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Rebecca Zacks

…or really just one great one: Xconomy needs your help. We’re busy cranking out terrific tech and life sciences journalism and putting on stellar events across the six cities in our network, and we’re looking for a kick-ass marketing coordinator to help us get the word out about all of it.

Full details are here, but in a nutshell: This is a full-time position in our Cambridge, MA, headquarters, ideal for somebody who is happiest when juggling a bunch of diverse projects. We need a person who enjoys figuring stuff out as s/he goes along, and has just enough of the old OCD to pull it off without too many embarrassing typos. Some main areas of focus will include marketing our events, managing our social media efforts, and marketing reprints and premium products.

If doing all that in an extremely collegial, slightly wacky startup environment sounds like your idea of a good time we want to hear from you at jobs@xconomy.com.

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UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

Wade Roush

You wouldn’t throw a fancy dinner party in a 7-Eleven. You wouldn’t hold a symphony concert in a subway station, or teach a meditation class on a tilt-a-whirl ride.

So why does anyone expect readers to read long articles on the Web?

Call me a traitor to my kind, but I think the World Wide Web is a terrible medium for long-form writing, precisely because of the mismatch between content and venue. The basic problem is that browsers are for browsing. Today’s commercial Web, where no morsel of exposition is more than one saccade away from a link, a logo, or an ad, is an impossible place to do any deep thinking.

No one designed this outcome. It’s just that the medium grew up so fast, evolving in less than 20 years from a hypertext file-sharing system at a European physics laboratory into today’s infinite digital bazaar. There wasn’t much time to think about whether it really made sense to translate our collective creative output into HTML, dump it onto Web servers, and pay for the whole operation with hyperlinked ads that, by their very nature, take readers away from whatever they’re trying to read.

Fortunately, there are folks scouting for ways out of this mess. Over the last few years, programmer-entrepreneurs like Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, have come up with a series of clever applications for separating or “parsing” the Web’s text from its context. This new menagerie of minimalism includes browser-based apps that zap the clutter around Web posts and replace it with a peaceful white background. It also includes mobile apps that let you store these pared-down posts for on-the-go consumption whenever you choose. And in this general category, I’d also include a few new curation services intended to spotlight contemporary and classic long-form writing and make it easier to consume.

I’ve picked 10 of my favorite reading apps and services for quick summaries on the following pages. If you’re like me and you spend a lot of time using the desktop or mobile Web, yet you also love getting lost in a long, thoughtful non-fiction article, then you’ll find some of these services to be life-changing.

But I wouldn’t say that we’ve reached an apotheosis—not by a long shot. At best, the Zen approach to repackaging Web articles is only one element of the solution, and it’s not one that will scale up very well. Already, critics are arguing that this kind of republishing is impolite at best, copyright infringement at worst. As soon as the big online publishers realize how many people are bypassing ads by saving parsed text to Instapaper and the other reading apps, they’ll freak out, the same way broadcasters did when TiVo came along. (It’s no accident that people have called the reading apps “DVRs for the Web.”)

What’s needed now are business models that would make publishers happy about providing more content in these ad-free environments. But we’re a long way from finding payment mechanisms that appeal to readers—let alone equitable ways to split up reading-app revenue between publishers, authors, developers, and platform providers, as a tussle last year between Readability and Apple illustrated (more on that below).

For now, damn the torpedoes—here’s my list of the 10 most interesting and useful reading apps and curation services. I’m going to describe the apps first, because once you understand those, the curation services will make a lot more sense. (For a single-page version of this article that you can export to one of the reading apps, click here.)

First app: Clearly.

… Next Page »

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Robert DiLoreto

Boston startups should be focusing more on creating strategic partnerships with big companies.

An “if we build it, they will come” mindset appears to dominate the Boston startup scene. Too many startups also rely mostly on a pricing and plans revenue model combined with implementing the latest inside sales and marketing 2.0 tools to “get found” while driving demand. A complementary and proactive approach in targeting big companies for strategic partnerships is needed.

Wake up… Most big companies have realized that their current set of technology providers lack the innovation and speed to deliver new competitive solutions. There are new sets of problems that need to be solved that may not have existed even a few years ago. As a result, new innovation programs and budgets have been established, led by senior executives. Their motivation is to fund pilots with emerging technology providers that most times lead to a much larger transaction and partnership strategy. Interesting areas include mobility, social, analytics, and cloud computing.

Take advantage of these customer-funded opportunities as these dollars may also complement your angel and VC funding efforts. Plus, for those leveraging lean startup principles, incorporating a big company “voice” to validate your product development roadmap may commit them to buy additional products and enhancements in the future.

