When the X Prize Foundation’s Peter Diamandis took the stage in San Diego this morning at the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA) annual convergence summit, he said it was the perfect audience for announcing the foundation’s newest competition—the “Nokia Sensing X Challenge.”

The challenge, organized through a partnership with the Finnish wireless device manufacturer, is offering a total pool of $2.25 million in incentive prizes over the next three years to stimulate the development of health sensors and wireless sensing technologies.

“We’re living in a day and age where really small teams of individuals—people like yourselves—are empowered to do the things that only large corporations and governments could do before,” Diamandis told the audience. “We’re looking to foment, to push forward, to celebrate, to announce a new generation of healthcare biometric sensors.”

The competition that Diamandis outlined will offer $750,000 a year, beginning in 2013, to teams that have developed “the most outstanding” sensors for drastically improving the quality, accuracy, and ease of monitoring a person’s health. There will be multiple winners each year, but how many and how much prize money will be awarded to each team has not yet been determined, Diamandis later told me.

“We aim to facilitate and inspire research in an area where we are also seriously exploring,” said Nokia chief technology officer Henry Tirri, who joined Diamandis on the stage. The type of “open innovation” promoted by the X Prize competition “has proven to be a very interesting and engaging method of opening a very broad amount of innovation in a very different way,” Tirri added.

“Our goal is to create an ecosystem of the innovators and companies out there, and to give them the platform to really show your stuff to the entire planet,” Diamandis said.

“Why are we doing this? Number one, we need better sensors,” Diamandis added. “My car, my airplane, and my computer have more biometric sensing capabilities that we do as humans. We should be creating gigabytes of data per day about our bodies’ health, monitoring every single moment, every single second of what we do. The fact that it doesn’t exist right now is terrible.”

The timing is ideal, Diamandis explained, because … Next Page »

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It’s been a busy week for startup funding, with Obalon Therapeutics, Aperio Technologies, Topera, and Ivera Medical closing on financing deals. We’ve also got drug development news from Ocera Therapeutics and MediciNova.

—Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical said it’s closing its center of excellence in South San Francisco, which has been focused on developing early stage antibody drugs, and consolidating its operations, now known as Takeda California, in San Diego. The company’s San Diego center of excellence, which is focused on structure-based drug discovery, has about 170 employees, according to a report by Gary Robbins of U-T San Diego. Keith Wilson, president and chief science officer of Takeda California, told the U-T that Takeda plans to add about 30 positions in San Diego by the end of the year.

—San Diego-based Qualcomm’s wireless health subsidiary, Qualcomm Life, named 25 members to an advisory council to help the business address key industry issues. The list includes Kleiner Perkins partner Brook Byers, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis, inventor Dean Kamen, Diego Miralles of Janssen Healthcare Innovation, Eric Topol of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, Psilos Ventures partner Lisa Suennen, and Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology (Calit2).

—San Diego’s MediciNova (NASDAQ: MNOV) said its experimental asthma drug failed to meet the main goal of a second mid-stage trial. The drug developer said patients treated with its leading drug candidate, bedoradrine sulfate, showed significant improvement in other ways, but a sell off on Wall Street sent shares of MediciNova down by … Next Page »

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A team developing analytic software that scores patients for the risk they pose to being readmitted within 30 days after being discharged from a hospital is the winner of the inaugural Janssen Connected Care Challenge. The prize is sponsored by Janssen, a unit of New Brunswick, NJ-based Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) .

Kim Park, a founding partner with Janssen Healthcare Innovation, declared the Discharge Decision Support System (D2S2) as the winner this morning at the 6th Annual Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA) Convergence Summit in downtown San Diego. The D2S2 team also was awarded $100,000 to advance the technology, which is under development by RightCare Solutions, a Philadelphia-based startup founded last year by Eric Heil of Domain Associates and Kathryn Bowles, a professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania.

The company describes the D2S2 system as a decision-support tool that uses key data from a patient’s admission to analyze the risk that the patient could be readmitted within 30 days after discharge. The software algorithm also “learns” by tracking patient outcomes and adjusting the way it scores a patient’s risk for readmission.

Because the D2S2 risk assessment is done upon admission, RightCare says hospital officials can better plan the discharge and follow-up care for at-risk patients. The company says a second-generation system will be able to recommend whether a patient at-risk for 30-day readmission should be referred to a skilled nursing facility, home care, rehab, or nursing home.

The D2S2 system was … Next Page »

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Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), the San Diego wireless technology giant, says today it is joining forces with EvoNexus, the free tech incubator operated by the nonprofit industry group CommNexus.

The move adds a new dimension of business and technical expertise to EvoNexus, which relies heavily on volunteer tech executives and others to help mentor entrepreneurs enrolled in the program. EvoNexus operates two incubators in San Diego, one is downtown and the other in the University City neighborhood, and provides fully furnished office space, utilities, and other services to startups at no charge.

