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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

Chronically bad unemployment is the biggest story in the U.S. today, and we had some more bad news about jobs being lost this week in Seattle biotech. But there were a few other good things to report, including a story about a new company being born.

—Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN), the Thousand Oaks, CA-based biotech giant, said this week it is cutting 380 jobs companywide from its R&D operations, which includes 70 people at its sites in Seattle and Bothell, WA. The company plans to say more about the cutbacks Monday on its quarterly financial conference call.

—GlaxoSmithKline made big news in Seattle this week at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation‘s malaria forum. The story was about how GSK’s experimental malaria vaccine, supported by the Gates Foundation through the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, was found to protect about half of African children in a Phase III clinical trial. But there’s an elephant in the room about vaccine cost that nobody is really discussing thoroughly in public.

—The latest biotech startup in town has officially spun out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The company, called Blaze Bioscience, has raised its first $725,000 in angel financing and recruited former ZymoGenetics dealmaker Heather Franklin as its CEO. The idea, from the lab of researcher Jim Olson, is to “paint” tumors so that surgeons can make sure they get rid of the whole tumor, and not leave behind straggler cells that can lead to a recurrence.

—I’ve had Immunex on the mind lately as we prep for our next big Xconomy life sciences event, “The Immunex Impact“ on Dec. 1 in Seattle. Yesterday, I invited Immunoids to bring some old photos and company memorabilia to the event. I also announced the newest addition to the lineup of speakers—Patricia Beckmann. She will join Steve Gillis, Chris Henney, Doug Williams, Stewart Parker and others in this special confab of Immunex alumni. And speaking of Henney, he was honored this week with a biotech “Hall of Fame” award at an annual industry event in Laguna Niguel, CA.

—Bothell, WA-based Marina Biotech (NASDAQ: MRNA) has been running low on cash lately, but it found some support this week from a single investor who agreed to put as much as $15 million into the company over time.

—From the medical device side of town, we had a couple stories about companies going in opposite directions. Kirkland, WA-based Pathway Medical Technologies, acquired in August by Bayer’s Medrad unit, has allowed a lease extension option to expire on its headquarters, suggesting that it may not be interested in keeping operations in Seattle. On a more positive note, Redmond, WA-based Mobisante talked about how it has received more than 300 sales leads for its ultrasound-on-a-smartphone, even before it’s really ready to capture much of the market for this low-cost diagnostic tool.

—I know people have heard a lot of song and dance about genomics revolutionizing healthcare, and the reports have been greatly exaggerated to date. But in this week’s BioBeat I took a moment to marvel at the truly amazing kinds of experiments that are now feasible as scientists have learned how to sequence entire human genomes for $4,000 or less, in a matter of weeks. I’m going to explore this further next Monday at our next event in San Francisco, “Computing in the Age of the $1,000 Genome.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Heather Franklin had a lot to think about in September 2010. She was a senior vice president at Seattle-based ZymoGenetics, when it agreed to be acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb for $885 million. Now that the big company was calling the shots, it was time to think about a new move in her career.

Jim Olson, a physician/scientist/entrepreneur at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, sensed opportunity. Franklin’s name kept popping up at local industry events, when he asked people about the best candidates in town to become biotech CEOs. So he started bending her ear over the phone the day of the Zymo-Bristol announcement, September 7, 2010. The message: Here’s a great new technology that can help cancer patients, which needs a seasoned executive like you to help develop it.

“I quizzed him really hard,” Franklin recalls. “I said ‘It’s 2010, and here’s a paper from 2007. What’s happened since 2007?’ He described work that had been done to take something from a research project and really shape it for further development. After seeing Jim’s enthusiasm and vision, I told him I was enthusiastic about it, but needed to kick the tires.”

Olson, who also founded Seattle-based Presage Biosciences, says he was impressed. “When we met two days later, within 10 minutes I knew that this was the person who was best suited to advance Tumor Paint to help cancer patients,” Olson says.

Those original meetings in the fall of 2010 have culminated in a new Seattle biotech company called Blaze Bioscience. Franklin, the former senior vice president of business development at ZymoGenetics, is the CEO. She’s joined by two longtime colleagues from her Zymo days—Julia Novak as the vice president of research and project management, and Mila Lobanova, the vice president of finance and operations. The company has raised its first $725,000 in angel financing, and has an exclusive worldwide license to technology from Olson’s lab at the Hutch.

Heather Franklin

The big idea for the company is to apply molecular “paint” to tumors, to help surgeons clearly see the difference between cancerous and healthy tissues. Currently there’s no way for a surgeon to see in real time during an operation whether he or she has completely cut out a tumor. Physicians today use MRI scans, after a patient has been sewn up, to check to make sure they got the whole tumor out.

Blaze is seeking to go a step further, helping surgeons get a much better idea if whether they have truly gotten rid of the tumor while the operation is ongoing—which is critical in order to help avoid a relapse. It’s made to work by using a peptide molecule that’s attached to a fluorescent molecule. When a surgeon directs a camera and near infrared light into the surgical site, this should provide a clear picture of what tissue is cancerous, and what’s not. After the tumor is removed, the surgeon takes another look with the camera to see if any straggler cancer cells are left behind.

Olson’s lab has tested this concept in mice, and it will still require … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

People in the biotech business (most, anyway) aren’t delusional. They know the odds are stacked against anybody who dares to develop a new drug. But even during the darkest days of recent economic history, December 2008, I heard a seasoned executive explain why the U.S. was, and would remain, the leading place in the world for biotech.

It was about attitude.

“Europeans always want to focus on the 100 reasons why something won’t work,” Bruce Carter, the British-born former ZymoGenetics CEO said. Americans, he went on, know the 100 reasons why a drug probably won’t work, yet “are willing to look at the one reason why it will.”