If big companies are approached correctly, senior executives leading innovation programs will make swift decisions. Unfortunately, there are major challenges I see within the startup community to take advantage of these budgets. These include:

• Little focus on proactively targeting big companies. Also, the startup team and their mentors may not possess the sales skills or experience to effectively connect with and relate to big-company senior executives.

• Boston startups are too focused on the product and technology. Big companies are also evaluating their ability to work and collaborate with the startup team. Chemistry is important to these executives.

• You are not the center of the universe. There may be additional value in extending and leveraging existing ecosystem investments.

What I am describing here is not an outdated sales process where the cost to acquire a customer is high and the sales cycles are very long.

Keep in mind that big companies would rather … Next Page »

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Bruce V. Bigelow

When it comes to tech startups—especially in Internet software and app development—San Diego has been adrift in the horse latitudes. That’s the term Spanish mariners had for the waters where the trade winds died out for days and even weeks at a time. Becalmed sailors desperate to gain some headway would heave their horses overboard to reach the New World.

It hasn’t reached that point yet in San Diego, but you would never know that software was once a thriving entrepreneurial community here. Even now, the software sector accounts for more than a third of San Diego’s private technology companies. But as I’ve written previously, it feels as if the local software companies speak different languages. In contrast to the flourishing tech hubs in Seattle, Boston, and New York—not to mention Silicon Valley—San Diego’s software scene is sleepy and indifferent.

Still, there are signs of a freshening breeze.

David Cohen last week at UC San Diego

Scores of new seed-stage startups have begun to emerge throughout the region, including a dozen that just moved into the new EvoNexus incubator in downtown San Diego. These emerging companies are led by young entrepreneurs who view San Diego’s innovation establishment as old-school and irrelevant. They are turning out instead for informal “hackathons” and “meetups.” They tell me they’re yearning for real mentoring by real tech entrepreneurs, and for access to real tech investors who are really investing.

Last week, more than 200 people turned out to hear David Cohen talk at U.C. San Diego about TechStars, the early stage fund and accelerator program for Internet startups that he co-founded with three partners in Boulder, CO, six years ago. Cohen is the CEO, and by any measure, the startup program has been wildly successful.

TechStars enrolled its first 10 Internet startups in 2007, providing as much as $18,000 in seed funding and an intense, three-month mentorship program for each company in exchange for a 6 percent stake. Since then, TechStars has expanded to … Next Page »

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Erin Kutz

News of FDA drug approvals shone the spotlight on some New England biotechs this week.

—Waltham, MA-based Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS) and San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals(NASDAQ: AMLN) won FDA approval for their injectable diabetes drug exenatide once-weekly (Bydureon). This was their third time seeking clearance for the drug, which uses technology from Alkermes to last long enough in the bloodstream to turn it into a once-weekly injection

—Additionally, the FDA cleared a drug developed by Lexington, MA-based Curis and its partner Genentech as treatment for a common form of skin cancer called basal cell carcinoma. The drug, vismodegib (Erivedge), is the first approved product for Curis.

—They say good news comes in threes. Cambridge-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals also got a faster-than-expected FDA OK to start selling its drug ivacaftor (Kalydeco) as a treatment for a rare form of cystic fibrosis. That’s the second drug approval for Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX), which also sells a treatment for hepatitis C. Bonnie Ramsey, one of the key people involved in developing the drug, talked to my colleague Luke about the implications of the approval.

—But there was some bad news, too: A week after reporting data that its pancreatic cancer treatment saridegib (IPI-926) showed some success in a small study, Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI) halted a bigger, mid-stage clinical trial of the drug when it showed patients were living longer in the placebo group. The Cambridge, MA-based company’s shares fell more than 30 percent after the news last Friday.

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João-Pierre S. Ruth

Much like the New York Giants charging onto the football field, companies such as bitly, BarkBox, and Gilt Groupe—along with their backers—have upped the caliber of innovation expected from startups in New York. In response to this upswell of activity, Xconomy brought some 250 members of the local investor and entrepreneurial community together Wednesday to catch a glimpse of the city’s potential as a venture hub. (And to debate the merits of the Giants vs. the Patriots.)

Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures, and Todd Dagres, general partner and founder of Spark Capital, discussed the role media hype plays with some startups and the rise of social media, during a keynote chat moderated by David Rosenblatt, CEO of 1stdibs.

Admittedly, the media is notorious for picking its darlings when discussing innovation while barely mentioning some growing companies. Though Instagram, for example, makes headlines when it lands funding, Wilson said, Union Square Ventures has companies in its portfolio quickly building their businesses under the radar. “They don’t get caught up in a bunch of nonsense,” he said. “We have companies like Indeed.com and Return Path that will be public companies in three or four years—maybe less.” The management teams at those companies, Wilson said, are more focused on developing their products than building their media following.