“A big differentiator for EvoNexus—from an investor’s or entrepreneur’s point of view—is that we are the best deal in the country because we’re completely free, except you have to pay for your parking,” says Kevin Hell, the former DivX CEO who has been overseeing EvoNexus for the past year.

Now EvoNexus will collaborate with Qualcomm Labs to develop a track within EvoNexus called QualcommLabs@EvoNexus.

Qualcomm Labs is expected to serve a role at EvoNexus that is similar to its function within Qualcomm, where it helps to identify and assess new products and market opportunities developed internally through Qualcomm R&D. For example, Qualcomm housed its wireless health initiative in the Qualcomm Labs business unit (known at the time as Qualcomm Labs Services) before moving it into its new Qualcomm Life subsidiary.

Qualcomm Labs also wants to guide startups developing innovative technology in certain areas, such as machine-to-machine communications, into the EvoNexus program. Qualcomm and EvoNexus did not disclose the financial terms of Qualcomm’s participation in the program, if there are any. But startups admitted into the QualcommLabs program will get separate seed funding from Qualcomm Labs as well as free space in an EvoNexus incubator.

Qualcomm did not disclose how much seed funding it plans to … Next Page »

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About 275 technologists and healthcare industry executives are gathering in downtown San Diego tomorrow as the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA) convenes its Seventh Annual Convergence Summit at the Grand Hyatt.

“The overarching theme of the summit this year is ‘How do we move from innovation to institutional and personal adoption of the tools and technologies for wireless health?’” says WLSA CEO Rob McCray. Tomorrow’s agenda consists of all closed-door sessions for WLSA members, while McCray says the agenda for Wednesday and Thursday, which has no restrictions but is nearly sold out, puts an emphasis on the imperative for adopting technology innovations that meet healthcare needs and help to reduce costs.

In Wednesday’s opening session, for example, McCray says Leslie Saxon of the USC Keck School of Medicine is highlighting some of the practical aspects in determining who pays as institutional customers adopt wireless healthcare innovations. David Sayen, regional administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid in Californa, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and other Pacific islands, will talk about using innovation to wring more care from existing programs.

The 2012 summit also may go down as the year of incentive prizes in wireless health.

The parade of prizes begins Wednesday with the selection of a winner from three finalists named in early April as part of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Connected Care Challenge, a competition that was created to help bridge the gap in coordinating patient care among different healthcare practices. Each of the finalists received $50,000 to help advance their … Next Page »

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Startup accelerators like Y Combinator and TechStars are known for producing the latest and greatest in Web startups. But there’s a set of established and accomplished companies—like ZipCar (NASDAQ: ZIP), Xenogen, and Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT)—that also received startup coaching, mentoring, and connections to investors back in their day.

They went through a different program, run by Washington, DC-based Springboard Enterprises. Unlike the aforementioned accelerators (and the dozens upon dozens of imitators they’ve spawned), Springboard doesn’t directly offer funding or take equity. Instead, through its six-month-long venture forums, it focuses on connecting women entrepreneurs with mentors for intense coaching on their presentation and business strategy, and for connections to investors.

“It’s trying to build a network of individuals in entrepreneurial and venture communities who are supportive of these emerging growth ventures,” said Springboard director of programming Joshua Henderson in an interview about the organization.

Springboard, founded in 2000, is in the midst of its 23rd venture forum, which is focused on life sciences companies. It took its current crop of entrepreneurs to New York for a day of interviews with mentors last month, and brought the group to Boston last week for a full-day boot camp.

This past Thursday’s event included panels on topics like term sheets, getting press, and crafting the perfect pitch to investors. But much of the day was structured around active feedback sessions for the participating startups.

It featured an impressive roster of entrepreneurs, including doctors, lawyers, PhDs, and several who had built and exited multiple companies. But being a serial entrepreneur or accomplished professional doesn’t automatically make you a strong public speaker, so Springboard dedicated the first part of its boot camp to a session where the women presented for a few minutes on themselves and their accomplishments, while the audience of investors and mentors offered feedback. Below are some takeaways I caught from that part of the day.

—“I think any of these degrees shows stick-to-it-iveness. I value that tremendously,” said one audience participant after an entrepreneur started her presentation describing her failed attempt as an attorney (she passed the bar but decided she didn’t like the field). This sparked an interesting discussion on many of the candidate’s tendencies to downplay their achievements and degrees.

—This also brought up the suggestion by one audience member to “never disparage any profession.” Smart advice, given you never know the full backgrounds of the investors you’re pitching. Presenters were encouraged to say why they jumped into starting their company without negatively describing their previous job experiences.

—“You’re not learning the ropes, you’re running a company.” This came in response to one entrepreneur who described getting her footing at her new CEO gig. Audience members said she was clearly well qualified and understood the space, but spending time talking about how she was still learning “negated the positive.”

—Audience members advised entrepreneurs to go beyond rehashing their resume to telling their unique story—like one entrepreneur whose grandfather’s heart attack inspired her to start her medical monitoring company.