I’ve been wondering lately whether this is still true, whether biotech has lost its nerve, its anything-is-possible swaggering attitude. Sure, everybody tries to cast their companies and products in the best possible light, that will never change. But deep down, there’s a lot of lingering insecurity. People (me included) keep saying things like the venture capital model for biotech is broken, the IPO market is cruel, Big Pharma is slowly imploding, everything must be outsourced to China and India, young scientists can’t find jobs, drug price controls are inevitable, and the FDA is smothering life sciences innovation.

My job as a journalist requires me to have a well-tuned BS detector, to be skeptical of those who say they can overcome all the odds. But lately I can’t help but wonder, where are the biotechies today who really believe in themselves, and are willing to bet everything that they will beat the odds and do something remarkable?

There is a lack of scientific courage running through biotech today. That’s what Steve Ertel, a senior vice president at Cambridge, MA-based Acceleron Pharma, said on a panel that I moderated last month at the Biotechnology Industry Organization convention in Washington, D.C. Carl Weissman, a Seattle-based VC who invests in biotech startups with disruptive potential, gave an emphatic “yes” when I asked him if he thinks the industry is lacking in guts. Kevin Starr, a partner with Third Rock Ventures in Boston, made this basic point in a different way a few weeks ago, when he talked about the kind of culture Third Rock has worked hard to instill in the more than 20 biotech startups it has founded in the past four years.

“What you need to create is life in an enterprise where there’s a ‘nothing is impossible’ attitude, and that assembles the right set of complementary people together to turn an idea into something that’s great,” Starr says.

Kevin Starr is a partner with Third Rock Ventures

It struck me as kind of an odd thing to hear from a venture capitalist. I’ve covered the industry for the past 10 years, so I’ve only heard tales about biotech culture from the years before then. But my sense is that investors didn’t need to instill a “we-can-do-anything” attitude in the DNA of biotech companies. The entrepreneurial spirit was driven partly because of the exciting new technologies of the day, coupled with charismatic industry founders, and an only-in-America appetite for high degrees of investment risk and reward.

What’s really ironic here is that some of the most truly exciting things in biotech’s 35-year history are happening right now—at the precise moment when there’s so much timidity flowing through the business. Scientists are sequencing entire human genomes for $5,000 and the price is only going down, clearly paving the way for a new wave of more predictive diagnostic tests. The biology of cancer is getting much clearer, and the drugs are starting … Next Page »

Comments (8) | Reprints | Share:          

It’s time to close the books on the first quarter of 2011. As the editor around here, that means it’s time to look back at the journalism we did that broke new ground, shed some new light, or otherwise exemplified what we think is the best stuff we did to serve our readers the past three months.

We know people are very busy, and it can be exhausting keeping up with news on the Web, especially with so much half-baked, recycled, or aggregated content out there. We try to keep the quality of the journalism around here consistent, and high. My friend and colleague Greg Huang summed up our approach pretty well earlier today in his roundup for Boston readers:

“Every so often, we like to take a breath and look back at some of Xconomy’s top stories from the past few months. These are not necessarily the ones that generated the most traffic (though in some cases they are). They are stories that exemplify what we try to deliver to our readers day in and day out—real stories behind the companies, people, ideas, and trends that are shaping the future of innovation in our network of cities. What’s more, they help distinguish us from the media pack.”

Below you’ll see our top 20 tech and life sciences stories from the past quarter. But I’m actually leaving out Xconomy Seattle’s single most important story in the first quarter of 2010. It was the one where I introduced our new senior editor here in Seattle, Curt Woodward. He started on February 14—just seven weeks ago—and you can already feel he’s making an impact on our coverage, with scoops and in-depth insight on the local tech scene. The dude can flat out report and write, and he’s just getting warmed up. If you aren’t already following him, check out @curtwoodward and @xconomyseattle. And watch for more from this team in the second quarter and beyond.

The Top 10 Tech Stories

“Zaarly’s Wild Ride, Winning a Weekend, Quitting a Job, and The $100 Midnight Cheeseburger“

“Seattle’s Tech Job Crunch: How Long Can Valley Invaders Poach From Microsoft, Amazon, Before the Talent Well Runs Dry“

“Cheezburger, With Dreams of Domination in Internet Humor, Grabs $30M from Foundry Group, Madrona, Madrona, Softbank“

“Jeremy Jaech Leaves CEO Post at Seattle’s Verdiem“

“Obama’s Earmark Ban Could Ripple Through the Northwest Makers of Vaccines, Biofuels, Clean Water Technology“

“Nick Hanauer and Rich Barton’s Stealth Startup, King of the Web, Inches Closer to Revealing What’s Under that Crown“

“Geoffrey Moore: Why Middle Managers Are the New Kings, Stiff-Arming Shortsightedness, and the Money Chasm in the Mobile Social Sphere“

“Skytap, Fresh Off Boston-Led $10M Financing, Seeks to Make Cloud Computing Work Better“

“Amazon’s Multi-State Sales Tax Battles Are a Sideshow to the Real National Solution, and the Politicians Know It“

“Photorocket, Led by Amazon and aQuantive Vet Scott Lipsky, Uncloaks Its Not-Another-Photo-Sharing Service“

The Top 10 life sciences stories:

“Clarisonic Cracks Big-Time With $100M in Sales, Riding Rave Reviews From Lady Gaga, Oprah“

“Dendreon’s Warhorse, Chief Scientific Officer Dave Urdal, to Retire at Year End“

“Gates Foundation Makes First Equity Investment in a Biotech Startup, Liquidia Technologies“

“Mobisante Wins FDA Approval for Ultrasound on a Smartphone Technology“

“Gilead Pursues Cancer, Inflammation as Next Step to Diversify Beyond HIV“

“The Immunex Alumni: Where Are They Now?“

“NanoString, Snapping Up Genomic Health Veteran, Seeks to Prove Economic Value of Cancer Diagnostic“

“Calypso Medical’s New CEO Seeks to Steady Ship After a Rough Couple of Years“

“How ZymoGenetics Coulda Been a Contender: The Big Break That Came Too Late“

“Biogen Idec’s New R&D Boss, Doug Williams, Spurns the Corner Office for a Return to Science“

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

[Update: 12:40 pm] Dendreon has been searching around Seattle for months to find a new home to accommodate its growth, and now it has made its moving plans official.