Dagres said that some companies simply do not talk up their plans. He compared Twitter, a usual suspect on many blogs and news sites, with Tumblr, which until recently was not as vocal. “Tumblr couldn’t get arrested even though it was growing like crazy and was very substantial,” he said. “You didn’t hear anything about it. Now it’s starting to catch on.”

New York’s Tumblr could be on to something by shrugging at hype in order to endure in the social media arena, Wilson said. He noted that early players such GeoCities gave way to MySpace, Facebook, and now Foursquare and Pinterest. “People are figuring out how to make these services more useful and how to also make them businesses,” he said.

The trouble with GeoCities, Wilson said, was in spite of the high hit counts on those … Next Page »

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Gregory T. Huang

Don’t know about you, but I’m less interested in Facebook’s IPO than I am in the efforts of people trying to find the next Facebook out of Boston/Cambridge. One such effort is the new Experiment Fund, based at Harvard University, which I wrote about earlier this week.

Turns out there’s more to the latest seed-stage fund in Boston than initially meets the eye. I had a chance to speak with the Experiment Fund’s co-founders, Hugo Van Vuuren of Harvard and Patrick Chung, a partner at Silicon Valley-based New Enterprise Associates (not that Patrick Chung, that Patrick Chung).

They clarified the goals of the new fund and provided some more context around how it plans to distinguish itself from other similar efforts. I’ve also talked with a number of other early-stage investors around town and have gotten a better sense of how the Experiment Fund is being received locally (more on that below).

First, some mechanics of the fund, which has been in the works for about two years. Harvard has no financial stake and will have no say in the fund’s investment decisions, but it has provided support and office space, Van Vuuren says. He declined to specify the projected size of the fund, but he said it plans to make four to six new investments over the next two years, each in roughly the $100,000 to $250,000 range.

The Experiment Fund has already invested in four companies: Rock Health (see my colleague Wade’s stories here and here), Omada Health, Punch Media, and Tivli. Interestingly, only Tivli is based in the Boston area. Rock Health and Omada are in San Francisco, and Punch Media is in the DC area. They all were started by Harvard students—the key ingredient for now—but the fund intends to invest in teams from other schools around Boston and the East Coast, as well. So I’m guessing its next four investments will be pretty different from its first four, at least geographically.

“We want to meet them here,” Chung says. “We want to help you right here in Boston where the ideas were first born, where the team was put together.”

One issue they wanted to address was the notion that the fund is … Next Page »

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Arlene Weintraub

At Xconomy’s event yesterday, New York’s Venture Emergence, members of Gilt Groupe’s founding team fascinated a standing-room-only audience with the tale of how, in just four years, they grew from a scrappy startup to one of the most successful e-commerce sites on the Web. Co-founders Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, who is one of our Xconomists, and Alexis Maybank insisted that one of the keys to their success is their close friendship. “Without our very strong relationship, we could have never gotten this business launched so fast,” Wilkis Wilson told the crowd.

But wait, doesn’t that advice run counter to what just about what every business expert says? One should never work with family or friends, right? Wrong, say the Gilt Girls. In fact, they’re so confident in the mixing of friends and business that they co-wrote a book about their entrepreneurship experience, By Invitation Only: How We Built Gilt and Changed the Way Millions Shop, which will be released in April.

The book’s title is partly a reference to Gilt’s business model: It sells fashions, home décor, and travel services in limited-time “flash sales” to people who are invited to be members on the site. But it’s also an apt description of how the co-founders have managed the business from day one—with a strong focus on making sure they have the right people in place to manage a high-growth startup.

Wilkis Wilson and Maybank have been together through both good times and bad. The good: They’ve raised about $218 million in venture capital and are widely expected to pull off a successful IPO later this year or early next year. The bad: Gilt confirmed last week it was laying off 90 people and embarking on a restructuring.

In a chat with Xconomy after their panel presentation, Maybank and Wilkis Wilson downplayed the bad times. “We scaled this business so quickly from zero employees to 900,” Maybank said. “Internal restructuring is part of the normal process in a fast-growing business.” As for how their friendship has helped them endure the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, Wilkis Wilson said … Next Page »

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Erin Kutz

Snapette was supposed to be an unusual way for Sarah Paiji to spend the summer between her two years at Harvard Business School. It was a mobile app idea she started working on last winter with HBS alum Jinhee Ahn Kim, aimed at enabling women to better share and find fashion products in brick-and-mortar stores.

