Biotech, Devices, Patents Luke Timmerman wrote: Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) said today it scored a victory with a U.S. District Court in Texas. A jury had previously determined the Natick, MA-based medical device company violated Medtronic’s patents on balloon catheters and stent delivery systems, awarding damages of $250 million. The court today found that two patents held by Medtronic (NYSE: MDT) were unenforceable, and it chose to reduce damages awarded to $19 million. Boston Scientific plans to appeal the remaining $19 million damage award to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, and said it is “confident” it will win. Permalink | Share |  E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS Less

deals, acquisitions, Internet Wade Roush wrote: Wilton, CT-based Greenfield Online (NASDAQ: SRVY), which owns a network of Internet-based consumer survey and comparison shopping sites, announced a complex sequence of changes today. The company is backing out of a previously announced merger with New York-based Quadrangle Group. Simultaneously, it’s selling its Internet survey business to an as-yet-unnamed buyer from the financial services industry. And biggest of all, it has agreed to sell the remaining parts of its business—consisting principally of Ciao, an online comparison shopping service popular in Europe—to Redmond, WA-based Microsoft for $468 million, some $42 million more than Quadrangle had offered. Founded in 1994, Greenfield Online has nearly 800 employees and raised $58 million in a 2004 IPO. It acquired Ciao in 2005 as part of a buying spree that also brought in OpinionSurveys.com, Rapidata.net, and Zing Wireless. Ciao runs a classic comparison-shopping site—with localized versions in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States—that offers price comparisons, product specifications, and consumer reviews for more than 4 million products. The company earns money on click-through advertising and commissions on referred purchases. Tami Reller, corproate vice president and CFO for Windows and online services at Microsoft, said in an announcement that acquiring Ciao would “further extend Microsoft’s search and e-commerce services in Europe,” where the company already runs localized versions of its MSN and Microsoft Live Search portals. “The team at Ciao has built a passionate consumer community based on intuitive technology and extensive merchant relationships that we believe will deliver incremental benefit to the Microsoft Live Search platform,” Reller said. The sale to Quadrangle had been valued at $426 million, but Greenfield said in an announcement Tuesday that it had received a superior offer from a “Fortune 100 strategic buyer,” which turns out to be Microsoft. Under the previous merger agreement, Quadrangle had three days to make a counter-offer—which, apparently, it did not. Greenfield will now have to pay Quadrangle a $5 million termination fee. Microsoft was apparently uninterested in Greenfield’s original core business—its Internet Survey Solutions division, or ISS, which recruits paid panels of consumers who respond to surveys commissioned by consumer products companies. The software giant was involved in finding an outside buyer for that part of the company, according to Reller. “We are pleased we could find the right strategic partner for ISS to continue its growth,” she said. One of Greenfield’s investors, Connecticut-based Mesco Ltd, is also an investor in uTest, a software quality assurance outsourcing house we profiled last week. Utest executives said they wanted to work with Mesco because of its familiarity with businesses that gather feedback online. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

android, Mobile, MIT Robert Buderi wrote: Google announced the winners of the first round of its Android Developer Challenge yesterday—and at least two teams with core members from MIT (one also had a Harvard member) were among the 10 teams taking home the $275,000 top prize. The teams were selected from 50 finalists picked last spring. And in addition to the top 10 big winners, Google also announced 10 other teams that each took home $100,000. We couldn’t find any local groups in that list, although not all the winner bios were published, and it has proven difficult to locate the backgrounds of all 20 winners. One of the 275K winners, called Locale, is an offshoot of an experimental course taught by legendary MIT professor Hal Abelson, assisted by Andrew Yu, a manager in the school’s Information Services and Technology office. Eric Carlson, of New England-based ConnectedBits, mentored the team, whose members include junior Clare Bayley and just-graduated seniors Carter Jernigan, Jasper Lin and Christina Wright, along with Jennifer Shu, an MIT graduate already working as a software engineer. Locale allows cell-phone and other mobile-device users to manage settings so that they automatically change depending on their current location. One example might be that your phone automatically goes silent or switches to vibrate when you’re in a class or meeting room. If you’re at home, calls might be automatically forwarded to your landline, where you might have a better connection. According to Locale’s description in the Android Gallery: “Users specify locations, times, and other conditions to trigger on. Location conditions utilize Android’s location API for high precision GPS positioning.” You can read more here. The other big winner was Wertago, described as “the creation of five friends (and mobile-technology enthusiasts) spread out across the country—New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Bay Area—coordinating their effort almost entirely through Google Mail, Talk, and Docs.” But while they don’t live in Boston, all of those friends have strong local ties. Team members Teresa Ko, now a doctoral student at UCLA, Kelvin Cheung, and Peter Ree, all have undergrad and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Meanwhile, Robert Sarvis, now a lawyer in the Washington, D.C., area, studied math at Harvard. No bio was listed for the fifth team member, Douglas Young. According to its Android page description: “Wertago is the mobile application nightlifers have been waiting for—a single application that shows you up-to-the-second information about what venues are hot, helps you coordinate plans with all your friends, lets you share content and influence the social scene, and enables you to connect with socialites all across the city. Nightlife will never be the same!” Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS Less

location, telecommunications, 4G Wade Roush wrote: Overland Park, KS-based Sprint, which is building a nationwide WiMax network called XOHM, has picked Boston’s uLocate to power the local information and mapping services for XOHM subscribers. XOHM, a so-called “4G” network, will cover entire metropolitan areas with broadband wireless data at speeds approaching those of cable Internet service. In an announcement yesterday, uLocate said developers will be able to use its Where platform to build information services that use the location information built into WiMax signals. Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

wwwade, photography, Microsoft Wade Roush wrote: Up to now, software giant Microsoft has largely missed out on the digital photography revolution. The most popular photo editing tools come from Microsoft competitors like Adobe and Apple. Flickr, every geek’s favorite photo-sharing site, was invented in Microsoft’s backyard in Vancouver, BC, but went on to become part of Yahoo. And Corbis, Bill Gates’ bold early-90s experiment in licensing digital images for high-resolution displays in consumers’ homes, devolved into an online stock image house. But the hottest new twist on digital photography is, unexpectedly, a Microsoft product. It’s a powerful Web service called Photosynth that can analyze multiple photos of a common object or space—say, Michelangelo’s David, or Times Square in New York—and intuit a 3-D model of the depicted subject, which then acts as the scaffolding for an interactive photo tour. The creation of a small Redmond-based product group called Live Labs, Photosynth is more than cool enough to earn Microsoft greater mindshare among photographers, both serious and amateur. I’ve been playing around with the tool since Microsoft started allowing members of the public to create their own “synths” on August 21. I would call Photosynth almost post-photographic, in the sense that it abandons any allegiance to the idea of a single, definitive image (goodbye, Doisneau’s “Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville” or Adams’s “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico”) in order to exploit the abundance of images on the Web, or, these days, on any digital photographer’s hard drive. It assembles related images into interactive montages that can be navigated almost as if the user were walking through or around the photographed space or object. For example, in early demos of Photosynth, Microsoft showed how hundreds of images pulled from Flickr could be assembled into a massive 3-D montages of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris or the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Words don’t really suffice to explain Photosynth: to understand it, you should just go to the Photosynth website and explore a few synths. I especially invite you to check out three synths I created last weekend around Boston, representing my South End apartment, Copley Square, and the Christian Science complex. Embedded versions of these synths can also be found on the following pages of this article. Sadly, the special Photosynth viewer runs on Windows machines only, inside the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers; this being a Microsoft project, there isn’t yet a version of the program that works on Macs. But at least the Live Labs people are apologetic about that: when you try going to the Photosynth site on a Mac, you get a message that says “Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet.” When you start exploring a synth, you’ll notice that mousing over an individual image brings up ghostly white outlines, indicating that the synth contains other images presenting the same objects from different angles. Clicking on one of those outlines (or on the arrows around the screen) will take you to those other images, but not instantly: Photosynth provides a smooth, animated transition, as if you were merely turning your head or approaching an object for a closer view. The best synths—that is, those with the most convincing transitions between images and the most complete sense of spatial unity—are those constructed from hundreds of photos taken with Photosynth in mind, like my three synths. The software’s matching algorithms have more to work with when there’s a lot of overlap between adjacent photos. So if you want to make a synth of an object like a sculpture, for example, you have to …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

Life Sciences, deals, Accelerator Ryan McBride wrote: The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, the state’s development agency for the innovation economy, says it awarded a $50,000 planning grant to support the eventual launch of the North Shore Life Sciences Accelerator in Beverly, MA. The North Shore LS Accelerator plans to provide life sciences startups with low-cost lab space, intros to investors, and other assistance. Sounds like another Accelerator we know… Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

Biotech, Diagnostics, Quanterix Luke Timmerman wrote: Quanterix made the news this week when it raised the second half of a $15 million financing round from Arch Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Flagship Ventures. The Cambridge, MA-based company has no trouble commanding attention, since its technology comes from the lab of Tufts University researcher David Walt, a co-founder of Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN), the high-flying San Diego-based maker of biological research tools. Despite the company’s pedigree, though, Quanterix’s latest round was covered as a run-of-the-mill VC financing blurb. So, I contacted CEO Nick Naclerio to learn more. The company, which started in June 2007, is working on what it calls a Single Molecule Array, or SiMoA for short. It’s supposed to be 1,000 times more sensitive than the standard Elisa tests, made by big players like Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT) and Becton Dickinson (NYSE: BDX), that are used to detect antibodies in a blood sample and which can diagnose whether a patient has been exposed to HIV, West Nile Virus, or other pathogens. Quanterix has a prototype device, Naclerio says, and the new capital will be used both to further develop the technology platform and for preliminary clinical trials. The company’s aim is to use SiMoA to find the tiny concentrations of proteins that can’t be seen by Elisa. One example might be a millimeter-wide tumor, at the very early stages of growth, that sheds minute amounts of signature proteins into the blood. It’s theoretically possible the test could spot tiny amounts of proteins that are linked to Alzheimer’s, Naclerio says. “We are able to count individual molecules,” he says. “Generally, the more sensitive you are with a diagnostic, the better.” Lots of work still needs to be done to establish how useful such a test might really be, Naclerio says. For instance, clinical studies will have to be done to show whether tiny concentrations of a protein in the blood are really an early sign of bad things to come with cancer. Until a trial says otherwise, it’s possible that small tumors might simply be mopped up by the immune system, and might cause people to be worried for no good reason, I suggested. Naclerio didn’t disagree, which is why he added that the company is working with physician collaborators on which meaningful proteins they really would like to look for in the blood if they had a powerful device that could find them. The company plans to concentrate initially on known proteins, and isn’t going to spend its research budget looking for new proteins that could help with early detection of cancer. However, one well-known project of that kind is the International Cancer Biomarker Consortium, led by Nobel Laureate Lee Hartwell, president of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Given how much promise Hartwell and his collaborators see with proteins serving as early warning signs of cancer, it seems likely Quanterix won’t have much trouble finding researchers who want to use its precise new tool to learn about those diagnostic clues lurking in the blood. “This technology has the potential to open up a lot of new applications in diagnostics,” Naclerio says. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

VC, funding, sports Wade Roush wrote: Private Equity Hub reported yesterday that San Diego-based Active Network has raised $80 million in a sixth round of funding led by existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners of Waltham, MA, Canaan Partners of Westport, CT, and ESPN. Existing investor Charles River Ventures of Waltham did not return for this round, which brings the firm’s total venture funding to $275 million, PE Hub reported. Active Network runs a number of Web communites related to sports and active lifestyles, including Active.com and CoolRunning.com, and provides software tools that community organizations can use to manage administrivia such as online registrations, reservations, payments, donations and fundraising, and memberships. Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

pharma, IT, VC Ryan McBride wrote: Sermo has garnered the interest the popular press by drawing doctors into the social networking sphere. Yet among venture capitalists and entrepreneurs the Cambridge, MA, startup has attracted more attention for devising a value proposition to convince the pharmaceutical industry and others to pay for access to its coveted online community of doctors; the first pharma to take Sermo up on that proposition, in a deal announced last year, was global giant Pfizer (NYSE:PFE). Now Sermo CEO Daniel Palestrant says that his company’s list of paying pharma clients has grown to include nine of the 12 largest drug companies in the world (he wouldn’t name names, but think of Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY), GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK), and Novartis (NYSE:NVS) as potential customers). This news answers some looming questions about whether Sermo would be able to sell multiple pharmas on the concept of paying for online interactions with docs. What’s more, it may be a positive harbinger for the budding Health 2.0 sector, which is banking on the migration of pharma marketing dollars to the Web as a main source of revenue. Sermo, with a physicians-only community of nearly 77,000 members, is reaching out to a pharma industry besieged by mounting government oversight of its interactions with doctors, hampering the ability of drug reps to court clinicians through traditional means such as company-paid meals and golf outings. This clampdown is spurring the drug industry to find new ways to interact with its target audience. “I think what’s happening is that Sermo is very quickly emerging as a medium that can not only allow industry to redefine its relationship with physicians but also to have tremendous cost savings and have tremendous insights,” Palestrant says. “It’s not unusual to have our clients find that the same things that they did offline or through other mediums they can do on Sermo for a tenth of the price and in a quarter of the time.” Palestrant makes those claims without revealing details about how much his privately held firm charges pharma clients for access to its members. However, he talked about new products luring those customers (Sermo doesn’t allow advertisements or product promotions on its site), including an offering launched in recent months that allows drug companies and contract research organizations …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

Software, startups, Simulation Wade Roush wrote: In Boston and Seattle, the professional sports teams aren’t just for entertainment—they’re managed by some of the biggest movers and shakers in the two regions’ high-tech economies. In the Seattle area, the Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers are part of Vulcan Inc., owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The Kraft Group, owner of the New England Patriots, has built one of the NFL’s most advanced websites and has spun off a startup, Matchmine, that’s doing pathbreaking work in the area of online content and shopping recommendations. Many of the Banner 17, the group of financiers that owns the Boston Celtics, are partners at Boston-area venture capital and private equity firms. Over at the Red Sox, pitcher Curt Schilling is the founder of 38 Studios, which is building a massively multiplayer online (MMO) adventure game set to debut in 2011. And now you can add one more connection between the sports and high-tech worlds. Yesterday marked the public debut of iRacing.com, an Internet-based auto racing simulation system created by John Henry, principal owner of the Red Sox and co-owner of Roush (no relation to me) Fenway Racing, and Dave Kaemmer, co-founder of Papyrus Design Group, which developed several of the best known console racing games, including NASCAR Racing: 2003 Season and Grand Prix Legends. (In 1995 Papyrus became part of Sierra Entertainment, which was long headquartered in Bellevue, WA.) The Bedford, MA, company has been working on its simulation—which combines PC-based software with a subscription-based Internet service that allows participants to race against each other—since 2004. The company has a staff of 42, half in Bedford and half (primarily digital artists and software engineers) working remotely, according to Scott McKee, iRacing’s vice president of marketing. If you’re familiar with the way most big commercial videogames are developed these days, you’ll realize that 42 is a tiny number; major console and PC games like 2K Boston’s Bioshock or Electronic Arts’ Spore (which comes out September 7) involve hundreds of developers and artists and have Hollywood-scale production and marketing budgets. But iRacing goes out of its way to explain that its simulation system is not a game, and isn’t being produced or marketed like one. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that ‘game’ is a four-letter word to us, but we don’t think of ourselves as a game company,” says McKee. “What we offer is really the world’s most sophisticated commercially available racing simulation, conceived and designed with a very discriminating customer in mind—professional racers. We want to create a software package that will help them learn new tracks, hone their skills, or knock off the rust if they’ve been out of the car for a while. It’s really a driver development tool.” McKee says he used iRacing to learn his way around Virginia International Raceway—one of two dozen tracks currently available in the simulation—before going there to participate in an amateur race. “I’d never driven the track before,” McKee says. “I spent about half an hour a day for three weeks driving the sim in a comparable car, and when I got there I was immediately up to speed.” So to speak. Of course, you don’t have to be a real-world racer to use iRacing.com. On Tuesday, after a month of beta testing and two months in invitation-only mode, the company opened its simulations to anyone 13 or over who has a credit card, a Windows PC (sorry, Mac users), a broadband Internet connection, and a wheel-and-pedal set. (These PC accessories are available from joystick and mouse manufacturers such as Logitech and Microsoft.) Subscriptions cost …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS Less

Web, Software, publishing Wade Roush wrote: At the Drupalcon Boston conference back in March, Acquia, the Andover, MA, startup formed as a commercial home for the open-source Drupal social publishing system, showed off a demonstration version of its nascent product, code named “Carbon.” A select group of beta users have been testing Carbon for some time, and today Acquia vice president of marketing Jeff Whatcott announced via the company’s blog that Acquia is expanding its beta program. The company is starting by handing out 100 beta invitations to readers of TechCrunch, and will also give beta accounts to attendees of Drupalcon Szeged 2008, a Drupal community conference that began today in Szeged, Hungary. Thereafter, the company will register “hundreds of people each week” for the Carbon beta test and will eventually add everyone who has requested access to the software through Acquia’s website. Whatcott explained that the company is rationing access to Carbon because it doesn’t have enough support staff to provide “high quality responsive support” to an unlimited group of beta testers. He said the company is on schedule to release the full version of Carbon “this fall.” Drupal is the content management system behind thousands of websites, including the sites of major publications such as Linux Journal and The Onion. Many Web publishers prefer it to competing open source publishing systems such as WordPress and Joomla because users have written thousands of free plug-in modules that handle both basic features such as commenting and RSS feeds and advanced feature such as shopping carts and multimedia hosting. Carbon is a version of the Drupal 6 core software, including selected user-contributed modules, that comes with access to Spokes, Acquia’s Web-based support and update notification system. There’s moderate excitement around Carbon and Spokes because commercial support for Drupal could make it easier for corporate organizations to adopt the publishing system for their websites, similar to the way that many enterprises choose Red Hat’s version of Linux or Sun’s version of MySQL over free, non-commercial distributions. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS Less

deals, IPO, SEC Ryan McBride wrote: Salient Surgical Technologies (formerly TissueLink), of Dover, NH, filed papers with the SEC to withdraw its proposed $86.25 million initial public offering. The maker of medical devices to seal blood vessels during surgery made its initial filing for the IPO in March. Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

VC, funding, Software Wade Roush wrote: Burlington, MA-based Expressor Software, whose products rely on semantic descriptions to simplify the integration of data from disparate sources into data warehouses, announced today that it has raised $10 million in a Series B venture round led by Commonwealth Capital Ventures. Existing investors Globespan Capital Partners and Sigma Partners also participated in the round. Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

photography, startups, Media Wade Roush wrote: In an ideal world, your digital photos would be shared and archived instantly, behind the scenes, as soon as you snapped them. They’d be wirelessly transmitted to your friends’ phones or e-mail addresses, a photo sharing site like Flickr or Snapfish, your social-networking accounts at Facebook or MySpace, a media storage site like Box.net, your digital photo frame at home, and, if you wished, to your favorite photo lab for printing. As it turns out, there are companies working on most parts of this not-so-futuristic picture. Camera phones can already transmit photos wirelessly, and for regular non-wireless cameras, EyeFi makes an SD memory card that doubles as a Wi-Fi chip, automatically uploading your pictures to the photo-sharing site of your choice as soon as you come within range of a Wi-Fi network. If you have an iPhone, the App Store includes any number of apps that instantly upload your photos to the Web (AirMe and Flickup connect to Flickr, for instance, while SnapMyLife and Phanfare connect to their own new photo-sharing communities). Parrot makes digital photo frames that can grab pictures from camera phones over Bluetooth, and eStarling and other manufacturers make Wi-Fi-equipped frames that can display photos stored on your home PC’s hard drive, or tap into RSS feeds from the major photo sharing sites. But so far, there isn’t a single overarching photo-sharing solution. If you wanted to broadcast all your photos to all your devices and accounts, you’d still have to cobble together two or three of the kinds of services outlined above. That’s probably one reason why software engineer, venture investor, and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, in a July 2008 post called “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund,” remarked that “there is huge growth still to come” in the market for photo and video sharing services. “There may ultimately be 30 different subtypes of image/video sharing service, half of which remain to be discovered,” Graham wrote. Well, as it turns out, Y Combinator was already funding at least one of those subtypes of services when Graham wrote his post. San Francisco-based PicWing—one of the startups that just completed Y Combinator’s “summer term” in Cambridge, MA, and presented at the incubator’s recent Demo Day—wants to simplify the digital photo scene by bringing out a wireless digital photo frame that users reach via e-mail. “Digital photo frames are a great idea, but the current photo frames are pretty bad,” says PicWing co-founder Enrique Rodriguez. “It takes a lot of effort to get your pictures onto them. We’re trying to let you push pictures directly to the frame, so your non-technical relatives can look at the frame and there they are.” To make a photo show up on PicWing’s frame, all you have to do is send it to the frame’s unique e-mail address, whether from your home computer or your cell phone. Rodriguez and fellow founder Eddie Kim are building the first batch of PicWing frames by hand. Each frame is basically a small Linux computer, attached to the back of a 7-inch LCD screen, that incorporates incoming photos into an Adobe Flash-based slide show. The pair already has a 6- to 8-week backlog of orders for the device, which they’ve priced at $249. To give potential buyers a taste of how PicWing works, Kim and Rodriguez have also built free widgets that display photos e-mailed to a user’s PicWing account on a PC desktop, inside a blog post or Web page, or on a Chumby (a bizarre little device that’s one-quarter clock radio, one-quarter …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS Less

Biotech, Multiple Sclerosis, Life Sciences Luke Timmerman wrote: Biogen Idec has made a lot of its money on Avonex and Tysabri, drugs that slow down the rate of flare-ups for people with multiple sclerosis. Now the Cambridge, MA-based biotech company (NASDAQ: BIIB) is pursuing a loftier goal. It is working on the first experimental drug that may reverse the symptoms of the neurodegenerative disease. The drug, being tested in animals and prepped for its first human trial, is designed to block a protein called Lingo-1 that interferes with body’s production of myelin, the fatty protective coating around nerve fibers. People with multiple sclerosis have an overactive immune system that eats away at the myelin layer, and they have no ability to regenerate myelin in the brain or spinal cord, says Sha Mi, a Biogen researcher. That means nerve impulses that control speech, vision, and movement get short-circuited, sort of like when an electrical wire is stripped of its insulation. Biogen thinks it now has engineered a drug that can stop Lingo-1 from doing its dirty work, allowing the body to regenerate myelin coating around nerves. That could restore normal functions, like walking. “People around the company are very excited about this,” says Kenneth Rhodes, Biogen’s vice president of discovery neurobiology. “It’s potentially a transformational therapy.” Sha Mi, the Biogen scientist who discovered the molecular switch that paved the way for the program, put it this way, “As a scientist, I came all the way from China. If we can create a new medicine to affect patients, that is my dream.” The drug hasn’t even entered clinical trials yet, and it’s already been an eight-year odyssey. Sha Mi (who goes by the name Misha) joined the company in 2000 from Wyeth’s Genetics Institute unit in Cambridge, MA. Not long after joining Biogen, she found the Lingo-1 protein in a database and learned it was expressed solely in the central nervous system and, then, only in neurons. Later experiments showed that when scientists delete the gene that makes Lingo-1 in mice, those altered mice would recover from a disease in which the immune system eats away at myelin, called autoimmune encephalomyelitis. The same recovery was seen in mice when they were given an antibody drug designed to block the Lingo-1 protein. There were no side effects or dangers seen from producing too much myelin, because the body will only produce the amount needed to cover nerves, Sha Mi says. The combination of experiments, conducted by Biogen scientists and collaborators in China, made the cover of Nature Medicine last October. Other researchers are working on myelin repair, such as a group led by Bruce Trapp at the Cleveland Clinic, says Rhodes, the Biogen vice president. Madison, NJ-based Wyeth (NYSE: WYE) has attempted to develop conventional small molecule drugs against Lingo, but hasn’t been successful, he says. Biogen is developing a genetically engineered antibody against Lingo because that approach should do a better job of binding with the Lingo protein target on the surface of cells, Rhodes says. The first version, however, wasn’t quite “optimal,” and a newer one is being engineered with better properties, he says. The latest version is made with fully human DNA, instead of partial mouse DNA, because researchers want to be confident that the drug won’t spark the immune system to reject it, especially if it needs to be given chronically. The company is planning to ask the FDA for permission to start its first human clinical trials, although he wouldn’t say when. No details are available yet on how the trials will be crafted, but Rhodes made clear that the company’s vision is for Lingo to be used in combination with Avonex or Tysabri. The idea is that those drugs can reduce the immune system’s assault on neurons, quieting the storm. That would give an opportunity for the anti-Lingo-1 drug to step in and regenerate myelin around the nerves. Since 400,000 people in the U.S. suffer from MS, and there’s nothing else quite like this program poised for clinical trials, it seems unlikely that Biogen will have much trouble recruiting patients in the first study. If they show they can regenerate myelin in even a few people, Biogen will be a few steps closer to fulfilling Sha Mi’s dream. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

Roundup, Life Sciences, VC Rebecca Zacks wrote: There were some exciting venture deals this past week, and some great in-depth reporting about Boston-area life sciences firms on the part of Luke and Ryan. In case you missed any of it…. —Ryan did some sleuthing on a stealthy startup down the street from Xconomy’s headquarters in Kendall Square, MA, and uncovered (at least partially) Living Proof. With a board that includes MIT’s Robert Langer and Polaris Venture Partners as an investor, the startup is leveling some impressive scientific and business firepower against bad hair days and other cosmetic complaints—and it has $7 million in new financing to buoy its quest for beauty. —Brand-new Boston-area startup Proteostasis Therapeutics closed a massive $45 million Series A financing from HealthCare Ventures, Fidelity BioSciences, New Enterprise Associates, Novartis BioVenture Fund, and Genzyme Ventures. The firm is aiming to develop small-molecule treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, emphysema, and other ailments that work by helping the body maintain normal protein production. —Medical diagnostics startup Quanterix, a Tufts University spinoff in Cambridge, MA, reportedly raised $15 million in a Series A financing from Arch Venture Partners, Bain Capital, and Flagship Ventures. The startup is developing tools capable of identifying single molecules in human blood. —Just hired to head the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center—the agency that will administer the state’s $1 billion funding initiative—Susan Windham-Bannister shared her goals and plans for the center in a lengthy interview with Luke. (He had the good sense to save the hard questions for part 2.) —Wondering what happens to the IP when a biotech goes bust? Ryan caught up with Wellesley, MA, accountant Joseph Finn, who puts defunct firms’ patents on the auction block. —Resolvyx Pharmaceuticals raised $4 million in an add-on to a $25 million Series B financing round that the Bedford, MA-based company closed in April. Atlas Venture, Flagship Ventures, Radius Ventures, CHL Medical Partners, Biogen Idec, and QVT Fund are supporting the startup’s efforts to turn fish-oil science into treatments for a host of inflammatory diseases. —Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) of Cambridge, MA, and the nonprofit Medicines for Malaria Venture formed an alliance with India’s Advinus Therapeutics to develop new treatments for pregnant women and infants infected with malaria. —The FDA said that it is working with Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) and Elan (NYSE: ELN) to update the labeling for Tysabri following confirmation that two multiple sclerosis patients on the drug had contracted the often-fatal brain infection PML. —Lexington, MA-based Indevus Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INDEV) raised $105 million in a private placement of notes; the cash is intended to retire existing debt and carry Indevus into calendar 2010. —Bob gave a sneak peek of our September 23 forum, How to Build a Life Sciences Company. Robert Langer will be a keynoter at the event; I’m betting it will be a good hair day for him. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

VC, funding, wireless Wade Roush wrote: Vanu, the Cambridge, MA, company whose “all-software radios” allow wireless operators to broadcast using multiple standards such as GSM and CDMA, has raised $32 million a stealthy Series B venture round, Dan Primack of Private Equity Hub is reporting today. Waltham, MA-based Charles River Ventures, which led a $9 million Series A round for Vanu last year, has returned for the new round, which also included Norwest Venture Partners of Palo Alto, CA, and Tata Capital of India. Vanu, founded in 1998 by MIT computer science PhD Vanu Bose, the son of Bose Corporation founder Amar Bose, isn’t publicizing the funding round. But Andy Beard, the company’s chief strategy officer, told Primack that the company will use the funds to expand operations in the United States and India. The company “will talk later this year about the motivation behind the round and what it means for our future plans,” Beard said. Software radio technology uses computer software to emulate functions such as mixing and amplification that are handled by separate hardware components in traditional radios. Software-defined radios can communicate using multiple radio protocols that would normally require separate chips. In Vanu’s implementation of software radio, the software runs on standard Linux PCs rather than the specialized hardware used by most manufacturers of cellular base stations, making the systems easier to upgrade. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS Less

deals, Indevus Pharmaceuticals, Sanctura Ryan McBride wrote: Indevus Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:INDEV), a Lexington, MA, specialty pharmaceutical firm, announced it has raised $105 million in a private placement of non-recourse notes. The company said the sale of the notes, which are secured by royalties from its overactive bladder drug Sanctura, is intended to retire existing debt due next year and fund operations into calendar 2010. Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

Curis, cancer, Life Sciences Ryan McBride wrote: Drug developer Curis (NASDAQ:CRIS), of Cambridge, MA, reported today that it has begun a Phase 1 clinical trial of an anti-cancer small molecule, dubbed CUDC-101. The experimental drug is designed to inhibit tumor cell growth and survival, and 18 to 40 patients are expected to enroll in the clinical trial. Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

video, Web, Media Matt Kaplan wrote: [Editor's note: This Xconomist Forum post is a revised, updated version of an essay contributor Matt Kaplan wrote for the PermissionTV blog on August 9, 2008.] Every four years I look forward to the summer Olympic Games. It’s not so much that I’ll sit down and watch the coverage non-stop, but there are a few sports that I look forward to watching, and the occasional event that catches my attention by surprise. (Beach volleyball, anyone?) This year, with so many hours being produced by NBC, I waited in anticipation for what could be the defining moment of Video 2.0. Was this going to be the moment when traditional television and the Web fused together to give us a blended experience like never before? An experience that allowed us to both lean back and watch the NBC drama unfold and lean forward to self-produce our own Olympic channels? An experience that provided the right amount of live-action coverage, video-on-demand, expert commentary, tear-jerking athlete profiles, game history and statistics? A personalized experience that made us stop and say, “Wow, now this is what we’ve been waiting for?” Don’t get me wrong—the sheer ability to watch over 2,000 hours of coverage was great, and the lessons NBC learned from the 1992 Triplecast debacle allowed us to watch it all for free. I was just hoping that the 2008 Olympics would mark the turning point for the online video experience and herald the arrival of a new blended medium. Unfortunately, this opportunity was lost. In the end, we basically had two distinct experiences: a traditional TV broadcast carefully orchestrated by NBC, and a video site that was essentially a tribute to everything wrong with online Video 1.0—short video clips, a cluttered user interface, and more links than there are stones in the Great Wall of China. I’m sure NBC saw the website as a way to deliver more long-tail video content than what it could handle over the broadcast channels. It also gave the network a way to stream on-demand replays while cramming banners and sponsorships into every nook and cranny of available white space. I’m not against the ad-supported format, and I even enjoy watching creative ads produced for the Olympics. Just don’t insult viewers by turning off player controls such as “Enlarge Video” while pre-roll ads are playing. Believe it or not, users might have wanted to watch ads in higher quality or better yet, engage with them if allowed to. Instead the video ads were mostly repurposed TV spots, but fuzzier, more repetitive and equally static. Sure, I could have watched hours of live streaming video on the web and swapped between multiple feeds with the ease of a TV clicker. But there was nothing particularly inventive about the online experience, and there definitely was no continuity between it and the broadcast feed. I wanted the online video experience to be an extension of the live broadcast feed, to enhance it with in-depth profiles and timely features that weren’t going to be shown on air. There were in fact, many attempts by NBC to drive viewers from the broadcast feed to the website, but they simply referred us to the main website, NBCOlympics.com, rather than to a specific landing page or URL. So instead of an online video experience that brought the most important Olympic highlights to the forefront, I fell victim to watching what others deemed as “most popular.” No, it wasn’t Michael Phelps winning his historic eighth gold medal or Usain Bolt smashing his own world record in the 100-meter race. It was the Cuban taekwondo fighter Matos kicking the ref in the face after he was disqualified. I doubt that’s the lasting memory that NBC wants its viewers to have. OK, so enough negativity. The sheer magnitude of it all was impressive—but I thought I’d make some specific suggestions on how to improve the Olympic viewer experience in 2010. Use the on-line medium to enhance the live TV broadcast. Drive viewers from the broadcast to specific replays, athlete profiles, and other programming online. Prompt viewers with specific keywords such as “PHELPS” or “GYMNASTICS” to bring them quickly to the on-line video content. Let viewers personalize their ideal Olympic coverage. Allow viewers to create a personalized schedule so they know when and where to tune in to watch their events. Let viewers define their sport or athlete “watch list” and automatically build a personalized library of daily video highlights. Allow viewers to influence the live broadcast schedule. To maximize the TV broadcast audience, allow viewer voting or preferences to influence what will air on the upcoming live broadcast instead of choosing the coverage for them. Combine highlights and full replays into one experience. Allow viewers to begin watching highlights of an event, then extend their viewing to include more of that particular game or match as desired. Likewise, allow viewers to begin watching a full replay then switch modes to see just the highlights. Take advantage of low-cost citizen journalism. Invite former Olympians, athletes, entertainers, or even broadcasting students to provide commentary for online videos rather than airing them in silence. Give advertisers more value for their money. To enhance the ad experiences, provide an on-line video library for advertisers to tell their stories in more than 30 seconds (not less). Allow for richer, interactive ad formats that engage viewers. For all the money that was spent on pure video production and delivery, I just wish a fraction could have been spent on transforming the video experience into something more integrated, more personalized, more enjoyable and more remarkable. Perhaps it’s a matter of money, where the advertising dollars for the website are dwarfed by those of the broadcast network. Or perhaps it’s a case of an organizational divide, where the suits who run the network don’t mingle with the jean-wearing nerds who build websites. Regardless, until viewer needs are put first, we’ll have to put our Olympic 2.0 dreams on hold until Vancouver, 2010. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less