—The audience feedback showed that subtle changes in wording and phrasing can impact the overall feel of a presentation. One entrepreneur was cautioned for overusing the word “passion” and advised instead to be specific about what made her qualified to run that company. Another was told that the phrase “I believe” is stronger than “I think” when describing her company’s potential impact.

In its 10-year history, Springboard has worked with 481 companies, which have collectively raised … Next Page »

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In March, global consulting firm Ernst & Young released an annual report for its life sciences clients called “The Third Place: Healthcare Everywhere.” It discusses a range of topics, from apps designed to improve patient adherence to medical treatments, to games that encourage healthy habits.

Today Ernst & Young is holding a summit in Princeton, NJ, which will bring together players across the healthcare system to discuss opportunities for using technology to get closer to patients—and to change their behavior for the better. In advance of the event, Xconomy spoke with David DeMarco, Ernst & Young’s northeast pharmaceutical and medical device leader, on how the changing technology landscape is affecting the life sciences industry.

Xconomy: Ernst & Young’s report refers to “the third place” in healthcare. Explain.
Dave DeMarco: The idea came from Starbucks, which talked about wanting to be the third place where you enjoyed a cup of coffee—after your home or your work. And they didn’t just want you to enjoy a cup of coffee, they wanted you to enjoy a social experience. Traditionally healthcare is provided in two places—the hospital and the doctor’s office. But in the future world, the third place is wherever the patient is, i.e. everywhere. In the third place, you have the potential for continuous monitoring. You have the potential for real-time data that helps drive behavior. The system is more transparent, and patients have a lot more control.

X: Have you seen any good examples of healthcare providers going into the third place and influencing patient behavior effectively?
DD: There was a study done at the University of Pennsylvania and Carnegie Mellon University involving [the blood thinner] warfarin, which is given to patients who are at risk of suffering pulmonary embolisms or other serious events. You would think the compliance to that drug would be pretty darn high, but it’s only 67 percent. So in this study, they gave patients electronic pill boxes that were hooked up through the Internet to their providers. They knew if you took your pill or not. Then, through either a text or e-mail, they gave each patient a two-digit number every day and held a lottery. If a patient matched both digits, which only happened with a 1 percent probability, he or she won $100. What I loved was the catch: You could only win the money if you took your pill.

The last thing they did, which was clever, was if you had a day where you weren’t compliant, they sent you a text or an e-mail saying, “You know, if you had taken your pill today you could have won $100.” Compliance went from 67 percent to 97 percent.

Is this going to save the industry? No. But we’ve been working on disease management for a long time, with mixed results. We really believe that behavioral change is the next frontier. Understanding the biases around behavioral economics is key—for pharma and biotech companies, too.

X: You also write about making medical compliance fun for consumers. How can life sciences companies—and even consumer companies—do that effectively?
DD: One of the things that we believe is going to be part of this healthcare-everywhere future world is the medicalization of consumer devices and the consumerization of medical devices.

An interesting example of the medicalization of a consumer device is Nike’s development of embedded sensors in their products to give real-time feedback on exercise. It’s called Nike+. This is just an early example of sensor technology blending with devices to be able to give some credence to the fact that yes, healthcare in the future can be delivered in other settings than the doctor’s office and the hospital.

An example of the consumerization of a medical device is a pilot that Bayer Healthcare and Nintendo did where they partnered to create a game for children with diabetes that centered around proper glucose control.

Life science companies have to figure out how to collaborate with organizations that they’re really not used to dealing with, so they can bring a net outcome advantage to the market.

X: How is the use of social media evolving, and how important will it be for life science companies to understand it and participate in it?
DD: I think that represents a real challenge. Most of our clients know that it’s going to be important. Yet there are regulatory issues that are unclear. So they’re all taking a cautious approach to do what they can. One of our large pharma clients has people online every day. They’re not pushing their products, but rather trying to advance awareness and education of disease states.

X: And what about apps? How can health-related companies best use them?
DD: The whole idea of apps is something that really harkens back to the theme of the consumer being the center. In a patient-centric world, where healthcare is everywhere, apps should enable and empower consumers.

Some of our clients believe that creating clinical decision tools for healthcare professionals is a very important strategy to wrap value around their molecules. Their thinking is now evolving, and they’re beginning to wonder about the power of consumer-based clinical decision tools. They’re recognizing that the consumer is really going to shape things in the future. I think the more life sciences companies can get information into the hands of consumers, the more they’re going to be able to extract value.

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Catching up on some venture capital news on a rainy Tuesday…

—SessionM, a Boston-based mobile advertising startup, has raised $20 million in Series B funding led by Charles River Ventures, according to a report in Dow Jones VentureWire, which put the company’s valuation at around $100 million. The startup’s previous investors include Highland Capital Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. SessionM makes a software platform for advertisers and brands to reach consumers on mobile devices in exchange for reward points, special content, and deals. The startup, led by co-founders Lars Albright, Mark Herrmann, and Scott Weller, is planning to expand from 35 to 60 employees in the next year, according to the report. The company did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

—Speaking of Charles River Ventures, the Boston- and Bay Area-based venture firm closed its 15th fund at $375 million a couple months ago.

