organized last year. I have some impressions from the morning presentations:

—Climatologist Dan Cayan of UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography explained why multiple computerized models of climate change indicate that Southern California will become significantly hotter and drier over the next 100 years. What Cayan left unsaid is the critical importance of water to the life sciences community in semi-arid San Diego, which gets just 10 inches of rainfall a year (on average) and imports most of its water from Northern California and the Colorado River basin. Biocom, the San Diego regional biotech industry association, began during the drought of 1991, when the San Diego City Council proposed a water-rationing plan that included shutting off water for several hours a day to manufacturers—including life sciences facilities.

—When someone in the audience asked about current prospects for desalination technology, Australian-born Tony Haymet, who is director of Scripps Oceanography, stepped to the microphone to explain that desalination remains very expensive. If I understood him correctly, Haymet said desalination is more than four times the cost of conventional water treatment. In Australia, where much of the population lives in a coastal climate similar to San Diego, Haymet said a prolonged dry spell led to a concerted effort to reduce excessive water use. The results are dramatic. Haymet said urban Australia has reduced its daily water consumption by 77 percent, from 130 gallons per person to 30 gallons per person. In contrast, the Scripps director says average daily water use in California today exceeds 300 gallons per person. So there’s room for improvement. Haymet noted, however, that … Next Page »

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With all the froth around big tech company earnings, device announcements, and mobile app stores, it’s refreshing to see some long-term research in computing being funded. Google announced today it has awarded $1.35 million ($900,000 up front) to the University of Washington for work on mobile data collection for public health and environmental monitoring, and $100,000 to UC San Diego, for research on energy efficiency.

The awards are part of $5.7 million in the first Google Focused Awards Grants being given to a dozen projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities in the U.S. and U.K. The areas of research also include machine learning and privacy. The grants are for two to three years, and give the recipients “access to Google tools, technologies and expertise,” according to a blog post by Alfred Spector, Google’s vice president of research and special initiatives.

The UW grant is to computer science professor (and former Intel Research Seattle director) Gaetano Borriello, in collaboration with Deborah Estrin at UCLA. (Wade and I have previously reported on the work of these two professors in wireless sensor networks.) The new grant is for researching the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environmental monitoring applications.

“Here at Google Seattle, we deeply appreciate our strong relationship with the University of Washington,” said Brian Bershad, Google Seattle’s engineering director (and former UW computer science professor), in a statement. “With this focused research award, we see an example of how that collaboration and recognition extends broadly across Google.”

Meanwhile, the UCSD grant to computer scientists Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson, and Amin Vahdat, is for studying energy efficiency in computing. Energy efficiency has been among the topics of interest at the UC San Diego campus of Calit2, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. Calit2 director Larry Smarr views global warming as a serious environmental threat, and has highlighted efforts at UCSD and elsewhere to make data centers and other IT operations more energy-efficient.

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It’s that time of year when young analysts turn to thoughts of venture investments won and lost. We’ve got the early returns, and more details will shake out in coming weeks, so get a head start now.

—It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Venture investments in cleantech startups nationwide fell by 38 percent in the fourth quarter that ended Dec. 31, compared to the third quarter of 2009, according to ChubbyBrain, a New York firm that tracks data on high-growth private startups. Yet investments in Internet startups soared during the quarter. The overall amount of fourth-quarter venture capital investments declined to $5.5 billion nationwide, compared with $5.9 billion during the fourth quarter of 2008, but ChubbyBrain counted 687 fourth-quarter deals nationwide, the highest number in five quarters.

—On another front, funds flowing into U.S. venture firms by college endowments, wealthy individuals, and other limited partner investors fell by almost 55 percent in 2009, compared to 2008, according to Dow Jones LP Source. In San Diego, the private equity firm Capital Creek Partners of suburban Rancho Santa Fe raised $50.7 million in the sole funding that showed up last year.

—SAIC (NYSE: SAI), the Virginia-based government contractor that was founded in San Diego, agreed to acquire cybersecurity firm CloudShield Technologies of Sunnyvale, CA. Since its founding in 2000, CloudShield reportedly had raised about $75 million from investors that include D.C.-based Paladin Capital Group; Foundation Capital of Menlo Park, CA; Fuse Capital of Palo Alto and Los Angeles; TPG Ventures of Fort Worth, TX, and San Francisco; and Tektronix of Beaverton, OR. The companies did not disclose financial terms of their deal.

—San Diego-based OpenCandy, which was founded by six ex-DivX employees in 2007, is growing fast and might consider raising a secondary round of venture capital later this year, according to CEO Darrius Thompson. OpenCandy, which now has 20 employees and is still hiring, raised $3.5 million in Series A funding in late 2008 from Bessemer Venture Partners, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and some prominent individual investors. The company’s website helps to connect free software publishers and advertisers.

—UCSD’s Rady School of Management has formed a new source of startup capital for San Diego entrepreneurs. The new Rady Venture Fund plans to make investments that range between $75,000 and $100,000 in a program that’s primarily intended to help MBA students at Rady learn the ropes of venture capital.

—MeLLmo, the Del Mar, CA-based startup that created a mobile business intelligence application for Apple’s iPhone, said South Africa’s Vodacom has selected its Roambi app to provide real-time, critical business information to its workforce.

—SG Biofuels said it has formed a strategic alliance with Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE), the Carlsbad, CA-based maker of genetic diagnostic equipment, laboratory instruments, and other biotech supplies. Using Life Technologies’ genetic analysis tools, SG Biofuels said it will be able to produce improved cultivars of Jatropha, a bushy crop the company is developing as a potential source of biofuels.

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Entrepreneurs scratching to find sources of startup capital in San Diego will soon be getting help from an unexpected source. The Rady School of Management at UC San Diego says it is launching its own venture fund that will use donor funds to make investments of $75,000 to $100,000 in startups commercializing new technologies.

The Rady Venture Fund, which the business school describes as the first of its kind in San Diego, is modeled after the Wolverine Venture Fund, founded in 1997 by the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. The Michigan venture fund typically invests from $50,000 to $200,000 in seed and early-stage funding rounds in syndication with other VC firms and angel investors.

“Our objective is to provide hands-on educational experience to UCSD MBA students—not on making returns on our investment,” says Lada Rasochova, a Rady School alumna who put the fund together as director of entrepreneurship at the UCSD business school. Yet Rasochova noted the Wolverine Venture Fund has made some successful investments, notably in Irvine, CA-based IntraLase Corp., and Ann Arbor, MI-based HandyLab, which was acquired less than four months ago by Becton-Dickinson for a reported $300 million. The Wolverine Venture Fund is estimated to have made $2 million on a $300,000 investment in the medical technology startup.

An external advisory board made up of venture investors, entrepreneurs, and community leaders will help provide guidance on the fund and associated coursework. Rasochova says there also are two “safety checks” on venture investments made by the fund. She says a committee that includes venture industry veterans will make investment decisions, and investments only will be made jointly with another VC firm. Rasochova says Rady students will participate in the entire investment process, “so we would prefer to make investments in the San Diego region so our students can help them succeed.”

The program, which is open to both full-time and flex-time MBA students, includes a more academic course in venture finance and investment analysis and what Rasochova calls two “hands-on” classes that enable students to vet business plans, support entrepreneurs, and help manage the fund and its venture investments.

The Rady Venture Fund is expected to make only one or two investments per year in startups focused on high technology or the life sciences, although Rasochova says the fund has ruled out drug development companies because of the extraordinary time and costs involved.

Because the Rady Venture Fund is funded by donations to the business school through the UC San Diego Foundation, Rasochova says any investment returns will revert to the venture fund and the Rady School of Management. If there was a really huge return, she says, Rady School Dean Robert S. Sullivan would decide how any spillover funds would be used.

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If Jane Austen had been an avant-garde technology writer instead of a 19th Century English novelist, she might have imagined a character like Larry Smarr: a brainy and bespectacled man of 61 years who tends the roses and fuchias of his La Jolla garden on weekends while designing the infrastructure of the Internet the rest of the week.

In his Twitter bio, Smarr writes, “I was a mathematician, then physicist, then astrophysicist, then supercomputer director, now computer scientist. I have made change my friend.”

Now, as director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, Smarr wants to do for energy conservation and green technologies what he did for Web innovation. He is enthusiastically endorsing the widespread use of sensors for real-time monitoring of power use in buildings. The savings could be huge and the environmental benefits enormous, Smarr says, because energy used to heat and cool buildings generates 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Smarr described the idea at a UC San Diego forum Wednesday evening: wireless sensors nowadays can continuously monitor temperature and many other factors inside and outside a building—and relay the data to Web-based environmental control systems designed to maximize energy efficiencies.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” said Smarr, adding that “the electrical bill of this building is $1 million a year.” During his presentation, Smarr noted that UC San Diego has now installed sensors throughout 34 of its buildings, and publishes the resulting data online and in real time. UCSD announced a few weeks ago that it has embarked on a $73 million program to increase the energy efficiency of 25 of its older buildings in an effort to reduce their combined energy costs by at least $6 million a year.

The concept is an example of what the forum’s organizers call “greenovation,” or green innovation. If Austen were still around, though, she might call it “Sensing and Sensibility,” or perhaps “Sense and Sustainability.”

Smarr told the audience that the desktop computers and servers in the UCSD computer science and engineering building account for 70 percent of the building’s baseload power demand. “And 90 percent of that could be avoided,” Smarr says, by adding software that would turn off display screens, internal wireless devices, and other energy-guzzling internal components when they’re not being used.

Whether Smarr’s call for a new era of energy-conscious chip and computer design will be heard in Silicon Valley and other hardware technology capitals remains to be seen. But UCSD, to its credit, has set out to establish itself as … Next Page »

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The potential of algae as a clean energy source has been generating a lot of entrepreneurial excitement in San Diego. At last count, 10 local companies are busy working on technologies focused on transforming ordinary pond scum into “green crude” one day capable of powering aircraft, trucks, automobiles, and even utility plants—and easing the world’s energy problems. It is a bold vision—but one that may be selling algae short. That thought occurred to me after I had a chat with Stephen Mayfield, a leading expert on the genetics of algae who recently moved his lab from The Scripps Research Institute to UC San Diego.

Mayfield has been studying algae for about a quarter of a century—long before it became hot—and he is a co-founder of San Diego-based Sapphire Energy, the oil-from-algae startup backed by billionaire Bill Gates. He’s a big believer in biofuels, and just a few days before Thanksgiving, he was in Washington with other Sapphire representatives, lobbying the Department of Energy for support. But to Mayfield, algae have far more to offer than a potential energy solution. He sees them as a possible answer to an entirely separate problem: the high cost of biotechnology drugs.

First some background. Many biotechnology drugs are made in living organisms, such as bacteria, yeast, or mammalian cells. The genetic code for a therapeutic protein or antibody is inserted into the organisms, which uses the DNA as a blueprint for producing the designated complex molecule. It is impressive technology, although the organisms require plenty of care and feeding in big, expensive factories that take years to build and bring online. And there’s the rub. Companies must often decide whether to construct a drug factory before they are certain they have a product.

Miscalculations are costly. By the time Idec Pharmaceuticals of San Diego broke ground on a $380-million factory in nearby Oceanside, CA, in 2002, all three drugs it planned to manufacture there had hit setbacks in clinical trials. A search for new drugs to produce in the factory led to Idec’s merger with Biogen of Cambridge, MA, which decided to make the multiple sclerosis drug natalizumab (Tysabri) there.

The biotech community in San Diego is well-acquainted with the rest of the story. Not long after the factory was completed, Biogen Idec briefly withdrew natalizumab from the market because a handful of patients developed rare but life-threatening brain infections. The drug never became the blockbuster the company had hoped for, and the factory was sold to Genentech at a loss.

Failing to invest in manufacturing can be just as costly, as Seattle-based Immunex learned. A shortage of production capacity for its blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis drug is one reason why that company sold itself to Amgen.

Mayfield says algae are ideal vehicles in which to produce biotech drugs because they don’t need all the pampering other organisms require. They pull … Next Page »

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A breakfast discussion on “Getting Ready for the Rebound” held yesterday by the San Diego Venture Group might have been more aptly billed as “Waiting for the Rebound: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts.” But then again, with San Diego News Network CEO Neil Senturia serving as moderator, there really can only be one act.

The irrepressible Senturia was in his element (which is to say he was on stage) as he delivered one-liners while leading a panel of local experts through a conversation about the rebound that ranged from the venture capital outlook in San Diego to Wall Street ethics and the overall U.S. economy.

So, for example, as UC San Diego Economist Allan Timmermann talked about government spending and the prospects of inflation, Senturia interjected, “Inflation is what allows you to live in a more expensive neighborhood without moving.” And when Mission Ventures managing partner Leo Spiegel talked about the strength of character he looks for in startup entrepreneurs, saying, “I want to see that they went to the wall,” Senturia quipped, “You mean the wailing wall.”

As the only economist on the panel, Timmermann was an obvious target for such Senturian gibes as, “If you put 10 economists in a room, you get 11 opinions.” But a riposte from the UCSD economist got one of the biggest laughs when Senturia indignantly denounced the outrageous pay and bonus demands of disgraced Wall Street executives, the corruption of Bernie Madoff, the alleged corruption of hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam—and demanded the panelists explain what has happened to American ethics. Timmermann answered, “It’s only when the tide retreats that you see who’s swimming naked.” The audience roared.

But seriously folks, the conversation about preparing for a rebound led to a number of interesting points and observations:

—The outlook for venture-backed companies is clearly improving, according to Mission Ventures’ Spiegel. Following what he describes as a “brutal” period last winter, in which a third of the employees were laid off across Mission Ventures’ 30 portfolio companies, Spiegel says two of those ventures are now responding to buyout offers and a third is … Next Page »

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The San Diego Supercomputer Center at U.C. San Diego today named UCSD astrophysicist Michael L. Norman as interim director. Norman replaces Fran Berman, a specialist in grid computing (and San Diego Xconomist), who has served as the center’s director since 2001. Berman plans to join the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as vice president of research, effective Aug. 1. Norman, a UCSD distinguished professor of physics, was appointed as the center’s chief scientific officer a year ago. The university says it plans to name a permanent director at a later date.

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What recourse does an entrepreneur have when there is no venture capital for a start-up with a truly promising invention? At San Diego’s Biological Dynamics, 27-year-old founder Raj Krishnan’s solution is to win entrepreneur and student competitions—and so far he has won 13 awards, nine of them this year, including most recently a $40,000 first prize in the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge, where the judges were impressed with his presentation skills. “We went to the competitions because venture capital is extremely hard to find now, and we have been fortunate. It enables us now to protect our IP and pay bills,” Krishnan says.

Raj Krishnan talks eagerly about the prospects of someday making a cancer diagnosis no more troubling to a patient than telling someone they have caught a common cold. And the bioengineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego says he may have found a way to make that happen. Krishnan’s team of fellow UCSD students and professor Michael J. Heller believe they have found a simple and cost-effective way of detecting cancer at its outset.

Nowadays finding a cancer at an early stage usually means it can be cured. But there hasn’t been any method of detecting cancer in its earliest stages. Symptoms usually aren’t apparent until the cancer has reached a late stage of growth.

As cancer cells begin to grow, an increased amount of DNA circulates in the blood. Krishnan says this increase in “cell-free” DNA is believed to be of cancerous origin. In the 1970s, scientists noted that people with tumors have a lot of free DNA in their blood, but serious studies have only been done lately. “There still hasn’t been an easy method to isolate the DNA without degrading it,” says Krishnan. “Ours is the first that doesn’t do that, and it’s a very clear and very easy separation.”

Michael Heller and Raj Krishnan

Krishnan’s research efforts have been directed at creating technology to identify abnormal amounts of cell-free high molecular weight DNA in the blood. High molecular weight DNA is widely considered a good secondary biomarker for almost every type of cancer, but separating nanoparticles of DNA that circulate in extremely small amounts has been problematic, to say the least. This DNA is thought to be of 5-50 nanometers in size, which means it is smaller than the wavelength of light. “It’s very difficult to find in blood. The analogy of needle in the haystack has been used, but I’d say it’s more like looking for a needle on the whole farm,” says UCSD’s Heller, a professor of bioengineering. Krishnan discovered it can be done by generating an electric field through a microelectrode array.

Until recently, using AC (alternating current) electric field techniques to separate nanoparticles such as DNA from blood would have been considered impossible because of … Next Page »

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