Then, two days before school was set to wrap up that first year, a Twitter interaction with the colorful Silicon Valley investor Dave McClure more or less changed all that, Paiji says. She tweeted an infographic about local shopping, which McClure then retweeted. He also directed his Twitter followers to sign up for the Snapette fashion app. The resulting traffic clued Paiji in to the fact that McClure was someone important in the startup world.

At the suggestion of friends, Paiji reached out to McClure, who runs the 500 Startups seed fund and accelerator in Mountain View, CA, to share some more information on her company. “He liked the idea but said he doesn’t know anything about fashion,” she says. So McClure passed Snapette along to his 500 Startups partner Christine Tsai and Jess Lee, founder of fashion tech startup Polyvore, to take a look at the company. Snapette got the OK, the 500 Startups fund invested an initial $50,000, and Snapette left its digs at Boston’s MassChallenge program to join McClure’s accelerator—three weeks after it had already started.

Now, Paiji is working full-time on Snapette and has no foreseeable plans to return to business school. The 500 Startups demo day in August put Snapette in front of 700 investors.”If they’re interested, it’s hard to say you’re going to back to school and will do this on the side,” says Paiji.

“It was very thematic of the whole journey: unexpected,” she says.

(And this isn’t the first startup I’ve written about whose Twitter interactions with McClure ultimately led to inking an investment from him. The other one would be Cambridge, MA-founded and now San Francisco-based Baydin.)

Snapette officially launched its app in late August in conjunction with demo day, and Kim and Paiji finished up the year at Dogpatch Labs in Palo Alto, CA. The company also continued to be a part of the MassChallenge program remotely, Paiji says.

Just last month, it made the move to New York City (to Dogpatch Labs, again) to be near the “high shopping density of boutiques and users,” says Paiji, who I caught up with in Boston this week.

There’s plenty of buzz around social, local, mobile, and even fashion tech startups. So what makes Snapette different? Most of the plug-ins and apps and platforms aimed at better tailoring shopping to consumer preferences exist in the online world. Not so much for the physical world. “Our idea was, we would love to help women find great products in stores using crowdsourcing,” Paiji says.

Snapette’s iPhone and iPad interface provides a stream of product pictures that have been uploaded by the user community, with information on the brand, price, and store that carries it. Users can search streams near them, and get directions to the store selling the products nearby. They can also interact with and follow others in the Snapette community, share products to other social media outlets, and view a stream of what products are hot and trending based on likes and comments on Snapette.

“It feels like Pinterest for the real world,” says Paiji. (The comparison had to be drawn.)

Snapette has since expanded beyond this crowdsourced content, and is explicitly partnering with brands and boutiques looking … Next Page »

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Sarah Schmid

Cambridge, MA-based Flagship Ventures, a $900 million fund known for its successes with companies such as Accuri Cytometers and Acceleron Pharma, is planning to open an office in Michigan in the next six months, says Sean O’Donnell, VP at Credit Suisse’s Michigan office.

The move comes after Venture Michigan Fund II (VMF II), a fund-of-fund which is managed by Credit Suisse, made a $15 million investment commitment in Flagship Ventures Fund IV, which invests in early-stage companies. As part of the agreement, Flagship will invest that $15 million in Michigan companies. Flagship has already found success in local companies with Accuri Cytometers, which is based on technology spun out of the University of Michigan.

“Flagship Ventures is a much larger fund than is typically involved in our program,” O’Donnell says. “We hope they’ll exceed that amount.”

The Venture Michigan Fund II was established in February 2011. Like the first Venture Michigan Fund, VMF II exists to primarily invest in early- and seed-stage Michigan companies. VMF II has $120 million in capital to invest in funds that target high-growth and emerging industries. The commitment to Flagship was the fourth investment it has made.

And what can we expect Flagship to invest in? O’Donnell admitted that Michigan continues to feel the effects of a difficult national fundraising environment, though he says there is actually an increased amount of capital available to Michigan companies compared to years past thanks to programs like VMF II. He pointed to the success of homegrown entities like Arboretum Ventures and HandyLab as helping to persuade investors that Michigan is a viable place to invest.

O’Donnell also says that, though Michigan’s life science sector will remain robust, he predicts movement away from therapeutics and devices in favor of anything that saves money. Where he expects to see increased investment is in the IT sector, particularly in software development, mobile apps, and social media, and the reason is simple: Those kinds of companies are cheap to start.

“I feel Michigan is on the right track,” O’Donnell says. “We’re always going to have gaps, but good deals will still be able to find capital.”