The Seattle-based biotech company (NASDAQ: DNDN) has signed a lease to take eight floors, or about 185,000 square feet of office space, at the Russell Investments Center downtown, according to Bob Mooney, who represented Dendreon in lease negotiations along with fellow managing director Hans Kemp of Jones Lang LaSalle. Dendreon has also signed a lease to move its R&D groups into the 98,000-square foot Earl Davie Building along Eastlake Avenue, occupied by ZymoGenetics before it was acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb. The Puget Sound Business Journal had the story earlier this morning.

“We are pleased to confirm that Dendreon signed lease agreements to relocate our headquarters,” said Dendreon spokeswoman Tricia Larson, in an e-mail. “As the largest biotech company in Washington, this move enables us to continue to grow in Seattle as we realize our mission of transforming the lives of patients with cancer.”

Dendreon has been in hyper-growth mode since April 2009, when it showed in a pivotal clinical trial of 512 men with prostate cancer that its novel immune-booster was able to prolong lives with minimal side effects. The company raised $600 million earlier this year to manufacture and sell the product, sipuleucel-T (Provenge), globally. The company has been hiring hundreds of employees with new capabilities in areas like marketing and manufacturing-not just here in Seattle, but also at other sites in New Jersey, Georgia, and southern California.

The company has been struggling to find enough room to house all the employees it has been hiring. The company currently occupies an old building at 3005 First Avenue with 75,000 square feet; subleases another 35,000 square feet at the old Seattle P-I building along Elliott Avenue; and has another 60,000 square feet of office space nearby on Western Avenue where Isilon Systems is also located, Mooney says. If my math is correct, that means Dendreon currently occupies about 170,000 square feet spread among three buildings, and it is now moving into two buildings with about 66 percent more total capacity. The Russell building lease lasts five years, and the Earl Davie Building lease lasts 7.5, Mooney says. The company plans to start moving employees in phases as soon as this fall, Mooney says.

“They’ve had people practically sitting on top of each other, sharing conference rooms, things like that,” Mooney says.

[Update with employee headcount numbers.] Dendreon is hiring so fast it’s hard to keep track of how many employees it has at any one time. The company said it had 1,497 employees as of February 15, according to its latest annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s up from 198 employees two years earlier. The company also lists 141 current job openings on its website this morning.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

We had news galore this week on the Seattle biotech beat, with a mondo acquisition, an accusation of insider trading, and a prominent report pronouncing the U.S. medical device industry in a state of decline. Take a gander at the flurry of headlines here.

—Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN), which has significant immunology R&D operations in Seattle, announced this week it has made a potential $1 billion bet on Woburn, MA-based BioVex, a company attempting to rev up the immune system to fight cancer in a new way. I caught up with Amgen R&D boss Roger Perlmutter in an exclusive interview the next day to find out why he’s become a believer in what’s known as the oncolytic virus approach.

—Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN) has had a lot to be excited about this past year, but now it has a real headache. The Securities and Exchange Commission has accused one of its employees of illegally tipping off a family member that really good news would be coming soon from the company’s cancer drug in development for Hodgkin’s disease. The SEC said the insider trading netted $800,000 in illegal profits. The agency said Seattle Genetics is cooperating with regulators.

—Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) has decided to stay in Seattle, and retain what’s left of the ZymoGenetics workforce, the company said this week. Local officials, including Gov. Chris Gregoire and Chris Rivera, the president of the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association, thanked the company for providing a much-needed vote of confidence in the local biotech community. But Bristol has sound business reasons to hold onto its Zymo assets, beyond keeping local officials happy. Zymo’s lead asset in development for hepatitis C is now far more valuable than it was when Bristol acquired the company, because of a clinical stumble by a competitor last month.

—Seattle-based Calypso Medical Technologies had a couple of blurb-worthy items this week. The Seattle-based medical device company pulled in another $6.4 million through a securities offering, and named Ed Vertatschich as its new CEO, replacing Eric Meier.

—I reminded readers about our next big upcoming event at Xconomy Seattle, titled “Computing in the Age of the $1,000 Genome.” This is coming up fast, on February 7th, at Swedish Medical Center’s Cherry Hill Campus. It’s a rare opportunity to bring together Lee Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology, along with key leaders at Microsoft and Amazon, as well as leading entrepreneurs from the Bay Area—Complete Genomics and PacBio. If you’d like to register, click here.

—One of Seattle’s well-known medical device inventors, Clif Alferness, showed up in these pages this week when I had a chance to profile his latest startup, Redwood City, CA-based Calibra Medical. CEO Jeff Purvin talked about how Calibra has developed a cheap and easy way to deliver insulin to diabetics with one needlestick every three days, instead of once or more per day.

—Venture capital financing stats flowed in this week, closing the book on 2010, and news flash—it’s still ugly out there for entrepreneurs seeking venture capital. You can see the decade-long trend in this piece, and read comments from OVP’s Carl Weissman on what has to happen to reverse the downward trajectory.

—Is the U.S. losing its mojo as the world leader in medical device innovation? A new report from PwC says yes, although I’m not so sure the folks in India and China are quite ready to start eating our lunch here in the States. I’m curious to hear what more of our readers have to say about this.