—Braemar Energy Ventures, based in New York and Boston, has raised about $280 million toward its third energy fund, according to a recent regulatory filing.

—Sequoia Capital has hired Todd Cozzens, a Boston-based health-IT veteran, as a venture partner, the Boston Business Journal reported. Cozzens, the former CEO of Wakefield, MA-based Picis (acquired by Ingenix/UnitedHealth in 2010), is Sequoia’s first venture partner dedicated to healthcare and health-IT investments, and its first East Coast hire, according to the report. In an interview with Citybizlist, Cozzens said he was “a known quantity” to Sequoia, and that although he happens to be based in Boston, he will look at companies around the U.S. and abroad.

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Hospitals typically check patients in with one system, track their healthcare with another, and process insurance claims with yet another. Boston-based Kyruus is looking to pull together all these different data points and many more to help healthcare providers tackle patient care more efficiently.

We first heard about Kyruus last year, when it was revealed Highland Capital Partners principal Graham Gardner was the CEO of the new company. Highland led an $8.6 million Series A financing for Kyruus last June alongside Venrock and Gerson Lehrman Group. Angel investors Jonathan Bush, Ed Park, John Goldsmith, and James Golden also participated in the deal for Kyruus, which is working at intersection of two booming slices of the Boston technology scene: health IT and big data.

Kyruus co-founder and chief product officer Julie Yoo says Kyruus’ technology essentially centers on the “use of data to be able to get high resolution insight to performance, behavior, and outcome.” Big Data startups typically work to organize and processes loads of disparate data found in everything from social networks to publications to photos to medical records. In the case of Kyruus, it’s all the data that is collected to paint a picture of a doctor’s and healthcare network’s ability to care for patients.

“The average hospital has 200 unique data sources that contain information about physicians,” Yoo says. Beyond the administrative, insurance claims, patient survey, and medical record data, hospitals reveal information on their physicians through publications and other outlets, Yoo says. Government reforms have also mandated that healthcare providers make certain data transparent.

“We can take our data scaffold, and tap into internal data assets at hospitals,” says Yoo. “It extracts value from IT investments hospitals have already made.”

By unifying the data on a physician, Kyruus hopes to play a part in how hospitals, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies work with physicians.

“Hospitals struggle to form teams that are significant to manage the care of a population of patients,” Yoo says. So, they could use Kyruus technology to map out their network and identify what types of physicians are lacking, and then hire the ones with the right expertise. Doctors could also identify which specialist in a network is the best person to handle a patient’s care after a challenging diagnosis. Par8o, founded by Sermo founder Daniel Palestrant, is also looking to use technology to make the doctor referral process more efficient.

Insurers could use the Kyruus platform in much the same way to determine which physicians would be the best additions to their networks of caregivers. And the not-so-helpful tool on your insurance company’s website that’s supposed to guide you in picking a doctor? The Kyruus technology could help make a lot more sense, too.

“It’s a horrible experience to find a doctor in a page on an insurance website,” says Yoo. “We’re employing data and rules-driven types of … Next Page »

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Here’s our wrap-up of life sciences news over the past week, along with some life sciences data from the latest Connect Innovation Report.

—Bedford, MA-based Hologic (NASDAQ: HOLX) agreed to pay $3.7 billion, or $82.75 a share, for Gen-Probe (NASDAQ: [[GPRO]]), San Diego’s venerable, 29-year-old clinical diagnostics company. At a 20 percent premium, the Hologic-Gen-Probe deal represents good news for investors. But Hologic said it also expects to squeeze $75 million in cost savings by consolidating the two companies’ operations, and it’s unclear how that will play out for Gen-Probe’s 1,400 employees.

—San Diego’s Zogenix (NASDAQ: ZGNX) said it is seeking approval from federal drug regulators for its extended-release formulation of hydrocodone bitartrate (Zohydro) for managing chronic pain. In submitting its new drug application for the opioid pain-killer, Zogenix is keeping to the schedule it outlined last year. If approved, Zohydro says its drug could be the first 12-hour hydrocodone pain-killer that poses no risk of acetaminophen-related liver injury

—San Diego’s AnaptysBio said it has formed a partnership with Foster City, CA-based Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GILD) to discover and optimize therapeutic antibodies, using its proprietary technology. Gilead agreed to pay AnaptysBio an undisclosed upfront fee as well as milestone and royalty payments for products that advance under the partnership. The companies did not identify what the focus of their drug developments would be. AnaptysBio, which was founded in 2005, previously signed collaboration deals with Celgene, Roche, Novartis, and Merck.

—In this week’s BioBeat column, Luke explained why his pessimism about life sciences IPOs is relaxing a bit to allow … Next Page »

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Michael Nusbaum rarely thought twice about giving his personal cell phone number to patients after he operated on them. Nusbaum is a bariatric surgeon at New Jersey’s Morristown Medical Center, and he wanted patients to be able to reach him easily by phone or text. But then he found out that sending text messages to patients violates federal privacy laws. Whenever patients texted him, “I wouldn’t text them back,” Nusbaum says. “I had to pick up the phone and call them so I wouldn’t violate the law.”