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Gregory T. Huang

Here’s a quick update on the agenda for Mobile Madness 2012: Total Mobility, the annual half-day mobile conference we are organizing here at Xconomy Boston. The event is taking place on the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Cambridge, MA. We are looking forward to a packed house and some outstanding talks, discussions, and networking.

I’m pleased to announce a few more startup participants:

—Apperian founder and chief strategy officer Chuck Goldman will join us for a discussion of mobile business strategies, along with Mobiquity founder and CEO Bill Seibel. Goldman is a former Apple exec who leads Apperian’s strategic and business development efforts in enterprise mobile apps. Seibel, for his part, was a founding partner at Cambridge Technology Partners and went on to lead ZEFER, Demantra, and Gumball; he currently leads Mobiquity’s efforts to help businesses develop mobile strategies.

—Fiksu CEO Micah Adler joins us to talk about his company’s approach to marketing mobile apps. My colleague Erin recently wrote about Fiksu’s consumer-facing service, which lets people try out apps from various brands and stores for free.

—Paydiant co-founder Chris Gardner will be on hand to discuss his vision for the future of the mobile wallet—banking, shopping, and e-commerce via your smartphone.

Other confirmed speakers include Jason Jacobs of RunKeeper, Chris Lynch from Vertica/HP, Chuck Kane from One Laptop Per Child, and Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR. We’ll also have a special panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” including Lars Albright (Quattro Wireless, Session M); Mike Baker (Enpocket, DataXu); Tom Burgess (Third Screen Media, Linkable Networks); Jeff Glass (m-Qube, Bain Capital Ventures); and Ryan Moore (GrandBanks Capital investor in Enpocket, Where, and Nexage, now with Atlas Venture).

There are more announcements to come, and I will be posting the detailed agenda soon, so stay tuned. Meantime, you can still grab the early bird rate if you register today.

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Luke Timmerman

Bonnie Ramsey said three years ago that a cystic fibrosis drug from Vertex Pharmaceuticals was a huge medical advance in the making, and would end up being an achievement on par with putting a man on the moon, at least for her patients.

Yesterday, she says, was the day it truly felt like she was part of a team that reached the moon-shot goal. The good news came when the FDA approved Vertex’s ivacaftor (Kalydeco) as the first drug of its kind to work by treating an underlying genetic defect for cystic fibrosis.

“It’s a really big day,” says Ramsey, a leading CF physician/scientist at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington. “Even though it’s for a small subpopulation, the treatment paradigm has completely changed. It’s no longer about just treating the symptoms, it’s about treating the genetic defect. That’s a real game-changer.”

The drug from Cambridge, MA-based Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX) is now FDA approved for patients age six and older who have what’s known as a Class 3 gene mutation called G551D. This mutation is found in about 4 percent of the 30,000 patients in the U.S. with cystic fibrosis. The disease, the result of various mutations to a gene called CFTR, causes the poor transfer of water and salt across cell membranes, which leads to the buildup of thick, sticky mucus in the lungs, and poor absorption of nutrients. It means patients have to endure hours a day of treatment their entire lives, and the median life expectancy is about 39 years. Doctors currently treat the symptoms of the disease, through things like inhalable antibiotics, but Vertex’s drug is the first FDA-approved therapy that works by altering an underlying disease-related protein.

Bonnie Ramsey of Seattle Children's Hospital

Ramsey has had an instrumental role in developing this drug since its infancy. As the executive director of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s Therapeutic Development Network, back in 2000 she began collaborating with the drug’s original developer, San Diego-based Aurora Biosciences (later acquired by Vertex.)

Ramsey was the lead investigator of a pivotal study of 161 patients, known as Strive, which yielded results in February that laid the foundation for yesterday’s FDA approval. The study showed that patients age 12 and older on the twice-daily pill from Vertex had about a 10.6 percent absolute improvement in their ability to force out air from their lungs in one second—compared with a placebo. The effect held up over the full 48-week course of the study. Researchers also saw significant improvements in being able to gain weight, while also reducing cough, sputum production, and the incidence of pulmonary exacerbations. Side effects included headache, and upper respiratory tract infections, researchers said, although more patients dropped out of the placebo group than the drug group. A second study verified the effect in younger patients, age six and above.

What excites scientists is that the drug has a compelling foundation in biology. It is designed to … Next Page »

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Erin Kutz

This week’s deal news covered a breadth of sectors: biotech, medical devices, mobile applications, software, and robotics. Not to mention a major venture capital fund raise.

—Waltham, MA-based drugmaker Avila Therapeutics was bought by New Jersey-based Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) for $350 million, with as much as another $575 million available in milestones. Avila is a maker of “covalent” drugs that are designed to shut down the activity of disease-causing proteins for a prolonged period of time.

—Verastem, a young Cambridge, MA-based biotech working on drugs targeting cancer stem cells, completed its initial public offering, led by UBS and Leerink Swann. The IPO (5.5 million shares sold at $10 apiece) represented a strong showing among investors, as Verastem originally indicated it planned to sell 4.5 million shares priced between $9 and $11 each. The underwriters have a 30-day option to buy another 825,000 shares.

—Burlington, MA-based ConforMIS, a maker of knee implant systems, raised $89 million in a Series E funding from private equity investors and government investment funds abroad. The company said it will put the money toward sales, manufacturing, and expansion of its technology.

—Co3 Systems, a maker of data loss management software, received new funding from Fairhaven Capital. The Cambridge, MA-based startup said it will put the money (whose sum was undisclosed) toward sales, marketing, and engineering.

—Malborough, MA-based medical device startup Navilyst Medical will be acquired by Albany, NY-based AngioDynamics (NASDAQ: ANGO) in a transaction valued at $372 million, based on the company’s $14.20 per share closing stock price Monday. Navilyst, which focuses on … Next Page »

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Gregory T. Huang

There’s a new player in the seed-stage investment game in Boston. As of this week, the Experiment Fund is open for business at Harvard University, backed by the Silicon Valley venture firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The startup investment fund is being hosted by Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in Cambridge, MA.

The new fund is led by Hugo Van Vuuren (see photo above), a Harvard graduate student and entrepreneur, and two venture capitalists from NEA, Patrick Chung and Harry Weller (both Harvard alums). David Edwards, a Harvard professor of biomedical engineering, serves as an advisor to the fund. Van Vuuren and NEA did not respond to requests for comment in time for this article.

The basic structure of the Experiment Fund is that selected startups—mostly student-led teams from Cambridge—will receive up to $250,000 in seed funding over the next two years, presumably in exchange for a sizable equity stake in the companies. The fund is based out of Harvard but says it will operate independently of the university and will look at teams from other local schools—and, more broadly, from the East Coast. The sectors targeted are pretty broad as well; they include information technology, healthcare, and energy.

No word yet on the size of the fund or how many companies it will invest in. But Van Vuuren, a recent fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said in a press release that he and his partners are looking for “smart and resourceful people, zealous full-time teams, and experiments in need of seed funding and hands-on help to get off the ground.”

Not to beat a dead Zuckerberg, but the overarching goal here is to keep the next Facebook in Boston—and, preferably, affiliated with Harvard. “It’s continued growth of the ecosystem for Harvard and beyond,” says Gordon Jones, director of the Harvard Innovation Lab, which is collaborating with the Experiment Fund to provide office space and resources, but is separate from the new fund. Jones calls the Experiment Fund “extremely complementary” to the i-Lab.

One of the first Harvard teams to receive an investment from … Next Page »

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Luke Timmerman

[Updated: 1:25 pm] Vertex Pharmaceuticals is now officially more than just a one-hit wonder.

The Cambridge, MA-based biotech company (NASDAQ: VRTX), best known for its hepatitis C drug, has won clearance from the FDA to start selling a new twice-daily pill called ivacaftor (Kalydeco) for a rare form of cystic fibrosis. The FDA said today the Vertex drug can now be used for patients age six and older who have a gene mutation called G551D. About 1,200 patients in the U.S., or roughly 4 percent of the total population of 30,000 cystic fibrosis patients, have the mutation.

The approval came faster than expected, as Vertex turned in its application in October, and the FDA had a deadline of April 18 to complete its review. The company plans to start shipping the drug to pharmacies this week, the company said.

“Kalydeco is an excellent example of the promise of personalized medicine—targeted drugs that treat patients with a specific genetic makeup,” said FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, in a statement. “The unique and mutually beneficial partnership that led to the approval of Kalydeco serves as a great model for what companies and patient groups can achieve if they collaborate on drug development.”

The new cystic fibrosis drug has been highly anticipated for years, and the application to the FDA is based on clinical trial results that arrived in February. The study of 161 patients found that patients on the Vertex drug had about a 10 percent absolute improvement in their ability to force out air from their lungs in one second—a common measure of success in treating lung disease—compared with those on a placebo. The effect lasted over the entire 48-week course of the study. Researchers also saw significant improvements in reducing cough, sputum production, and the incidence of pulmonary exacerbations. Side effects included headache, upper respiratory tract infections, nasal congestion, rash, and dizziness, although more patients on the placebo group dropped out of the study early because of side effects, Vertex said.