—Seattle-based Geospiza, a longtime maker of software for biological research, inked a new multi-year collaboration with one of the very big life sciences toolmakers—Waltham, MA-based PerkinElmer (NYSE: PKI).

—Lastly, we had an interesting guest post from Jim Posada, the CEO of Seattle-based Resolve Therapeutics, on “the new normal for biotech startups.” Anybody who’s ever wondered how you can build a business after spending a decade or more and a billion dollars to find out if you maybe have a product ought to read this. Posada is one of many entrepreneurs trying to find a way to develop drugs in a way in which investors can get reasonable returns without waiting 20 years.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb scoped out the neighborhood for a couple months, and has decided to put down roots in Seattle.

The New York-based pharmaceutical giant (NYSE: BMY), which spent $885 million to acquire ZymoGenetics in October, has decided to maintain its presence here, according to Chris Rivera, the president of the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association.

“My understanding is that there are 275 people there, and they are all being retained, and they were told this morning in a meeting with senior management,” Rivera says. He said he wasn’t sure what Bristol’s real estate plans were for ZymoGenetics’ historic Steam Plant headquarters, or its other properties.

A voicemail and e-mail message sent to a Bristol-Myers Squibb spokeswoman weren’t immediately returned.

The decision by the pharmaceutical giant is surely a sigh of relief for Rivera and a bunch of local policymakers who were dreading the possibility of yet another big pharma takeover leading to mass layoffs in the local biotech community. That’s what happened before with local biotech stars Immunex, Icos, Corixa, and eventually Rosetta Inpharmatics, and quite a few biotechies expected a similar fate to strike ZymoGenetics, the venerable biotech founded in 1981. Many of ZymoGenetics’ senior managers have already left for new jobs, including former CEO Doug Williams, but those who are still working at Zymo’s offices on Eastlake Avenue now have some more security in knowing Bristol wants to stay in Seattle.

Bristol agreed to acquire ZymoGenetics back in September, saying then that it wanted to obtain full ownership of a drug for hepatitis C called pegylated interferon lambda. This product, which I wrote about earlier today, surely became more valuable after Bristol closed the Zymo deal, because a competing drug failed to show it could make the Zymo product obsolete in a clinical trial. At the time of acquisition, ZymoGenetics executives  couldn’t promise that Bristol wanted the ZymoGenetics people, as well as the ZymoGenetics assets, but they suggested the deal might not end in mass layoffs. Former chief financial officer Jim Johnson told me in September that Bristol’s pattern with past acquisitions—Princeton, NJ-based Medarex, and Waltham, MA-based Adnexus Therapeutics—suggested that it may want to retain people with expertise in biotech R&D like those at Zymo.

Having Bristol retain a presence is critically important to the region, in that it helps provide stability to the local biotech job market, Rivera says. “”Having a mix of large pharma, large biotech, large device companies is important to keep our job ebb and flow more steady. It helps to recruit executives from outside the regio,” he says.

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:          

ZymoGenetics, if it had stayed an independent company in Seattle, would be worth tens of millions of dollars more today than what it was in September when it agreed to be acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY).

Bristol clearly scored a big break with its new ZymoGenetics assets on December 21, about two months after it closed the books on its $885 million acquisition of the venerable Seattle biotech.

If it had still been an independent biotech, the value of ZymoGenetics would have soared that day when Cambridge, MA-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals announced that, essentially, it had failed to make ZymoGenetics’ lead drug candidate obsolete. On that day, Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX) said it was unable to eradicate one of backbone components of hepatitis C therapy in a high profile clinical trial.

Vertex is blazing a new trail in the field with a potent new oral pill that generates unprecedented cure rates when given in combination with two standard treatments—pegylated interferon alpha and ribavirin. Vertex was hoping to raise the bar even higher, to find out if its lead molecule, telaprevir, could be combined into a new cocktail regimen that Vertex hoped would kick old-school interferon into the dustbin of history. Doctors and patients have been yearning for a way to get rid of interferon, which causes nasty flu-like symptoms that make patients feel awful for months, which discourages most patients from seeking treatment.

ZymoGenetics, knowing this well, had developed a genetically modified version of interferon, which it called pegylated interferon lambda. This new form of interferon was designed to kill the hepatitis C virus just like the older version of interferon, but without the flu-like side effects. Results from early clinical trials were so promising that ZymoGenetics was able to entice Bristol to sign a $1.1 billion partnership to co-develop the drug in January 2009.

Doug Williams

But many on Wall Street weren’t impressed. They had fallen head over heels for Vertex’s new molecule, insisting that ZymoGenetics and Bristol were wasting their time with a new type of interferon. Vertex, they said, was coming along with a cocktail approach of new oral pills that would get rid of interferon, meaning any improvement on old-school interferon would soon be irrelevant. While many doctors, and companies like Vertex still hope it will be possible to do this, the latest clinical trial failure makes it clear that interferon will be part of the standard treatment regimen for years. That means the drug Bristol acquired from ZymoGenetics has a chance to integrate itself into a new standard of care, at a moment when awareness has never been higher among an estimated 6 million U.S. and European patients with this liver-damaging condition.

Former ZymoGenetics CEO Doug Williams, who recently took a new job as head of R&D at Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec, acknowledged in a recent interview that the failure of Vertex’s combination trial would have been a positive event for ZymoGenetics and its pegylated interferon lambda program. He stopped short of saying that Wall Street would have perceived … Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

Biotech leaders from around the country gathered this week at San Francisco’s Union Square, and it sure seemed like folks had a little more spring in their step than they did a year ago at this same get-together. We’ll just have to see whether the hope translates into good actions in the year ahead.

—Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN) made headlines before things got too noisy at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, by describing its strategy to take its prostate cancer drug into the European Union. Dendreon has talked in the past about finding a partner to help with this expensive and risky proposition, but now it says it is ready to go it alone on seeking regulatory approval there.