So Nusbaum turned his annoyance into a business plan. He teamed up with his wife, who is a neuroradiologist at New York University, and founded Giffen Solutions in 2010 with the intent to create a secure smartphone app that doctors could use to talk to patients without violating privacy regulations. Giffen beta tested the product, called MedXCom, with a couple hundred doctors for a year before making it available to the broader medical community on April 12, Nusbaum says. More than 35,000 doctors and patients are now using it, according to the company. And Giffen, which raised $1 million in angel funding, expects to secure an additional $5 million financing round this month, Nusbaum says.

Nusbaum designed MedXCom to replace the after-hours answering services that doctors typically use. “There are huge barriers that exist in the communication between the doctor and the patient,” Nusbaum says. For example, he says, when a patient has an emergency and calls her doctor’s answering service after the office closes, the doctor may not have access to her medical records when he calls her back. And if he needs to order a prescription for her, he’s unlikely to remember what drugs she’s already taking.

If a doctor is subscribed to MedXCom, after-hours calls get forwarded to his cell phone instead of an answering service. “Before I speak to you, it will push your entire health profile to my cell phone,” Nusbaum says. “I can see everything—what surgeries you’ve had, what allergies you have, the medications you’re on. I have all that information even before I take the call.” If the doctor wants to order a prescription, he can do so right through the app.

Nusbaum had more than just his experience as a doctor to call upon when he created MedXCom. In 1998, he founded Hamilton Scientific and created one of the first electronic medical records (EMRs). He sold the company to MeridianEMR, which built it into a leading product for urologists before selling it to HealthTronics in 2011.

Since then, competition in the EMR field has intensified, thanks largely to the federal government’s new “meaningful use” legislation, which offers financial incentives to doctors who embrace technology for record-keeping. Dozens of companies have popped up to offer … Next Page »

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On September 16, 2011, President Obama signed into law the America Invents Act, the most important modification to U.S. patent law in 60 years—and some even argue, since 1836. Some changes went into effect immediately, such as fee penalties for submitting paper applications and strict rules on when multiple defendants can be joined together in one lawsuit.

These immediate changes were not as important to most inventors and tech companies. Instead, the big focus has been on the switch from the “first-to-invent” guideline for awarding patents to a “first-to-file.” Another change of great interest are the new types of challenges that can be used by third parties to prevent a patent from issuing, or to get it revoked. The changes in patent challenges take effect on September 16, while the new first-to-file rule begins next year, on March 16.

This doesn’t mean inventors and tech companies should be in standby mode, however. Actions that inventors and companies take now could affect patent applications and patents filed for and issued after the new provisions take effect. Thus, it is imperative for inventors and tech companies to start preparing immediately for the new world under the America Invents Act.

As a patent litigator, inventor, and professor of patent law, here are my five most important steps you or your company can take in advance of the First-to-File switchover:

—Get your documentation and lawyers ready to file patent applications on all of your current inventions by March 16, 2013.

All applications filed after March 16, 2013, that cannot trace all claims that were submitted at any time in the application to an earlier application fall under the new first-to-file rules—which in the vast majority of situations, can only hurt the applicant. Thus, under nearly all circumstances, make sure to file before March 16, 2013.

—Be careful about disclosing, selling, or using your invention in a commercial manner.

Under existing law, patent applicants have a year to file after selling, using, or disclosing their inventions. While it appears that the intent of … Next Page »

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San Diego’s innovation economy added 75 new technology companies and 695 jobs during the last three months of 2011, according to the Connect Innovation Report for the fourth quarter of 2011. New jobs created in San Diego’s innovation sector during the fourth quarter of 2011 accounted for more than half of the 1,182 jobs added across the spectrum of San Diego’s tech industries added throughout the year.

The number of new jobs created during the quarter also was about 2.5 times the 195 jobs added during the fourth quarter of 2011. And it was about 2.5 times more than the 196 jobs created during the previous quarter in San Diego.

In a statement from Connect, labor market specialist Gary Moss of the San Diego Workorce Partnership says job growth has grown steadily since July of 2010. Nevertheless, he calls the spurt of new jobs added at the end of last year “very encouraging.”

The quarterly Connect report, which can be found here, says patent activity for the San Diego area also hit an all-time high during the fourth quarter, local mergers and acquisitions doubled, and invested venture capital increased by 25 percent compared to the same quarter in 2010.

The long-term trend in venture capital investing, however, has been declining. The report notes that over the past five years, for example, venture investing in San Diego has declined by roughly 46 percent (from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008). Venture capital investments declined in 2011 to $829 million, although it did surge in the fourth quarter, according to MoneyTree data reported by Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the National Venture Capital Association, and Thomson Reuters.

For the year, Connect counted 109 new software companies, 67 new life sciences companies, 54 in communications, 21 in computers and electronics, and 42 new clean tech startups.

Mergers and acquisition deals involving San Diego companies totaled $1.2 billion in the fourth quarter. For the year, Connect said M&A activity thrived in 2011, nearly doubling to $6.6 billion. Two San Diego companies went public in 2011, generating $729 million .

The Connect report says San Diego hit a record for patents in the fourth quarter, with 1,215 being granted, compared to 940 in the fourth quarter of 2010. In addition, there were 1,702 patent applications in the fourth quarter, approaching the record of 1,725 set in the second quarter.

Grants awarded to scientists by the National Institutes for Health (NIH) plunged by more than 75 percent, dropping in $67.5 million during the quarter from $277.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2010. In the previous quarter, the NIH awarded $275 million in grants to researchers in the San Diego area. The report attributes the dramatic drop to the NIH operating under a continuous resolution signed by President Obama in November that allowed the federal government to continue operating with an approved budget.

The report says additional spending cuts are expected to further restrict NIH funding as the government’s efforts at deficit reduction are projected to bite deep into research grant awards.

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It was a light week for tech news in San Diego. Our roundup today is short and sweet.

—Fueled by strong growth over the past nine months, San Diego’s Zui.com introduced “Facetube,” a social network intended to empower pre-teens to share age-appropriate content. The company that began in 2008 as KidZui also re-branded itself earlier this year due to the popularity of its Zui.com search engine. More than 2 million unique visitors visited Zui.com in March.

—Bandsintown, the San Diego-based app developer with the No. 1 free concert tracking application on Facebook and the iPhone, said it has branched out to Android devices with a free app that can now be downloaded from the Android Marketplace. Bandsintown, acquired by New York’s Cellfish in September, enables music fans to track their favorite artists’ shows and helps groups promote their music and sell concert tickets.

—Independa, a San Diego startup combining health IT and wireless health technology to help enhance independent living for older adults, said it raised an additional $750,000 beyond the $1.6 million in seed-round venture funding disclosed seven months ago. CEO Kian Saneii said the company plans to use the funding to expand sales, support, and engineering operations, as well as marketing efforts aimed at broadening its customer base. The company said its additional funding came from Miramar Venture Partners, City Hill Ventures, and other investors.

— San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies said it has demonstrated performance gains and potential fuel-saving benefits of a variable speed supercharger drive that incorporates its continuously variable transmission technology. The cleantech company said its independent analysis shows that that vehicle manufacturers could move to smaller and more-efficient engines with no loss in performance or drivability by using a supercharger equipped with its “NuVinci” technology.

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Doug Burke, president of Cognitive Medical Systems, tells me this morning the San Diego-based health IT startup is implementing a wireless clinical support system for the Perinatal Quality Collaborative of North Carolina. The startup will integrate its health IT system and analytics platform with handheld devices that doctors and other health care providers can use to improve the care of mothers and infants admitted to the labor and delivery and neonatal intensive care units of participating hospitals.

The initiative represents a departure from the military market that Cognitive Medical initially targeted, which includes consulting, program administration, project management, software engineering, and database design.

“Our goal was always to cut our teeth on the Department of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Administration [programs], but we ultimately want to be selling products to commercial markets as well,” Burke says. “With the downturn in the DoD budget, it’s not a bad thing to be doing.”

In North Carolina, Burke says a key element will be clinical decision support software that helps doctors and other caregivers make better clinical decisions about perinatal care. The system is intended to eliminate time-consuming delays in collecting and analyzing health data, reduce paper reports and communications, and to make it easier to share information with families.

The North Carolina collaborative consists of a wide array of maternal and newborn care providers, health insurers, public health agencies, and others throughout the state. The organization has conducted initiatives that have reduced the number of less-than-full-term deliveries in 40 North Carolina hospitals by 43 percent and decreased the number of catheter-associated infections by 75 percent in 13 neonatal intensive care units.

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Last week, attendees of Sage Bionetworks’ 3rd Annual Congress came to San Francisco with the bold charge to speed up drug discovery and ready to stand on the shoulders of the previous two Congresses to take the nascent open source biology movement from a thinking to a doing stage. Pitched as “Building Better Models of Disease Together,” a packed house of more than 250 forward thinking attendees and a global online community of 500 watched the live webcast (available here).

Those who gathered were fully aware of the failures with the current siloed approach to biomedical research and were expecting to hear about Sage Bionetworks’ progress to build new infrastructure so that researchers, funders and the public can for the first time develop, fund and complete research that puts the patient at the center of the equation.

A special buzz filled the air as the 80 percent of returnees were complemented by an irreverent, energized group of 16 Young Investigators selected for their effort and commitment to open research. I opened the Congress, prompting all to call each other out on the culture of open collaboration they had come to create: “If you are lucky at some point in your life, you realize that the task needed is bigger than you. Realize that you should not be building something for you to use but for others to use. When you use the word “We,” mean it.”

Opening keynote speakers George Church and David Haussler, both heroes from the front lines of genomic technology and Big Data analysis, continued to impress all with the rapid advances of affordable molecular technology and its ability now to generate more bytes of data—rapidly approaching the zettabyte scale—than words that human beings have collectively ever spoken. To make the most of Big Data, both exhorted all to stop participating in the current siloed culture and instead invest in approaches that turn the machines loose on ALL the data that ALL can then see.

As Congress returnees have come to expect, Sage Bionetworks’ scientists, software engineers and collaborators led solid sessions, this time providing open science tools for all to now take up. These included datasharing platforms (Synapse), a portable legal consent (pending IRB approval) to create openly available, user-contributed health and genomic data, exciting examples of pre-competitive drug discovery models and the launch of BRIDGE, an online “town square” to democratize the identification of the effective therapies that matter most to patients.

But no one expected the jawdropping talks of three keynote speakers that stretched things even beyond the comfort zone of the most disruptive thinkers at the Congress. Although attendees arrived at the Congress heady about the progress already made, these keynote speakers pointed to the huge effort and out of the box thinking still needed to truly democratize medicine.

Keynote speaker Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor, compared our current closed “medical industrial complex” to the hopeless picture of today’s U.S. government and the toxic effect that money and privilege have had on its core democratic principles. Most biting was Lessig’s reminder that “We are the They” that are distracted and do nothing to change the status quo. Similar to the parent of a child with terminal cancer, Lessig exhorted all of us … Next Page »

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Some big changes are underway in San Diego, with AstraZeneca’s big buyout of Ardea Biosciences and Illumina’s ambitious bid to develop an app store. There’s big biology and big data happening too.

—Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN), the San Diego maker of DNA sequencing instruments, unveiled its plan to create Basespace Apps, an open platform for genomic software developers to make apps that can help scientists slice and dice DNA data. The strategy is to enhance the value of Illumina’s MiSeq benchtop DNA sequencing instrument in the same way the iPhone benefits from independently developed apps.

—-AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN), the UK’s second-largest pharmaceutical firm, agreed to acquire San Diego’s Ardea Biosciences (NASDAQ: RDEA) for $32 a share, which represents a total value of approximately $1.26 billion, including existing cash. AstraZeneca sees value in Ardea’s lead drug candidate, a new treatment for gout.

—After rebuffing an unsolicited $3.5 billion takeover offer from Bristol-Myers Squibb earlier this year, San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN) is looking for prospective buyers, according to press accounts. The move apparently prompted Carl Icahn, the financier and shareholder activist, to voluntarily withdraw a lawsuit filed over a corporate bylaw protecting Amylin directors who had voted to reject the offer. Icahn told reporters he still thinks Amylin should be sold, and dropped the suit after talking with Amylin CEO Daniel Bradbury.

—San Diego’s Biotix Holdings, which makes pipettes, laboratory consumables, and related products, has raised $2.2 million toward a $2.4 million equity round, according to a recent regulatory filing. Biotix was founded in 2005 by Grotech and Ferrer Freeman & Co. to serve life sciences, clinical, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology laboratories.

—RainTree Oncology elaborated on its recent $11.1 million financing round. In a statement, CEO Mike Martin says, “This second round financing will enable us to continue growing our core business, which provides community oncology practices a unique suite of products and services that improve quality of care and practice performance.” The recent financing brings the company’s total funding to $22.5 million.

—Xconomy brought together a group of leaders in business, technology, and genomics to discuss the emerging field of “quantified health,” and how the new tools of molecular biology are data analytics are making it possible to detect early signs of disease long before any symptoms appear. This combination of big biology with big data has already begun—and it’s leading to health care that can be predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory.

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The New York eHealth Collaborative announced yesterday that it has created a new incubator, called the New York Digital Health Accelerator. The program, which is now accepting applications for its first class of 12 startups, will be run by the collaborative, in cooperation with the New York City Investment Fund. The impetus for the new accelerator, say its founders in a statement, is to make New York “a hub for the emerging digital health technology industry.”

The first class of startups in the accelerator will consist of 12 companies that are developing products to address care coordination, patient engagement, analytics, and messaging. Each company will get up to $300,000, and will be mentored by executives at New York-based hospitals and other health providers. The accelerator is designed to foster new products that might help the state’s Medicaid Redesign Team and its new “Health Homes” program—an effort to bolster the efficiency of the state’s Medicaid program.

This is the latest in a string of efforts by the New York eHealth Collaborative and the New York City Investment Fund to foster innovation in health-related products and services. For example, the New York City Investment Fund, which is an affiliate of the nonprofit Partnership for New York City, sponsors Bioaccelerate, a program in which scientists compete for $250,000 each in seed money to commercialize their discoveries. Last year, NYC Investment Fund’s CEO Maria Gotsch told Xconomy that Bioaccerate was part of her organization’s plan to boost funding for the non-media industries, which are often neglected by venture capitalists. And New York eHealth Collaborative has undertaken several initiatives in health IT, including a two-day conference last December where 43 companies showcased their healthcare products and services.

The new Digital Health Accelerator  is supported by Aetna, Milestone Venture Partners, New Leaf Venture Partners, Quaker Partners, Safeguard Scientifics, and UnitedHealth Group. Nearly 20 local health providers have agreed to participate, including Albany Medical Center, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and NYU Langone Medical Center. Startups have until June 1 to apply.

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There was a set of startup presentations happening in the Boston area this week, and unlike the demo day events for incubators like TechStars or MassChallenge, the goal wasn’t to get money.

“Don’t think pitch and tell,” says Harvard Business School senior lecturer Janet Kraus. “The purpose is to help them understand what the next steps are.”

These events were the culmination of a semester-long program at the Harvard Innovation Lab called the Women’s Founders Forum, put together by Kraus, a serial entrepreneur who joined Harvard in 2010.

Kraus—who co-founded and sold Circles (to Sodexo in 2007) and led and sold Spire (to Perfect Escapes in 2010)—says she participated in a similar forum of venture-backed CEO founders earlier in her career. “It was literally the most valuable grouping that I had professionally,” she says. “There’s nothing like another founder, CEO, to help you grapple with questions.”

The Women’s Founders Forum consists of about 20 entrepreneurs spread across Harvard’s different schools. They are split up into two groups that met for two hours every other week this semester, Kraus says.

In each meeting, founders bring the rest of the group up to speed on what’s been happening with their companies, with a few of them highlighting very specific challenges they need advice solving. “By getting the founders to scope the problem, that in and of itself is really clarifying,” Kraus says. Time permitting, the group will also discuss a more general set of issues faced by early stage companies, like hiring or fundraising, she adds. The plan is for the program to continue with new sets of founders in upcoming semesters.

The Women’s Founders Forum builds on the entrepreneurial energy that has building up at Harvard, with a growing faculty at the business school focused on entrepreneurship, and the creation of the Innovation Lab last year. “I’d see startup after startup, and I knew them but they didn’t know each other,” she says. “They weren’t taking advantage of each other and cross pollinating.”

The program’s all-women focus helps the entrepreneurs see there are others out there like themselves. “The big companies that we read about are more often than not run by men,” Kraus says. “This program shows them we’re in this together, we can do this.”

The Women’s Founders Forum culmination events this week more or less open that process up to the local entrepreneurial community. The four sessions—with two focused on fashion startups, one focused on consumer tech, and a fourth dedicated to social, education, or health related startups—each put the students in front of a panel of entrepreneurs and investors experienced in the relevant industry. Women’s Founders Forum companies include e-commerce wine subscription service FirstCrush; Townhall 140, a video platform for connecting politicians and constituents; and Topshelf Clothes, a website for creating a virtual closet for personalized style advice and purchase recommendations.

Rather than looking to woo investors, startups paint a picture of their company to the audience and get feedback on places to go for help and resources. “It’s really intended to be intimate and collaborative, creating some relationships that will help them going forward. Not the meet and leave,” Kraus says

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Two of the biggest trends in technology innovation are converging—and as they come together, there is a chance to accomplish something rare in San Diego. Something exponential.

One of these forces is “big data,” the ever-increasing capabilities of computers and analytic software to move from gigabytes to terabytes, petabytes, and beyond. The other is “big biology,” which encompasses a breathtaking array of fundamental breakthroughs in DNA sequencing, molecular diagnostics, genome biology, proteomics, and other “omics” technologies.

Each is an irresistible force in its own right, and they are coming together like tributaries at the confluence of “quantified health,” a new field with the potential to fundamentally change health care. What makes this combination so powerful is the sheer magnitude of ways that “health” can now be measured—and in the use of data analytics to mine information that was previously unattainable.

The new tools of molecular biology are making it much more practical to analyze a patient’s genome—to determine if a patient has a genetic predisposition, say, for diabetes or heart disease. Advances in molecular diagnostics are also making it easier to regularly measure the hundreds of thousands of molecule-size constituents that are produced through genetic activity. With data analytics, it’s feasible to compare and chart these millions of data points over time to detect early signs of disease long before any symptoms appear—or to compare the data from one patient with the data from millions of other patients to see how they compare on the bell curve of “normal.”

This combination of big biology with big data has already begun—and leads to what Lee Hood of the Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology calls “P4 Medicine”—health care that is predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory. It is one reason why Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), has become a de facto evangelist for quantified health.

Larry Smarr

“Never in human history has something that is critical to human health gone down in cost by a factor of 1 million in a decade the way genomics has,” says Smarr, who is also a San Diego Xconomist. Combine this megatrend with advances in sensors and related technologies that are embedded in current-generation smart phones—-and the plummeting costs of data storage and cloud computing—and you have all the needed ingredients for a technology revolution in health care.

With Smarr’s help, Xconomy brought together some of the best minds in business, life sciences, and information technology for an “on-the-record” dinner discussion about the implications of quantified health, and what it might take to harness the power of this new river of information.

“The decade we are now moving into is going to be … Next Page »

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