While the 10 percent absolute improvement in breathing ability for people with a deadly lung disease might not sound like much, it is a big step forward for the disease. Cystic fibrosis, the result of mutations to a gene called CFTR, causes the poor transfer of water and salt across cell membranes, which leads to the buildup of thick, sticky mucus in the lungs. That effectively suffocates people over time, and often ends up killing people in their late 30s or early 40s. Doctors currently treat the symptoms of the disease, but Vertex’s drug is the first FDA-approved therapy that works by altering an underlying disease-related protein.

[Updated pricing information] Based on the small patient population that has the G551D mutation, and the significant benefit the drug provides to them, Vertex set the price at $294,000 per patient per year, Nancy Wysenski, Vertex’s chief commercial officer, told analysts today on a conference call. The company estimates that about 60 percent of eligible patients have private health insurance, while the rest are covered by government insurance, Wysenski says. As is common for companies selling high-priced medications, Vertex has established programs to help get the drug to patients who can’t afford it. Vertex said it will provide free medicine to uninsured families with household incomes of less than $150,000 a year, and it will provide assistance in making co-payments for those with insurance.

“We have a strong commitment to help patients 6 and older get Kalydeco,” Wysenski said on the conference call.

The drug was developed as part of a 13-year long collaboration with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which put more than $70 million into the development program, along with Vertex, and the drug’s original developer that was acquired by Vertex-San Diego-based Aurora Biosciences. Because of its support, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation will collect a royalty on Kalydeco sales that will start in the “high-single digit” percentage of sales, and escalate to “just below the teen level” as the drug reaches undisclosed sales milestones, according to Vertex finance chief Ian Smith.

Vertex has a number of plans ongoing to expand the use of Kalydeco beyond this initial small group of patients in the U.S. The company has applied for approval in the European Union, and hopes to receive clearance there to start selling in the third quarter. It is also running a trial of the drug in patients under the age of six; as a treatment for certain other gating mutations of the CFTR gene; and in combination with other medicines that seek to correct additional mutations.

Based on the price and number of patients in the U.S., Vertex can expect peak U.S. sales from the G551D patient population of about $550 million, said analyst Mark Schoenebaum of ISI Group, in a note to clients.

Vertex shares climbed 6 percent t0 $36.90 at 1:45 pm Eastern.

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Erin Kutz

The blow from getting a higher-than-expected bill from someone like your lawyer could be softened it if came attached to a 60-second video message explaining the special things he or she actually did in detail.

At least, that’s what Dave McLaughlin thinks—and he’s building his new startup Vsnap around the idea.

McLaughlin has been around the block before as an entrepreneur. He co-founded the mobile payments startup Fig Card, which was acquired by eBay last spring. Coincidentally, the 2011 application deadline for MassChallenge fell on the day that acquisition closed, so McLaughlin hurriedly finished the paperwork for the startup accelerator—and nabbed a spot. He’s also joined at Vsnap by chief technical officer Claudia Santoro, former vice president of engineering for the restaurant-focused software startup Exit41.

Vsnap didn’t take home one of the MassChallenge checks in October, but it’s now pulling in early customers—like Suffolk University and Schering Plough’s alumni association—to test out its alpha product and is readying itself to introduce its beta product sometime in February.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Users log into the Vsnap interface, record a 60-second video using their phone or computer camera, add descriptions, and can add attachments such as PDF files or Web URLs. Vsnap sends the package out through e-mail. Users can also record a video “signature” about themselves that will accompany all the messages they send. Currently the technology can be accessed via a Web browser, but Vsnap is developing iPhone and Android apps as part of the beta release.

The customer target for Vsnap is “any industry that has a low conversion rate but a higher price point,” says Joe Nigro, business development manager at the startup. That’s because lower priced products and services typically e-mail and communicate thousands of customers at once, and video messaging that many recipients could land you in a spam folder pretty quickly.

Vsnap was first thought up to fulfill a personal need, says McLaughlin. His cousin, Jim Joyce, lives in Ireland and is from the U.S., while his wife’s family lives in Italy. He started shooting video snapshots of his kids to send to his family in different time zones. When Fig Card sold, McLaughlin decided to join his cousin on this new idea rather than move on to PayPal, he says. Vsnap still offers a free consumer service, but business messaging has become its focus.

Vsnap is currently developing its pricing model, which will vary depending on the number of Vsnaps a user sends and their access to Vsnap analytics. The analytics can measure things like if and when the recipients viewed the video and how they interacted with the attachments. Currently, recipients of the video message have to view the video message in a separate link, but Vsnap is working with PowerInbox, another local startup, to build out the capabilities for video viewing right in the e-mail inbox.

Vsnap recently nabbed a $40,000 investment from the Massachusetts Technology Development Corp. MTDC had previously said it … Next Page »

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Director Bill Vernon reports on Governor Patrick's budget address, which seeks to raise taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Director Bill Vernon reports on legislation that would regulate the level of nursing staff in hospitals and how it would affect health care costs.

Jonathan Sheffi

Good morning from Mountain View, CA, and from the close of the 2012 Personalized Medicine World Conference, which brought together thought leaders of business, government, healthcare-delivery, research and technology. Four themes that emerged from this year’s program:

• Greater optimism, triggered by the 2011 approvals of two major oncologic agents paired with companion diagnostics: vemurafenib (Daiichi Sankyo and Roche / Genentech) for patients with metastatic melanoma with a mutant biological pathway known as BRAF V600E and crizotinib (Pfizer) for patients with non-small-cell lung cancer that overexpresses a protein called ALK. Walter Koch from Roche and Hakan Sakul from Pfizer proudly discussed their development processes and speedy approval timelines. Those approvals were also cited by several other talks as examples of major progress made in the quest to deliver the right drug to the right patient.

• Greater clarity from the FDA. Although the FDA was not able to meet its self-imposed deadline of year-end 2011 to finalize guidance to industry on the best practices for developing companion diagnostics, Elizabeth Mansfield reiterated Commissioner Hamburg’s commitment to personalized medicine and told the audience to expect final guidance before the end of June. Mansfield also said that the FDA would provide guidance on how to co-develop a drug & test in parallel, as well as how to “enrich” clinical trials through careful selection of patients, based on their genetics. Both of these important regulatory steps could happen in 2012. The most surprising revelation, though, was Mansfield’s staffing: her group has just four people to evaluate all personalized-medicine-related medical devices.

• More sequencing. Just a few weeks ago at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, 800-lb sequencing gorillas Illumina and Life Technologies / Ion Torrent announced that scientists can expect the $1,000 genome by the end of 2012. Piggybacking on that announcement, Mostafa Ronaghi, chief technology officer of Illumina, presented a thorough overview of his company’s progress to date, bragging that 90 percent of all sequences produced worldwide had been produced on an Illumina instrument. Among other projects, Ronaghi’s team is working on techniques to accurately cover the 8 percent of the genome that cannot be sequenced because of repetitive regions. (Ronaghi made his presentation just hours before news broke of Roche’s unsolicited $5.7 billion takeover bid for Illumina.)

• More translational bioinformatics. Given the implied data glut that whole genome sequencing will produce, last week’s conference revealed more accomplishments in the application of bioinformatics to the remedy of disease. One of the unsung heroes of this year’s conference was Elizabeth Worthey from the Medical College of Wisconsin, who walked the audience through a case study of a pediatric patient presenting with undefined inflammatory bowel disorder. Worthey’s whole exome sequencing and variant analysis of the patient revealed a key mutation in the XIAP gene. A cord blood transplant ultimately cured the child, who was eating, drinking and playing again within four months.

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Arlene Weintraub

South San Francisco-based Genentech said today that a cancer drug it developed with Curis (NASDAQ: CRIS), which is based in Lexington, MA, was approved by the FDA to treat basal cell carcinoma, a common form of skin cancer. The drug, called vismodegib (Erivedge), will be prescribed to patients with carcinomas that have spread to other parts of the body or that have returned after surgery or prior treatment. “These are patients who until now had no effective treatments,” says Genentech’s Jennifer Low, global development leader for vismodegib. “We’re really excited to be giving them new hope.”

Investors who made early bets on Curis are cashing in today. Shares of the company, which had nearly doubled in the last six months in anticipation of the approval, fell nearly 5 percent in morning trading to $4.94. This is the first approved product for Curis, which was founded in 2000, and the FDA nod sparks a $10 million milestone payment under the company’s agreement with Genentech, a unit of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche. Curis will also receive royalties on sales of the drug, which is a once-daily pill.

Vismodegib is also the first product approved in an emerging class of molecules that inhibit a target with a funny name: the hedgehog signaling pathway. The pathway, named after a mutant fruit fly in which it was discovered, is a network of proteins that cells use to send signals to each other. About 10 years ago, Genentech teamed up with Curis to explore whether inhibiting the pathway might offer a new way of treating skin cancer. “This approval validates the role hedgehog inhibition plays in metastatic and locally advanced basal cell carcinoma,” Low says.

In a late-stage trial, vismodegib shrank cancerous lesions in 43 percent of patients with locally advanced basal cell carcinoma and in 30 percent of patients whose disease had spread beyond the skin. Genentech says the drug will be available in one to two weeks.

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