—Seattle-based Allozyne made some news of its own the first morning of the JP Morgan conference, when CEO Meenu Chhabra described how her company’s long-lasting multiple sclerosis drug passed its first clinical trial. Chhabra, in an exclusive interview with Xconomy, talked about how she envisions challenging Biogen Idec in this field, where Biogen is the worldwide market leader.

—For those who’ve never been a part of the annual frenzy known as the JP Morgan conference, I did a feature story on how this thing has evolved over the years. Steve Gillis, as usual, found a way to poke fun at himself when I asked him about what this thing was like back in the ’80s and ’90s.

—The Institute for Systems Biology had a hand in one of the biggest national life sciences stories of the week, even if not many people really paid attention at first glance. Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics (NASDAQ: GNOM) said it has struck a deal to sequence a staggering 615 complete human genomes for the ISB, which wants all that data to study neurodegenerative diseases.

—One of Seattle’s most respected biotech executives is leaving town for a big new job. Former ZymoGenetics CEO Doug Williams has agreed to become the new head of R&D at Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB). I talked about Williams’ track record, and how it matches up with the current situation at Biogen, in this feature story.

—Bainbridge Island, WA-based Emerald BioStructures said it has formed an expanded alliance with Belgium-based UCB.

—Plenty of people love to grumble about Washington state’s government, but a couple global health organizations are pretty happy with Olympia this week. SIGN, a Richland, WA-based nonprofit, and CircMedTech, an Israeli company opening an office in Seattle, each got $150,000 grants from the state under a new program to support the Northwest’s global health competitiveness.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

New England’s life sciences companies and investors are wasting no time this new year. We saw headlines of financings, clinical trial results, acquisitions, and executive moves at biotech and pharma companies this week.

—Genocea Biosciences of Cambridge, MA, wrapped up $35 million in Series B financing from new investors Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation, MP Healthcare Venture Management, and Skyline Ventures. Previous Genocea backers Auriga Partners, Cycad Group, Lux Capital Management, Morningside Ventures, Polaris Venture Partners, and SR One also participated in the deal for the vaccine discovery and development firm.

—Year-old biotech venture firm Longwood Founders Management announced it had raised its first fund, with help from Cambridge-based Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) and GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK), which employs two of the fund’s founders, Christoph Westphal and Michelle Dipp. The fund raise totaled to $86.9 million, according to an SEC filing. Ryan caught up with the other founder, biotech investor Rich Aldrich, for a look at Longwood’s strategy.

—Boston-based Relay Technology Management is ready to launch its search and analytics engine for biotech business development groups early this year, Ryan wrote. The startup was formed by a duo of Tufts University researchers in 2008.

—George Cotsarelis, co-founder of baldness treatment developer Follica, was part of a team that released research this week showing that men with pattern baldness have plenty of hair follicle stem cells in their scalps. Follica CEO William Ju said the findings fit with the rationale behind the experimental drug and device under development at the mostly virtual biotech firm, which was founded and incubated at PureTech Ventures in Boston.

—Cambridge weight loss drug developer Zafgen announced that its experimental treatment for severe obesity was well-tolerated and helped patients lose about 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of body weight per week in its first human study, which lasted one month. The biotech still has more to prove—obesity drugs must show sustained benefits for at least a year—but the first 24 people tested saw better weight loss effects than those with placebo.

—Ryan previewed our upcoming Xconomy Xchange: HHS CTO Todd Park and Friends on the Future of Health IT. Park, who co-founded Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN) before working in Washington, will dish on how the government can help innovate in the health IT space.

—Medical device maker Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) of Natick, MA, announced it had bought Intelect Medical, a maker of neuromodulation technologies for deep brain stimulation, for about $60 million in cash. Boston Scientific, which already had an equity stake in the company, said it will complement its existing technology to help physicians better visualize brain stimulation fields.

—Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) enlisted former ZymoGenetics CEO Doug Williams to lead its R&D group. It also brought on a new vice president of corporate development: Steve Holtzman, the former chief executive of Cambridge-based Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI). Both new hires will report to George Scangos, who joined Biogen as CEO in summer of 2010.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Doug Williams spent more than 20 years working his way up from bench scientist to CEO, and long after reaching the top, a realization hit. What he wanted most was to go back to his true passion—getting his hands dirty in a big and strong R&D organization with potential to create new drugs.

“Having done the CEO thing at ZymoGenetics, what I spent an awful lot of time doing was talking to investors and raising money for the company,” Williams says. “Not that I didn’t enjoy it—I did—but for the next chapter in my career what I truly wanted to do is be back in the day-to-day, doing R&D activities all day, every day.”

Williams, 52, will still talk to investors from time to time, but he will certainly get a chance to ply his science and business acumen on a day-to-day basis as the new head of R&D at Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB). The company has grown into the fifth-most valuable organization in the biotech industry, with a $15.9 billion market valuation, ranking it behind Amgen, Gilead Sciences, Celgene, and Genzyme. Much of Biogen Idec’s value is based on its strength as the world’s largest maker of multiple sclerosis drugs. The company runs in the black, generated $4.37 billion in revenue in 2009, and has assembled a talented workforce with 4,275 employees at last count. The R&D budget was about $1.3 billion in 2009.

Despite all that, Biogen hasn’t been able to deliver a new FDA approved product since natalizumab (Tysabri) arrived in 2004. The lack of R&D output has prompted blistering critiques from billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who accused the company in 2009 of suffering from “failed leadership.” Not long after the public attack, R&D chief Cecil Pickett stepped down, and so did CEO James Mullen. Chairman Bill Young, moving on, said the next CEO would likely be a scientist. Sure enough, when CEO George Scangos was introduced, the first thing he said was that R&D had to improve. A few months later, Biogen said it was cutting 650 jobs, closing its San Diego operation, getting rid of cancer and cardiovascular research, and concentrating much of its effort on its core strength of neurology and immunology.

