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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Just when I thought venture deals, especially for software and tech companies, had headed south for the winter (or longer), the Northwest erupted with a slew of financings in the past week.

—But first, some serious biotech. Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led a $30 million Series B round for Fate Therapeutics, a San Diego-based stem cell company with ties to the University of Washington, as Luke reported. Existing investors Arch Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, and Venrock Associates also participated in the funding, as well as three strategic corporate investors—Astellas Venture Management and Genzyme Ventures were named.

—Seattle-based DocuSign, a maker of software to automate and control the process of electronic signatures, received a strategic investment from Second Century Ventures, the VC fund of the National Association of Realtors. The funding amount was undisclosed, but the money will be used to accelerate and extend DocuSign’s efforts with real estate customers.

—Beaverton, OR-based Avnera pulled in an $8 million equity round from undisclosed investors, according to a regulatory filing. The company’s previous investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Jafco Ventures, Intel Capital, and DAG Ventures. Avnera was founded in 2004, and designs novel chips for wireless audio applications.

—Seattle stealth startup Doxo raised $5.25 million in equity financing, according to a regulatory filing and media reports. The investors were not disclosed, but David Feinleib of Mohr Davidow Ventures was listed on the SEC form as a director.

—Bellevue, WA-based Enroute Systems, a developer of software that helps companies manage their parcel-shipping logistics, closed a Series A funding round worth $810,000 from Keiretsu Forum, Zino Society, Puget Sound Venture Club, and angel investors. Next up, Enroute is looking …Next Page »

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Fate Therapeutics, the San Diego-based company on a quest to develop techniques that make stem cell research practical for the pharmaceutical industry, has raised $30 million in a Series B round of venture financing.

Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led the deal, which included the three venture firms that co-founded the company two years ago—Arch Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, and Venrock Associates. This time, Fate also drew investment from three strategic corporate investors, two of whom are being named—Astellas Venture Management, and Genzyme Ventures. The company has now raised a total of about $50 million since inception, according to Scott Wolchko, Fate’s chief financial officer.

The round is the latest step forward for Fate, which was founded by a band of high-profile scientists from Harvard University, the University of Washington, Stanford University, and The Scripps Research Institute. Fate generated some scientific buzz last month when one of its co-founders, Sheng Ding of Scripps, found a way to use three conventional small-molecule compounds to coax adult human cells into an embryonic-like state. That’s important not only because it circumvents the ethical controversy around destroying embryos for research, but it also paves the way for “industrialized” stem cells. The Ding lab’s method is twice as fast and 200 times more efficient than previous techniques of creating induced pluripotent stem cells—with potential to turn into any type of cell. The Fate method also sidesteps the use of viruses and genetic modification of cells that has been one of the main disadvantages of the prior methods—and a big reason why pharma has steered clear.

Fate’s hope is to keep building enough momentum for its stem cell production technology that it will become a useful tool for creating models of disease in the lab, and for toxicology testing to see which drug candidates have the best odds of success. Further in the future, it hopes to create regenerative medicines to replace damaged tissues in the body.

While that capability is getting built up, and Fate is seeking pharmaceutical partners to help pay the bills, the company is also pushing ahead with its own proprietary drug candidate in clinical trials. The drug, FT-1050—a conventional small-molecule chemical compound that isn’t nearly as risky as an injectable cell therapy—is designed to help improve the effectiveness of adult stem cell transplants for blood cancers like leukemias and lymphomas.

“This is a company that has performed exactly as planned,” says Carl Weissman, managing director with OVP, who is taking a board seat in connection with the financing. “This management team is rounding out into a very sharp and effective group. It made sense for us to double down.”

OVP invested a small amount in Fate’s Series A round, and by betting bigger this time …Next Page »

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This was the week that a little biotech company in Bothell that few of the locals have ever heard of, burst onto the national stage.

—Bothell, WA-based Alder Biopharmaceuticals had its breakout moment this week when it pulled in $85 million in upfront cash, and stands to gain more than $1 billion over time from a partnership with Bristol-Myers Squibb to co-develop a new drug for rheumatoid arthritis. Clinical trial data on this drug hasn’t yet been released publicly, but CEO Randy Schatzman says it’s good enough to give market-leading drugs from Amgen and Abbott Labs a “run for their money.” Seattle Genetics CEO Clay Siegall, an Alder director, says it is now a “force” in regional biotech.

—Over in Seattle’s South Lake Union, another little-known private company called Kineta said it is splitting a little more than half of a federal contract with the University of Washington worth $13 million over the next five years. The goal will be to develop new chemical compounds, called adjuvants, that can boost the effectiveness of a wide variety of vaccines.

—The Institute for Systems Biology is continuing to net a lot of grant money, this week announcing that it has pulled in $8 million from the National Institutes of Health to contribute to The Cancer Genome Atlas. This is a genomic effort to identify potential new targets for cancer drugs.

—The battle between Seattle-based ZymoGenetics (NASDAQ: ZGEN) and Bristol, TN-based King Pharmaceuticals is heating up in federal court in Tennessee. If you’ve missed any of the back-and-forth, or how this ball really got rolling back in August, here’s a quick summary.

—Bellevue, WA-based Light Sciences Oncology, another private company that keeps a low profile, revealed in a regulatory filing that it has lined up another $35 million to support its drug-device combination therapy for cancer. The money is available in the form of a line of credit, and if investors choose to exercise warrants.

—Bothell, WA-based Verathon, the maker of a simple ultrasound tool for diagnosing bladder disorders, was acquired by Sarasota, FL-based Roper Industries (NYSE: ROP) as part of a pair of transactions valued at $356 million. The companies aren’t saying how much of that is going to the Verathon shareholders.

—Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN), the king of the moment in Seattle biotech, issued a pretty vanilla quarterly report with the Securities and Exchange Commission. One point worth noting was that it burned $28 million of its cash reserves in the three-month period ending September 30. It ended that quarter with $259.6 million in cash and investments left in the bank as it prepares to manufacture and market sipuleucel-T (Provenge) next year for men with terminal prostate cancer.

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Prostate cancer has been one of the hot fields for new biotech drug development this year, and now Cambridge, MA-based Tokai Pharmaceuticals is getting into the game with a drug that it hopes will someday help men live longer and push the boundaries of science even further.

Tokai, which raised $22 million in May from Novartis Venture Funds and Apple Tree Partners, has been pretty quiet about what it is up to until today. The company is starting its first clinical trial in 50 patients to test the safety of—and look for some early signs of anti-tumor activity in— a once-daily oral pill it calls TOK-001. I heard about the concept of the drug and the company from R. Bruce Montgomery, a clinical investigator at the University of Washington, and Seth Harrison, the managing partner at Apple Tree, who’s serving as acting CEO of Tokai.

Tokai is getting into the prostate cancer field with a drug that it says is the only one of its kind to fight cancer cells simultaneously with three modes of action. The Tokai drug is building on some of the science that San Francisco-based Medivation has used to secure a partnership with Japan-based Astellas Pharma worth up to $655 million, and which prompted Johnson & Johnson to acquire Los Angeles-based Cougar Biotechnology for $894 million earlier this year. Using a completely different way of fighting tumors, by stimulating the immune system to fight cancer cells like a virus, Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN) showed it could extend lives of terminal prostate cancer patients by a median of four months time with minimal side effects, and its stock boomed nearly 10-fold this year. All of the companies have their sights set on treating a disease that kills about 30,000 men each year in the U.S.

“For the sake of people with prostate cancer, we really hope we have something,” says Tokai’s Harrison.

Scientists have known for decades that prostate cancer cells thrive on testosterone and one of its byproducts in the body, so standard treatment has long been focused on shutting down the production of tumor-fueling testosterone, Montgomery says. This treatment, known as chemical castration, usually works for about five to 10 years. But all men eventually develop resistance to the hormone-blocking therapy, Montgomery says.

Researchers have been trying to sleuth out how this can be, and it now appears that the cancer cells are clever at finding new ways to grow. Tokai is zeroing in on blocking three of the ways tumors use to grow, even when they are deprived of most of the usual testosterone they need.

One way is by blocking a receptor prostate cancer cells have for efficiently picking up …Next Page »

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Kineta, the Seattle-based developer of drugs for autoimmune diseases, has won about half of a $13 million federal contract awarded to the University of Washington to create new compounds which might be used to boost the effectiveness of vaccines against HIV or flu.

The five-year contract from the National Institutes of Health is worth about $6.8 million to Kineta, a company with 11 employees, with the rest going to teams led by UW scientists Michael Gale Jr. and Michael Katze. The company’s job will be to identify and analyze new chemical compounds that could become vaccine boosters, called adjuvants, and test them in animals, while Gale’s lab will study the way they work, and Katze will pitch in with computational biology support.

The federal contract is a coup for a small company like Kineta, especially in a period when seed capital for new biotech companies is scarce. Kineta is led by a pair of scientists who worked together at Seattle-based Illumigen before it was acquired by Lexington, MA-based Cubist Pharmaceuticals two years ago in a deal that could be worth as much as $340 million over time. Kineta CEO Charles Magness and chief scientist Shawn Iadonato have started their new company with a strategy of taking relatively raw molecules at the animal testing stage, steering them through the value-building steps of early human trials, and then striking partnerships with larger companies that will find them less risky and more valuable.

The decision to pursue vaccines shouldn’t come as any surprise, because Kineta’s expertise is in immunology, and Gale and Katze were both among the company’s original scientific advisers. It has been pursuing the contract for about a year, Magness says.

“This certainly helps with our financial future because it’s a long-term fixed contract,” Magness says. “We’ll look to hire some people in the short term, but what it really represents is another long-term product opportunity for the company with secure funding.”

The researchers will specifically look to activate …Next Page »

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I was chatting with a couple of local investors at the TechStars (seed fund and mentorship program) event in Seattle on Wednesday. They thought the VC panel discussion of the startup climate and culture in different cities around the country was boring. If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, they said, that’s just where you are, and you deal with it.

But au contraire, mon frère—as a journalist and outside observer—I view those comparisons across different innovation clusters and their respective histories as a way to generate some good stories and insights. On the panel, there were certainly some constructive (and at times controversial) things said about the entrepreneurial climate in Seattle, Boston, and Boulder.

Here are a few edited highlights from the panelists, several of whom bring an outside perspective to their current cities:

Brad Feld of TechStars and Foundry Group gave a brief history of the startup scene in Boulder, CO—useful for any city with entrepreneurial aspirations. “When I showed up in ’95, what I found was on the software side you had a lot of smart engineering talent but you didn’t have much else. A handful of entrepreneurial companies in storage and cable infrastructure. Not much in the way of entrepreneurial executive leadership other than from these pockets. In the mid-90s, because of the counter-culture community—and the Internet was purpose-built for places like Boulder—you had a lot of people who were independent, very smart, doing their own things suddenly intersecting with a medium that allows you to be anywhere. It’s 100,000 people plus 25,000 college students. A pretty small town, but it has the largest percentage, per capita, in the United States of computer scientists and PhDs. Yet there wasn’t a broad wave of entrepreneurial experience,” Feld said.

“In the mid-to-late 90s, there was huge activity around the Internet. Anybody with a pulse could get a company started. The predictable thing eventually happened, there was a lot of wreckage. But from ‘95-2001, Boulder had imported a lot of executive talent—CEOs, VP sales, engineering leadership. We also had a lot of entrepreneurs who had one or two companies in that cycle. So by 2003, people were starting to come back and get re-engaged in entrepreneurial activity. There were probably 50-plus people that made $10 million or more, so there was enough of an angel community. There was critical mass around this. But what was missing was something that tied the community together. There was the endless cocktail party circuit of entrepreneurs. Eventually people got bored and stopped going.”

That led David Cohen, Feld, and others to form TechStars in Boulder. “It cemented this notion of first-time entrepreneurial activity is the core of the ecosystem. What was needed was fresh meat into the system. We got a lot of new, young people into the community,” Feld said. “The other thing was that one of the hardest things for first-time entrepreneurs is to have an engaged relationship with an experienced entrepreneur. We found we were creating this thing that integrated the whole value chain of entrepreneurs. It really energized the existing entrepreneurial activity around a thing.”

Chris Sheehan of CommonAngels then gave his thoughts on the Boston innovation scene. [Disclosure: Chris is on Xconomy’s board.] “In the IT ecosystem in Boston, there are a number of things going on,” Sheehan said. “It’s a wonderful place for universities and colleges. MIT has been the granddaddy in terms of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. But what I’m seeing is a fresh set of energy coming …Next Page »

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Want to know what the real opportunities are for startup companies and investors in the field of Web search and information discovery? Or what happens when you put Google and Bing in the same room? You’ve come to the right place.

We’re putting the finishing touches on the program for our next Xconomy Forum, on the future of search and information discovery. It’s all happening on the evening of November 30 in Seattle, at the University of Washington (Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room). You can see the writeup and program here.

In addition to our panel—which includes Brian Bershad from Google, Harry Shum from Microsoft (Bing), Steve Hall from Vulcan Capital, and Oren Etzioni from the UW, Madrona Venture Group, and Farecast—we’ll have a series of “bursts” from some of the most exciting startups working in information discovery today.

We have confirmed short presentations from four startups:

—Evri, led by CEO Will Hunsinger. This Seattle company is trying to reinvent Web browsing by understanding the content of Web pages and the connections between entities on the Web, using semantic algorithms.

—SEOmoz, led by CEO Rand Fishkin. This Seattle-based firm focuses on search engine optimization and Internet marketing, helping companies around the world boost their Web traffic and expand their business.

—Topsy, led by CEO Vipul Ved Prakash. This San Francisco startup is working on a novel search engine for social media, starting with Twitter. It’s what people call “real-time search,” and it’s based on Internet conversations, not documents.

—Sage Bionetworks, led by CEO Stephen Friend. This Seattle-based nonprofit is trying to do for biology what Twitter and Facebook did for social networking, and what Linux did for open-source software. It’s a tall order, but search technology is key to allowing biologists to find and share results in a common global database.

We’re really looking forward to the discussions on Nov. 30, and hope to see you there (registration info here).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It can be argued that among talent, cash and technology, no factor is more critical to a start up than talent. The talent drives innovation, attracts the venture capital and makes the critical life or death choices of the company. No matter how groundbreaking the technology or the amount of money invested, it is the people steering the ship that can sail off into the sunset or crash into rocks. This can be said for all sectors, especially life sciences.

That is why the focus of many of the discussions in the Seattle community about our life science industry center on generating a vibrant talent pool. Though the primary concern is on the recruitment and retention of the existing talent by generating an ‘anchor’ company, Seattle must not forget to be proactive with cultivating the young scientific entrepreneurs and talented businesspeople that want to build great new companies, and their careers, already here in the Northwest.

Before you jump to conclusion that this is some rant by a whiney grad student, I have to say upfront that the Seattle business community is incredibly generous when it comes to helping advise an aspiring yet naïve entrepreneur such as myself. Since I moved here 4 years ago from the East Coast to pursue my PhD in bioengineering at the University of Washington, I never knew the distinction between a biotech executive and a poor student could evaporate so effortlessly by simply walking into a coffee shop. Rarely have I been turned down by any person from industry scientist to CEO for an invitation to enjoy a cup and a conversation. I have met with countless of Seattle’s biotech and med device elite under the premise of me being an eager scientist wanting to learn how to turn ideas in the lab into a marketable product that helps people live better lives. Each time the conversation was as casual as the North Face attire some of them wore. I have tried to soak up every ounce of wisdom they have shared and am eternally grateful to each of them for their invaluable time they donated to my education.

I have noticed, however, that it takes a particularly aggressive student, especially in the life sciences, to recognize not only the possibility, but the necessity to educate themselves beyond the classroom. I was introduced to the concept through a student founded/run non-profit organization called the Science & Engineering Business Association (SEBA). Through SEBA, I am able to operate in the borderlands where university science education meets real world business and see firsthand the stagnant traffic flow between the two. On the student side, a majority are either intimidated by the prospect of meeting professionals outside the lab or under the false assumption that career success is solely dependent upon scholastic merit. On the business side, many seem to have an operator receiving calls but not too many making them. Each side seems to have its bias of the other which fortifies the walls between them and creates a culture that stifles the flow of information and growth of talent.

Many organizations have been trying to cross this cultural divide by generating both excitement and confidence in the students while providing a platform for the business community to share the advice it has to offer. The Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) has partnered with SEBA to host two annual events promoting and educating young innovators: Entrepreneurship Week and the Science & Technology Showcase. Entrepreneurship Week is a series of events and activities that brings individuals in the business community to the University as well as the students to the companies around Seattle. The Science & Technology Showcase is a poster/pitch competition hosted in collaboration with the Tech Transfer Office for young scientists to present their marketable innovations to venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and MBA students. Last year, the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association recruited SEBA to expand the showcase to reach universities around the Northwest and present their ideas at the Pre-Emerging Poster Session at Life Science Innovation Northwest (formerly Invest Northwest). Other community organizations like the Northwest Entrepreneurs Network are also making efforts by providing student scholarships to attend their Entrepreneur University that reduces the tuition to $50 for individuals. Despite these efforts listed and many others not mentioned, there is still a false belief that the University as an entity is not willing to shed the confines of the ivory tower that have stood tall for years.

While, many people within the University are making great strides in moving towards a more integrated academic environment with the life science business community, it’s time for both university students and more members of the business community to do their part to reach out. For the real changes the Northwest life science industry needs, it’s time to forget the past, drop the bias and have a second look at what is happening at the University. It’s not just the place where basic science is explored, and a few startups are launched, but it’s an underutilitized training ground for talented young people who will help lead the local life sciences industry for years to come.

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Craig Mundie is a geek, and I mean that in the best possible way. Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, the 17-year veteran of Redmond, WA, still talks like an engineer, throwing out terms like “heterogeneous machine architectures,” “GUIs” (graphical user interfaces), and “clouds and clients” like there’s no tomorrow. It’s kind of refreshing, given that he is in charge of setting the long-term agenda for one of the most powerful companies on the planet.

Mundie is in the midst of a weeklong tour of some top universities around the country. He called me yesterday from Cambridge, MA, where he had just finished a presentation to Harvard University students, faculty, and guests. He visits the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (my alma mater) today, and comes to Kane Hall at the University of Washington tomorrow afternoon. It’s similar to the college tours Bill Gates used to do.

From what I can tell, the goal is to stir up interest in computer science, give audiences a glimpse of future computing systems as Microsoft sees them, and stimulate discussions about how these technologies can help solve some pressing global problems. (You can read more about Mundie’s tour and demos in this Seattle Times story.)

Besides hearing Mundie’s thoughts on computer science education and the future of computing, I wanted to drill down and ask him about the challenge of taking on Microsoft’s strategy development (after Gates stepped down last year) in the most difficult economic times in recent memory. I also wanted to ask him about the deeper culture of Microsoft, the renewed role of research in the company’s future, and the importance of nurturing relationships around the world—and his secret ally in that quest.

Here are some edited highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: What are you trying to get across to university audiences on this tour?

Craig Mundie: In these presentations, I’m trying to get them to think not only about how computing evolves, but with that evolution, what kinds of problems will become approachable, and what are the new methods? Several things are evolving in parallel [and leading to more heterogeneous and complex machines]. That begets the requirement of how to do programming around parallel computing. With very high-scale computing facilities, the cloud and the client come together to form one system that people will program. They will use those things together with new display and sensing technologies.

Just as the GUI revolutionized computing, we could see a similar revolution with more natural interactions with machines, rather than just “type and point and click.” That will expand the number of people who can interact with computers. With the diversity, rooms can become computers [for instance]. You won’t think of them so much as a computer.

X: What are some of the global problems you think advanced computing will help solve?

CM: Beyond the computer science realm, I’ve talked about energy and the environment. I show one piece of research work we’re doing to compose computational models, a simplified climate model, at Princeton and Microsoft Research. It shows linkages between deforestation in the Amazon and atmospheric temperatures around the rest of the world. If you were a policy person, these kinds of things would give you tools to support your decision making.

In energy, we’re doing computer modeling and direct visualizations. I showed a model, loaned to us from TerraPower [the nuclear power firm spun off from Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures …Next Page »

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

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

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

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

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

DxBox

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

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

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

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[This post also appears on OVP's blog---Eds.] The University of Washington’s Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department’s Affiliates day is one of the most fun and rewarding days of the year for me as venture investor and geek. It involves a showcase of projects and research areas by professors and students and is a festival of creativity, new ideas, and engaged smart people. It is a day my colleagues and I look forward to every year.

Last Thursday’s meeting ended with a panel on “The Changing Face of Venture Capital” moderated by UW’s Ed Lazowska, who prompted us with a series of provocative questions. On the panel with me were Greg Gottesman of Madrona Venture Group, Ron Howell of WRF Capital, Bill McAleer of Voyager Capital, and Cam Myhrvold of Ignition Partners.

One of the first topics was the impact of the recession on startups and venture capital. Most VCs expressed the opinion that money was harder to find but that if you could get funded, it was a great time to start a company because skilled people were available, cloud computing providers such as Amazon have made it possible to do with less capital, and there were fewer competitors being funded. There was recognition that it has to be done with less, given the exit markets. But if anything, Greg Gottesman said Madrona is sticking to its model and not changing given a one-year blip.

Cam Myhrvold made the point that there were a lot of entrepreneurs using Amazon Web Services and open source to quickly bootstrap companies with much less capital than prior years. My comment was that if you play at the application layer using open source and AWS, you better think hard about marketing and customer knowledge since there are few technical barriers to entry.

One topic that was raised was why should entrepreneurs go for VCs over angels, money aside. I disagreed that money could be ignored and said that the quality of money was critical in these times. The recession has meant that almost all companies have needed more cash and, given that outside funding is tough, insiders had to step up. Many investors have not stepped up, which has made all VCs more conscious of the quality of their co-investors.

Ed asked what areas were particularly attractive for Seattle, and we got a consistent set of answers. Digital media, gaming, software, and the emerging areas of IT applied to green tech and IT applied to biology are core areas of interest. Each firm had its own areas of interest—for instance, Bill McAleer liked mobile apps and the application of social networks to the enterprise as one of his areas. Bill related a story from a recent trip to NYC where the cab driver was touting his favorite iPhone app—a map of all the public bathrooms. When asked about really innovative new ideas, Greg Gottesman mentioned 3-D printers and how his son was willing to empty his bank account to get one.

At OVP, we like the investment thesis that green tech and biology are becoming more compute-intensive, and that companies that can bring a view of IT applied to these areas are particularly attractive.

My conclusion from the evening is that Seattle is a great place for innovation and has a set of dedicated VCs who want to see a vibrant, risk-taking community. Each firm had its own areas of focus, some overlapping, but all were focused on creating great companies and skilled entrepreneurs here in Seattle. I left feeling that we were lucky to have UW CSE, a great research department generating innovative ideas, and a VC community very committed to fostering growth.

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My head is exploding trying to keep up with all the tech-business events going on around Seattle these days. Here’s a quick guide to the most prominent ones on my brain, in the hopes of saving you some stress (and keeping you up to date):

—Last night’s “Women in Tech” event from TechFlash was a smash hit, with a first-rate panel and networking. You can check out recaps of the event here and here. Yes, the crowd was predominantly women. I’m surprised more tech guys weren’t there to soak up the diverse perspectives and add their own input (or to get a date).

—Tonight’s panel on “the changing face of venture capital” at the University of Washington (computer science and engineering) should provide some spirited discussion of the unique challenges that investors and entrepreneurs are facing in the current climate. It’s an all-star lineup of local VCs: Mark Ashida from OVP, Greg Gottesman from Madrona, Ron Howell from WRF Capital, Bill McAleer from Voyager, and Cam Myhrvold from Ignition.

—Also tonight is the Clean Tech Open’s Pacific Northwest Regional Awards gala at the ACT Theater in downtown Seattle. Gov. Chris Gregoire is giving the keynote address, and will be followed by the announcement of three Northwest finalist winners (cleantech companies) who will then move on to a Western regional competition.

—Next week brings NWEN’s “Entrepreneur University” on Nov. 5 at the Bellevue Hyatt. It’s an all-day extravaganza about starting, growing, and managing your own company. Don’t miss the talks by Jennifer Mintz Clark, Andy Sack, and the Bacon Salt guys, or the “Entrepreneur Idol” pitch competition. (I’ll be there as one of the judges.)

—That same afternoon, on Nov. 5, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie is speaking at UW, as part of the computer science and engineering department’s Distinguished Lecturer Series. Mundie will talk about how software and information technology can help solve our most pressing global challenges and reshape scientific exploration. (I’ll need to go quantum so I can be in two places at once that day.)

—On Nov. 6, the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association (WBBA) is holding its annual meeting at the Sheraton Hotel downtown. Elias Zerhouni, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, is giving the keynote.

—A bit further out, Nov. 18 is the night of the Washington Technology Industry Association’s annual “predictions” dinner event at the Grand Hyatt in Seattle. John Cook of TechFlash will put some of the usual VC/entrepreneur suspects on the spot about their thoughts on 2010. On a separate note, WTIA recently announced that applications are now open for its 2010 Industry Achievement Awards, which will take place on March 4.

—Last but not least, Xconomy is organizing an evening on “The Future of Search and Information Discovery” (and Seattle’s role in shaping it) on Nov. 30, at the University of Washington (Walker-Ames Room in Kane Hall). We’ll get Google and Microsoft to share the stage, and surround them with some compelling VCs and startups, to talk about the technical problems and business opportunities in Web search, real-time information discovery, social media, and user interfaces.

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This morning I checked my e-mail, powered by Google, and then used Google Maps to find my way to the Google Kirkland open house. It reminded me a little bit of the scene in “Being John Malkovich” when Malkovich, the actor, finds a portal into his own brain and sees that everyone looks like him and says nothing but, “Malkovich, Malkovich.” OK, I guess the analogy would fit better if I also worked for Google and uttered “Google, Google” all day—but that might even happen sometime, if Google’s pace of hiring keeps up. (Just kidding.)

Engineering and site director Scott Silver, who’s been on the job since June (succeeding Peter Wilson, who left the company), introduced the new Kirkland facility, which has been officially open since August 31 and employs more than 350 people in a unified campus setting. He gave a little history of Google’s Kirkland operation—the first office was at Carillon Point in 2004, Google’s first major presence in the Northwest—and how it has grown and contributed to the company’s products. Google Talk, which does Internet telephony and instant messaging, was born and raised in Kirkland, for instance.

Other areas of focus for the Kirkland office include:

—Search: Webmaster tools, and instant indexing for real-time news.

—Advertising: AdPlanner (see below), AdWords Opportunities (helping advertisers optimize search ads), Google Analytics, and Campaign Insights (a new service released last week that’s around making brand ads more effective).

—Applications: Google Talk, Google Talk Video (within Gmail), Google Maps (including a new application for directions on mobile phones), the Chrome Web browser, YouTube video clips, and Google Sync (for synchronizing your mobile phone).

—Infrastructure: system and corporate billing software for supporting applications at huge scales.

Silver, a former Amazon and Netscape veteran, said he’s “quite proud of what we’ve done here, and immensely happy to come to this day,” and to be able to say Google is here to “create great products and find great engineers.”

I followed up with Silver afterwards, and he confirmed Google Kirkland is actively hiring software engineers, but he didn’t say how many positions are open at the moment. He said his team is doing hundreds of interviews per month, “and we’d love to do more.” I asked him about the 800-pound gorilla down the road, Microsoft, and whether Google is recruiting much talent from …Next Page »

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There’s a new tech startup incubator in town. The Founder Institute is accepting applications for its four-month training program, which begins in Seattle on December 7. The program is designed to mentor very early-stage entrepreneurs, with the goal of creating new companies across a wide variety of tech sectors including software, social media, consumer electronics, e-commerce, medical devices, and cleantech.

The program fits with a trend of increasing resources for entrepreneurs in the Seattle area. The Founder Institute was started by Adeo Ressi, the founder of the venture capitalist rating site TheFunded. The incubator recently completed its first session in Silicon Valley, graduating 54 companies (three of which have since rustled up outside funding), and has also announced expansions to San Diego and Washington DC.

Chris Early is leading the Seattle program. He’s a game industry veteran who was most recently general manager of Windows Gaming Technology at Microsoft. He left the company earlier this year, and caught up with Ressi around a month ago over drinks. (The two had known each other for years from the game industry.) Early suggested that Ressi should expand his program to Seattle, and it sounds like it didn’t take much convincing. “It’s been a whirlwind month putting it together here,” Early says.

As he explains, the concept behind the Founder Institute arose from what Ressi was seeing with TheFunded. “A large number of people were coming through at a pre-company stage,” and they were looking for mentorship and money to get started, Early says. So the Founder Institute provides classes on every step of the startup process, led by experienced mentors, including Derrick Morton, the CEO of FlowPlay, and Bryan Starbuck, the CEO of TalentSpring. About a third of the mentors will come from out of town, including David Kidder of Clickable.com and Bryan Thatcher of Empressr (both from New York). The ideal students are entrepreneurs with new companies—less than two years old—or just promising ideas. The goal is for every student to have a business plan and a polished pitch for their company by the end of four months.

OK, so everyone knows entrepreneurs, especially first-timers, need a lot of mentorship. But what’s different about the Founder Institute compared with incubators like Y Combinator …Next Page »

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[Editor's note: This editorial was co-authored by Neile Grayson, who, along with Valerie, is a co-chair of the program committee for Life Sciences Innovation Northwest 2010.]

On March 16-17, 2010, the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association (WBBA) will present Life Science Innovation Northwest 2010 (formerly “Invest Northwest”). This tenth annual conference has a new name, a new look, and a new program. Innovation has supercharged the Pacific Northwest’s biotech and medical device industries for decades. And our life sciences companies, nonprofit research institutes and global health organizations are leading the way. And, we are pushing forward some of the most compelling technology breakthroughs of our time. As such, this year’s forum has been refocused and rebranded to better identify and highlight these unique and powerful assets, defining the Pacific Northwest’s life science sector.

Life Science Innovation Northwest will bring public and private life sciences companies, research institutions, scientists, entrepreneurs, and our global health community together to tell their stories to potential investors and prospective corporate and strategic partners.

Neile Grayson

What does it take to succeed in Biotech? How to get federal grants? Exit Strategies in today’s market? As the executive planning committee is defining talks and panel discussions topics, we welcome your feedback to help us create a conference that will not only fit your needs and interests, but help to create better health solutions in Washington state. Please post your suggestions below.

Thanks and See you in March.

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He is one of those people who defies description in a few pages, let alone paragraphs. Sure, Nathan Myhrvold is the founder of Microsoft Research and CEO of the Bellevue, WA-based “invention firm” Intellectual Ventures. But besides information technology and business innovation, he’s a renowned expert in such ridiculously diverse fields as astrophysics, mathematics, paleontology, and photography. He’s also one of at least three tech billionaires to speak at the University of Washington this month.

A few weeks ago, Myhrvold spoke to a crowd of students, faculty, and guests about another one of his great loves: the science of cooking. (His resume as a chef includes winning the world championship of barbecue and working at Rover’s in Seattle’s Madison Valley neighborhood.) As part of the computer science and engineering department’s Distinguished Lecturer Series, Myhrvold’s talk covered everything from food safety myths and a tour of Intellectual Ventures’ kitchen lab facilities, to computer simulations of heat intensity above a barbecue grill. He was joined on stage by chef and biochemist Chris Young of Intellectual Ventures, a veteran of the renowned Fat Duck restaurant in England.

Myhrvold and Young have been working on a 1,500-page book on the state of the art in cooking science for about three years, together with a staff of 15. “It’s like a restaurant without diners,” Myhrvold joked. “Unfortunately, it’s also like a restaurant without revenue.”

The focus of the book is to illuminate the cutting-edge science behind cooking techniques, and to stimulate people’s curiosity about food while also being practical for chefs. “There’s a revolution in cooking going on today. If you keep doing the old thing over and over again, you don’t actually need to know why it works,” Myhrvold said. “If you want to do things that are new and different and unusual, it really helps to know why.”

Highlights of the talk included high-speed (6,200 frames per second) video of a popcorn kernel popping and a water balloon bursting; discussion of what happens to food when you subject it to 40,000 times Earth’s gravity (“kind of a cool thing to do to food every now and again”); and the creation of a batch of almond-based ice cream using liquid nitrogen.

Here are just a few things Myhrvold left us with:

1. Cookbooks are like software. Someone in the audience asked Myhrvold when the cooking science book would be available. “A damn fine question,” he replied. “I come from a history …Next Page »

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Search is hot again. Just when you thought Google had it all figured out, the Internet landscape has changed. Microsoft’s Bing has debuted to a generally positive reception, and signaled that the search war is far from over. The rise of Twitter and social media has spawned intense competition in the emerging field of “real-time search.” Advances in semantic understanding of the Web have led to new opportunities in Internet search for startups and big companies alike. Indeed, the world of online information discovery is being transformed dramatically—and much of the action is happening here in Seattle.

So I’m pleased to announce that Xconomy’s next Seattle event, on November 30, will tackle some of the most compelling questions in this exciting field. What are the most disruptive new technologies, interfaces, and business models in Web search? How is the proliferation of social media and smart mobile devices influencing companies’ strategies in information discovery? How should entrepreneurs and investors discern the real problems—and the most promising opportunities—in this industry? What lies beyond the current state of the art in search, and how will the field evolve in the next five to 10 years?

For one evening, we are bringing together some of the world’s experts in search and information discovery—and some of the deepest thinkers in computing, software, and entrepreneurship. This group includes Brian Bershad, Google’s Seattle site director; Harry Shum, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of search product development (Bing); Oren Etzioni, professor of computer science at the University of Washington, the founder of Farecast, and a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group; and Steve Hall, managing director of Vulcan Capital, who has put seed capital to work in a number of intriguing search-related startups, including Evri and Gist.

The moderator of the discussion will be Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the UW. We will also be adding to the program in the coming weeks with short presentations (“bursts”) from startups working in the search and information discovery space.

This star-studded event will take place on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle. We’re still finalizing the exact room location, but will keep you updated. I’ll be the emcee, and will be passing around the microphone to elicit a bunch of good questions from the audience, for what we intend to be a highly interactive conversation. We’re looking forward to having a great crowd on Nov. 30.

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This week we were jamming on our big event on the 20-year outlook for Seattle’s life sciences hub, but we still found a way to squeeze in a lot of news and features.

—Biotech pioneer Chris Henney offered an insightful and entertaining talk about how to invest in biotech at a recent speech before the CFA Society of Seattle. I included his six tips on how to spot a winning biotech in last week’s roundup, but that piece didn’t include the sequel on the five red flags investors should watch out for. The In Vivo Blog did a fun follow up on this story, too.

—If Seattle wants to grow as a biotech hub over the next 20 years, it could use a few more bars, and less university red tape. That’s according to Stephen Friend, the Rosetta Inpharmatics founder who’s now trying to ignite an open source movement for biology, in comments he made at the Xconomy event Monday evening on the 20-year outlook for Seattle life sciences. I summed up some of the other great insights I heard from his fellow panelists Ben Shapiro and Steve Gillis, and also posted a big photo gallery here that captured the energy in the room.

—Kirkland, WA-based Pathway Medical Technologies is one of the big success stories of the past year in the local medical device community, but even it has had to endure a few lessons from the school of hard knocks. CEO Paul Buckman offered a candid look at how the company is adjusting to the new reality of the medical device business.

—Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN), the giant biotech company with 900 employees in Seattle, said its experimental drug for osteoporosis, denosumab (Prolia), was delayed by FDA requests for more information. That didn’t seem like much of a big deal at first glance because the FDA didn’t ask for any new clinical trials, and it has been missing a lot of deadlines lately. But then Amgen said yesterday in its earnings release that the FDA is asking for more clinical trials to demonstrate safety of denosumab for cancer patients. Ouch.

—Sonosite, the Bothell, WA-based maker of portable ultrasound machines, got a lift this week when it settled all of its patent litigation with General Electric over ultrasound devices that weigh less than 10 pounds. Sonosite (NASDAQ: SONO) will get $21 million upfront and an undisclosed royalty on sales of GE’s portable ultrasound machines until 2016.

—Seattle-based Calistoga Pharmaceuticals released some preliminary, but encouraging, results over the weekend from a small leukemia trial. The company’s experimental drug was able to shrink tumors for 29 percent of patients in the trial, but based on some secondary findings, the company thinks it might be able to do much better than that in combination with other treatments, or with longer follow-up.

—San Diego-based Fate Therapeutics, the company co-founded by a group of top stem cell scientists that includes Randall Moon of the University of Washington, announced over the weekend that it has taken a big step toward “industrialized” production of stem cells for drug discovery. The advance for inducing adult cells into a pluripotent, stem-cell like state, came from the lab of Fate co-founder Sheng Ding, a professor at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego.

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