While cuts have already been made, Biogen still needs to start showing more R&D progress if it wants to thrill investors again. Williams, who I have been covering for almost 10 years now dating back to his days as the chief scientist at Seattle-based Immunex, comes to this task with a background that’s clearly relevant to a Biogen that wants to focus on neurology and immunology.

Williams got his Ph.D in physiology, and did a stint on the faculty at Indiana University before he moved to Seattle to join the biotech industry at Immunex in the late ’80s. He carved out his expertise in immunology and autoimmune diseases there, and was the chief scientist at Immunex when it introduced the groundbreaking drug etanercept (Enbrel). That drug is now projected to be the world’s third-best selling pharmaceutical with $8 billion in worldwide sales by 2014, according to Thomson Reuters.

After Immunex got bought by Amgen, Williams moved on to take senior R&D jobs at Seattle Genetics and ZymoGenetics. He was promoted to CEO of ZymoGenetics two years ago.

The experience at the helm of ZymoGenetics was a tumultuous one, where Williams laid off more than one-third of the staff, and made significant cutbacks to a once proud and sprawling ZymoGenetics R&D operation in cancer and autoimmune diseases. To Williams, those were cuts … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Biogen Idec, after a long search, has found a new scientist to spearhead its R&D group—Doug Williams, the former CEO of Seattle-based ZymoGenetics.

The Weston, MA-based biotech company (NASDAQ: BIIB), the world’s largest maker of multiple sclerosis drugs, also added another heavy hitter from the Boston biotech scene to its management team—Steve Holtzman, the former CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI). Williams takes the title of executive vice president of R&D, while Holtzman will be the executive vice president of corporate development. Both will report to Biogen’s relatively new CEO, George Scangos.

Scoring two seasoned executives in key departments represents the latest step in the new direction Biogen has taken since Scangos took the reins last summer. Biogen has been operating without an executive head of R&D since the departure of Cecil Pickett in2009, at a time when billionaire investor Carl Icahn was complaining mightily about the company’s failure to innovate in recent years. Scangos hammered home the point immediately when he took over in July, saying that R&D has to improve. Biogen Idec, a company with $4 billion in annual revenue, hasn’t introduced a new FDA approved product of its own since 2004.

Williams, 52, has a long history as a scientist and biotech industry R&D leader. He was the chief technology officer at Seattle-based Immunex when it developed etanercept (Enbrel), a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis that’s expected to generate $8 billion in worldwide sales by 2014. He went on to senior R&D posts at Seattle Genetics and ZymoGenetics before advancing to the CEO’s role in January 2009. He hit the free agent market last fall after ZymoGenetics agreed to be taken over by Bristol-Myers Squibb for $885 million.

Doug Williams

Holtzman, 56, has an equally long record on the business side of biotech. He was the chief business officer of Cambridge, MA-based Millennium Pharmaceuticals during its go-go genomics days, before he left to be founder and CEO of Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a cancer drug developer. Holtzman handed over day-to-day operating responsibility of Infinity a year ago to new CEO Adelene Perkins.

Essentially, Williams, Holtzman, and Scangos have all grown up together in the biotech industry over the years, even though they never worked together at the same company.

“I am delighted to welcome Doug Williams and Steve Holtzman to Biogen Idec,” Scangos said in a statement. “I have known Doug and Steve for a long time and have great respect for their capabilities, accomplishments and character. Doug has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to build and lead high quality research groups and, importantly, to aggressively focus the science and transform promising research into products. Steve is one of the most thoughtful and creative business people I know and has demonstrated over the years the ability to build great organizations and create innovative collaborative structures that meet the needs of both partners. Steve and Doug represent the completion of what I believe is now an excellent management team.”

Michael Lytton, who had been in charge of Biogen’s business development efforts, will be leaving the company.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

This is the time of year for counting blessings, so I have to say we consider ourselves fortunate as journalists to have what is sometimes called the front row seat to history.

That’s how I feel when I look back at the year’s mix of features, breaking news stories, scoops, and up-close profiles. We feel privileged to get to know the people in our community creating things like powerful new smartphones, software, cancer drugs, and the $1,000 genome. Even better, we get to share these stories with our readers on a daily basis.

So, in what’s becoming an annual tradition around here, we have pulled together our favorite 10 technology and top 10 life sciences stories from the past calendar year. We will certainly make sure to keep up with the fast-twitch nature of news on the Web in 2011, but at the same time, we also promise to deliver these kind of in-depth features. The whiteboard in my office, which I scribbled on when we opened this bureau in June 2008, still has a line that says “News You Can’t Find Anywhere Else.” You can count us to deliver more stories like that in the year to come.

Top 10 Tech Stories

“Geoff Entress, the Go-To Startup Investor, Weaves Himself Deeper Into Seattle Tech Community“

“GlobalScholar’s Kal Raman, Fresh off $160M Deal, Seeks to Build an Oracle for K-12 Schools“

“Beaming Power to UAVs, Space Elevators, and Someday Earth: The LaserMotive Story“

“UW Building $20M Fund to Back University Startups, Following the Utah Model“

“Amazon’s Cloud Computing Service Sees Opportunity in Genomic Data Overload“

“How Seattle Startups Could Lead the World: Five Technology Themes to Watch“

“Andy Sack, Flush With $6M, Builds Revenue Based Financing Company that Could Disrupt Venture Capital Startup Ecosystem“

“How to Predict Whether a Startup Will Succeed or Fail: Testing the Disruptive Innovation Model“

“Google, Amazon Play Catch Up in Group Buying: Analysis and Reactions from BuyWithMe, Tippr“

“Cowboys Like Us: Investor Nick Hanauer on How to Think About Breakthroughs in Business and Society“

The Top 10 Life Sciences Stories

“Alder Rises from Ashes of Layoffs, Overcomes Skeptics to Become Seattle Biotech Force“

“Dendreon Makes History: FDA Approves First Immune Booster to Fight Cancer“

“Seattle Genetics, Millennium Report Groundbreaking Results of Drug for Hodgkin’s“

“How Emerald Biostructures Was Saved from the Decode Genetics Bankruptcy by Boston VCs“

“Leroy Hood’s Personalized Medicine Vision Enters Proving Ground at Ohio State“

“How Michael French, a Military Brat Turned Dealmaker, Kept Marina Biotech Alive“

“ZymoGenetics CEO Doug Williams Exits the Stage, Mulls Next Free Agent Move“

“Lee Hartwell, at 70, Tackles Personalized Medicine, Education in Latest Career Phase“

“Seattle Children’s CEO, Between Meetings, Invents Cheap Ventilator to Save Babies Worldwide“

“Larry Corey, Virus Hunter With Midwest Roots, Seeks to Unleash Health Innovation at Hutch“

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Two of the Seattle area’s venture capitalists watched the IPO market with bated breath this week, and while one looks like it will get a cherished liquidity event, another saw its hopes dashed at the 11th hour.

—Ikaria, the hibernation-on-demand company with technology from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, slashed its IPO asking price by 38 percent yesterday and then withdrew the offering altogether by the end of the day, according to Dow Jones. It’s a big disappointment for Arch Venture Partners, which was in line to have its stake valued at $56 million if Ikaria had been able to close  the deal at the mid-point of its projected IPO price range.

—The team at Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners had to have a better feeling yesterday than Arch, but it didn’t see the home run it was hoping for, either. One of OVP’s portfolio companies, Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics, scaled back its IPO price, settling on a price of $9 a share, after setting a prior range of $12 to $14. OVP’s stake in company, a provider of low-cost gene sequencing services, will now be worth about $26 million, based on the latest disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

—We broke the news—no big surprise, really—that ZymoGenetics CEO Doug Williams has left Bristol-Myers Squibb now that the $885 million takeover has been completed. I took this opportunity to take stock of Williams’ tumultuous 22-month run as a first-time CEO, and I asked him about what he plans to do next in a follow-up Q&A. A few of you wrote to me that I should have been harder on Williams, because even though most people consider him a good guy, he and the board screwed up this opportunity big time when people’s livelihoods were on the line. This reminded me of a peculiar phenomenon in the biotech industry. If this story happened in a tech company, there would probably be an outright brawl in the comments section at the bottom of the article. While I could do without a lot of the spam and garbage that passes for online commentary on most sites, maybe it would be healthy for us oh-so-polite Seattleites to air these grievances in public every once in a while. Maybe we’d learn something along the way.

—Despite all the legitimate angst that’s out there, it’s also clear to me that there are actually legit signs of rebirth in Seattle biotech for the first time in years. Xconomy is bringing together a few of these key players—Mitch Gold, Clay Siegall, Carol Gallagher, Randy Schatzman—for what I guarantee will be a provocative event at PATH on Nov. 29. There are not many seats left.

—One interesting story of renewal in the Seattle biotech community popped up on my radar this week. Resolve Therapeutics, a company co-founded by a proven scientist in Jeff Ledbetter, has spun off from the University of Washington and attracted a former Eli Lilly dealmaker as CEO. This startup, which aims to make an injectable protein drug for lupus, has crafted a business plan unlike most biotechs, in which it seeks to give investors a realistic chance at getting a return on their money in less than three years.

—Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN) said this week that it has now applied for FDA approval to essentially quadruple the capacity of its first factory in New Jersey that makes sipuleucel-T (Provenge) for men with prostate cancer. It usually takes regulators about four months to complete their review, so that means Dendreon should be able to start ramping up production in the first quarter of next year. But it’s really just an incremental step, because the company has said it needs to win FDA authorization for two other factories in the Atlanta and Los Angeles areas before it can start to meet demand from patients in the U.S.

—Marina Biotech (NASDAQ: MRNA), the Bothell, WA-based developer of RNA interference drug technology, raised $3.3 million in a stock offering.

—Across town in Bothell, OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: OGXI) said it hired veteran biotech executive Michelle Burris to be its new executive vice president of operations and chief financial officer. Burris had been at Seattle-based Trubion Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Rockville, MD-based Emergent Biosolutions (NYSE: EBS).

—Lastly, I wrote about some of things former Corbis CEO Steve Davis has learned through his latest foray in global health, as the interim director of PATH’s programs in India. Things don’t look quite the same in the boardroom or on a PowerPoint as they do on the ground in New Dehli, Davis discovered.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Yesterday, we broke the news here at Xconomy that ZymoGenetics CEO Doug Williams has left the company now that it has been taken over by Bristol-Myers Squibb. He is now officially scoping out his next gig. This is news, because he’s one of the few people that national life sciences VCs would back in a heartbeat around a new company with big-time potential.

There were a lot of things I wanted to cover during my phone interview on Sunday with Williams, 52. I asked him about the lessons he learned from his turbulent experience in a 22-month run as ZymoGenetics CEO, and what he really wants to do next. He was much more relaxed and candid than the last time I talked with him in September. That was a tense moment when the venerable biotech—which has long sought to be the Northwest’s biotech bellwether—stunned its employees, and many in the community, by saying it had agreed to be sold to New York-based pharma giant Bristol-Myers Squibb for $885 million. ZymoGenetics had essentially thrown in the towel on its dream to become the next great biotech company from the Northwest.

Here’s what Williams had to say about that decision and his future plans. The interview is edited for length and clarity as always.

Xconomy: What are you considering doing next?

Doug Williams: I’m looking at a number of different opportunities, both here in Seattle and more broadly. I’d obviously love to stay in Seattle. My girls are both native Washingtonians, and this is home for us, but I am looking at some things outside the Seattle area as well. I haven’t really made any decisions, other than to decide I’m not ready to hang up the cleats just yet.

X: You’re 52, now, right, so what’s the right analogy here? You still have some mileage left on the tires?

DW: I like to think so. I sort of feel that after 20-plus years in the business, I’m starting to figure out some of the do’s and don’ts. I’m definitely not ready to stop. I enjoy working in this business. It’s a real gift to be able to work around a bunch of smart people and do things that are ultimately good, in the sense we develop important drugs.

X: Who else has left from the senior management team at Zymo, and might you work with them again in some other capacity?

Doug Williams

DW: The only other one that I’m aware of who has left is Stephen Zaruby, who was the president. He and I both left at the same time. The remainder of the senior management team is still there. I’d love the opportunity to work with any or all of them again; we forged a pretty strong bond as a management team and enjoyed working with each other. I’m not sure what the long-term issues are with some of the senior managers—I’m sure some of them will be offered positions with Bristol. I don’t know if all of them will be.

X: Do you have any role in the decision-making process anymore in terms of what happens to the people and facilities at ZymoGenetics, or is this a clean break for you?

DW: I made a clean break. It was sort of a mutual decision on the part of Bristol and me that having the old CEO rattling around in the building didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I left on Day 1. I certainly left having given them my impressions on what they ought to do, and I hope they will take some of that advice. They see there is a lot of value in the site. They are just trying to get their arms around … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Doug Williams, one of the few nationally prominent biotechnology executives in Seattle, has officially left his job as ZymoGenetics CEO now that the company’s $885 million takeover by Bristol-Myers Squibb has been completed, Xconomy has learned.

Both Williams and former ZymoGenetics president Stephen Zaruby have left the company after it was acquired last month by Bristol-Myers Squibb, according to Bristol spokeswoman Jennifer Fron Mauer. She didn’t say who else on the senior management team has left, or who is now in charge of Bristol’s new operation in Seattle. The New York-based pharma giant hasn’t yet decided what to do with the remaining Zymo employees, or its local facilities, she says.

Now that Williams, 52, is officially a free agent again, he will have his pick of various plum jobs. He has deep roots in Seattle going back to the 1980s, and has built up a big Rolodex and gained lots of executive experience at Immunex, Amgen, Seattle Genetics, and ZymoGenetics. Williams is obviously still young enough to run another mid-cap biotech company, start a new venture, or do something else. As his longtime friend and legal advisor Stephen Graham of Fenwick & West once said, Williams has a reputation as a “calm, thoughtful, insightful and unflappable” business leader.

“Doug is one of the key players in the Seattle market that has CEO experience and a solid scientific background,” says Bob Nelsen, managing director with Arch Venture Partners in Seattle. “He can do anything he wants, from CEO, startup, to VC. Hopefully he stays here! I would back him any day.”

When I spoke with Williams yesterday by phone, he confirmed he’s looking at a number of different job opportunities. “I’m not ready to hang up the cleats yet,” he says. “I sort of feel that after 20-plus years in the business, I’m starting to figure out some of the do’s and don’ts. I’m definitely not ready to stop. I enjoy working in this business.” [For the full interview with Williams, check Xconomy tomorrow.]

As with anybody who’s been around biotech for a long time, Williams has a track record with its share of ups and downs. He was the chief technology officer at Immunex when that company had its breakthrough success with etanercept (Enbrel), and he was there when the company failed … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Immune Design has struck its first big deal with a Big Pharma company.

The Seattle-based vaccine developer has agreed to provide a license to an immune-boosting compound, called an adjuvant, to the MedImmune unit of London-based AstraZeneca. The pharma giant plans to use the compound as a key ingredient in potent new vaccines it has in the works. In return, Immune Design will get undisclosed upfront cash, future milestone payments worth up to $212 million based on development and sales goals, plus “mid-single digit” percentage royalties if the vaccines become marketed products, according to Bruce Carter, Immune Design’s executive chairman.

Today’s deal is the latest step forward for Immune Design, a company founded two years ago by a trio of scientific heavyweights—Nobel laureate David Baltimore of Caltech, Larry Corey of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Steve Reed of the Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI) in Seattle. Immune Design raised $32 million its second round of venture capital in July, bringing its total fundraising haul to $50 million.

Back in July, Reed said in an Xconomy exclusive he was following the playbook of his old company, Corixa, which sought to build a foundation in the first couple years and start doing deals by year three. It’s an important point in the evolution for a biotech startup with a lot of proprietary technology that few people have really seen yet up close.

“The money is important, but what’s more important is that someone very interested in developing new vaccines recognizes the necessity of putting our adjuvant in their vaccine,” Carter says.

Bruce Carter

MedImmune is paying to get ahold of Immune Design’s synthetic chemical adjuvant, called glucopyranosyl lipid A (GLA). This compound is supposed to boost the effectiveness of vaccines in a cheaper, more reproducible, and more scalable fashion than previous generations of adjuvants that were derived from natural products. Reed and his teams at Corixa and IDRI did pioneering work on a natural product adjuvant, known as Monophosphoryl Lipid A (MPL), which is now a critical component of GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine for cervical cancer, called Cervarix.

While this deal for Immune Design isn’t huge by biotech standards, it is intentionally limited in scope, Carter says. MedImmune has obtained the rights to use the GLA adjuvant to enhance experimental vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), Epstein-Barr virus, and cytomegalovirus (CMV) infections.

MedImmune, of course, is well-known for its expertise in respiratory syncytial virus, since its fortune was built on the success of palivizumab (Synagis), which generated $1.23 billion in sales in 2009. Instead of just treating RSV, MedImmune now has its sights set on developing a potent new vaccine … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share: