Greg Pass is bringing more technology “street cred” to the team that is establishing the applied science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island in New York. The former chief technology officer of Twitter on Wednesday was named the founding entrepreneurial officer for CornellNYC Tech, a $2 billion school to be built in the city.

The planned campus got a boost early this week when Google announced it would give free space at its New York offices to house CornellNYC Tech classes over the next five years while the permanent home is built. The addition of Cornell alum Pass brings a notable name from the innovation community to the campus. Pass spoke to Xconomy about his role in helping to shape CornellNYC Tech and his hopes for the growing technology scene here.

Xconomy: What is an entrepreneurial officer?

Greg Pass: This is a new position that we’ve created to make sure someone is focused on making sure the academic program and the industry partnerships that we create result in entrepreneurial value for students, faculty, and the New York tech scene.

X: What got you interested in joining this project?

GP: It was an opportunity that blindsided me. I didn’t expect to be involved in helping to build a new school and program. I don’t know how you say no to an opportunity to build a new school from the ground up in New York while the city is surging in tech right now. It’s a unique opportunity for me to give back to my profession in a fundamental way.

X: What will your duties be as the campus develops and after it opens its doors?

GP: This is a fundamental role, not just an advisory role. On an ongoing basis there is going to be a lot of focus on thinking creatively about how the tech industry in New York can collaborate with the applied research activities of students and faculty. There is definitely creative work ahead of us but the goal is to drive much more value from that collaboration than we would typically see.

X: How important is it to team higher education with the technology and entrepreneurship community to keep the current momentum going?

GP: It remains a vital part of cultivating creative and innovative engineers. There is a great deal of untapped value there. In academia we have the latest research, which is often very applicable to industry, but there hasn’t been a honed interface between academic programs and tech right now, especially in New York. That’s definitely a great area of opportunity. We’ll see a ton of entrepreneurial value produced from those creative collaborations.

X: Are there new types of collaborations you would like to see happen at CornellNYC Tech that have not been tried elsewhere?

GP: There are certainly a lot of great engineering programs across the country and the world that are producing successful graduates. That’s not the issue per se. What we’d like to do is tailor our program specifically to students who are interested in having an impact through technological innovation. That could mean through entrepreneurialism and starting a company on their own or participating in a startup or an innovative company. To that end, in the program we’ll be exposing students to entrepreneurial experiences. Think of the program being somewhere between a masters program, so that students can achieve mastery in their topics, and something like Y Combinator, where students are getting actual entrepreneurial experiences, perhaps with New York tech companies.

X: Were there lessons that you wished you had learned in college to help you prepare for the technology and entrepreneurship world?

GP: When I first became an entrepreneur, twenty or so years ago, I wasn’t aware of programs to help me along the way. I’m certain there were some but they didn’t have the prominence and opportunity of things like Y Combinator. Things are moving in the right direction. In order to grow the size of the talent pool, additional resources like schools, community activities, and greater investment in incubators will really help increase the number of entrepreneurial engineers.

X: Will your position at CornellNYC Tech be full-time?

GP: It’s essentially full-time with time carved out to pursue entrepreneurial activities myself. Mostly things like advisories. I’m on the board of advisors of Obvious, which is Evan [Williams], Biz [Stone], and Jason [Goldman]’s new company. Certainly I want to keep engaged as an entrepreneur in the minority of my time.

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San Diego Xconomist Evan Snyder has been called a “stem cell revolutionary” and is regarded as a father in the field of stem cell research. When we talked in his office at San Diego’s Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, he told me he isolated the first neural stem cell in the mid-1980s, as well as the first human neural stem cell in 1998. Snyder’s team demonstrated the concept of stem cell pathotropism (the ability of stem cells to home in on injured or diseased regions of the brain) and helped to establish the concept that stem cells can be used to regenerate and repair diseased and damaged tissue.

He arrived in San Diego in 2003 to serve as a professor and director of the Stem Cells and Regenerative Biology Program at the Sanford-Burnham. He also is a scientific leader and researcher at San Diego’s new $127 million Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. While Snyder is focused primarily on basic research, he talked with me about the prospects for commercial development of stem cell technology—and how the much-publicized regenerative properties of stem cells, while holding tremendous long-term promise, will likely not be the focus of the first market successes. Our conversation, which I’ve condensed and edited, follows here.

Xconomy: My general impression is that much of the early promise and enthusiasm over stem cells has been dissipating.

Evan Snyder: I don’t think I would agree with that. I think there’s an enormous amount of promise.

X: I mean in terms of using stem cells in commercial applications.

ES: What the companies and the public thought was that it wouldn’t take any work, that you’d have a cell and you would sprinkle it with pixie dust and everything would get better. That was certainly unrealistic. It might have been fomented by scientists in the early days who were just totally enamored of the fact that you had cells that could read environmental cues and go down different pathways, and they seemed to do this based on their own intrinsic programming.

But the fine-tuning in the use of stem cells still comes down to really understanding the biology of the cell. That also entails understanding the biology of development, because … Next Page »

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The recent Facebook IPO has brought to the front pages an issue that many ordinary investors have been asking themselves for a long time: “Is the system fair?” In Facebook’s case, legitimate questions have arisen about why Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan, Facebook’s lead underwriters, all reduced their internal revenue estimates for that company prior to its IPO while investors outside of these three banks were told nothing about it. As Henry Blodget explains here, these circumstances raise serious questions about the practice on Wall Street of selective disclosure and the fairness of the overall system. In other words, were these banks (and subsequently their clients) told something that other investors were not?

This question, and an experience that happened to me this week, bring to mind another long-held practice on Wall Street that I think is equally questionable and seriously outdated. It’s the practice of banks holding private calls with company management teams for a select group of investors. Here is what happened:

This week, a website called theflyonthewall published an alert that Dendreon CEO John Johnson would be participating in a conference call hosted by J.P. Morgan as part of their “CEO/CFO Conference Call Series.” While I follow the company very closely, this was the first I had heard of this. I wasn’t even sure at that point if it was just a rumor or not. Subsequently, I learned that J.P. Morgan also previously distributed a schedule of such calls, presumably to their private clients.

Now before I go any further, let me make a few important disclosures. 1) I have been extremely critical of Dendreon’s management team and their disclosure practices in the past, so much so that I publicly lobbied for the ouster of its prior CEO and Chairman. 2) In this case, I do not mean to pick on Dendreon or its new CEO specifically because this is a practice that is rampant in the industry. Dendreon is just one of many companies who participate in these calls. In fact, I think Mr. Johnson is very honorable, ethical, and a breath of fresh air at Dendreon. I believe the company has a bright future with him at the helm. I only bring up this case for illustrative purposes because it specifically happened to me this week, and in light of the recent Facebook news. 3) J.P. Morgan is a great bank and they have a world-class biotech team. This is an industry problem, not a J.P. Morgan one.

After seeing this investor alert, I emailed Dendreon’s investor relations team, asked them if it was indeed true that the CEO would be holding an investor call and, if so, may I please have the dial-in number. Like many investors, I was interested in hearing what kind of updates or advice Mr. Johnson had to report. Dendreon Investor Relations replied with the following message, “Hi Brad, this is true, however the call is for clients of JPM and I’m not at liberty to provide the call info.” It does not get any more straightforward than that. Dendreon’s CEO had an hour of his time to give to investors, but apparently only investors who are clients of a specific institution. J.P. Morgan, by the way, has been either the lead or joint underwriter of multiple debt and equity offerings for Dendreon in the recent past.

Now let’s set Dendreon aside, because again, this is a practice that many, if not most companies participate in. As an individual investor, I believe these types of selective and private calls need to be opened up to all comers because otherwise they are blatantly unfair. In truth, it is impossible to know in advance if material information will arise during a call. It is one thing to hold a private call with an outside expert who has a relationship with the bank, but it is something entirely different to hold one directly with a company’s management team.

In fact, I believe it is so unfair that in my opinion even the banks themselves recognize this. For example, if you are ever awarded the “privilege” of being invited to one of these calls, you will notice the sleight of hand the banks sometimes use to cover their legal tracks. In the case of this J.P. Morgan event, during an opening legal remark they ask you to voluntarily jump off the call if you are not an “analyst.” However, clearly the call is for clients too because 1) Dendreon directly acknowledged that in their email to me and 2) the first thing the J.P. Morgan operator asks you upon calling in is, “Who is your J.P. Morgan salesperson?” They also forward you directly into the call after you have told them you are an investor. Why not just block “non-analysts” right from the start if it is so important?

Additionally, I would like to point out that other companies who have in the past participated in this same “CEO/CFO Conference Call Series” did see the value in full-disclosure and were motivated to put out a press release alerting everybody about it. For example, here is a link to a press release by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. They were motivated to make sure that all of their investors could equally participate in their call. Bravo, Regeneron…this is the right thing to do. Unfortunately though, they are the exception, not the rule. In my opinion, other companies would be very wise to follow suit. Private meetings throughout the 1990s tech bubble led to so many material disclosures behind closed doors that it prompted the SEC to enact Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD) in 2000. The regulation is supposed to ensure all investors get material information at the same time.

The bottom line is that in this day and age, the practice of publicly-traded management teams holding private investor calls for only a select few should stop. All investors, no matter who they bank with or how much money they have, deserve as much of an equal footing in the market as possible…especially when it comes to information straight from a CEO’s mouth. This is not overly burdensome for the companies or the banks, and might actually even increase their business. All you would be doing is distributing the phone number of a call that is already happening in the first place, as Regeneron and others have done. A small investor’s money is just as good as the big guys, so they deserve to hear what is on a CEO’s mind as well.

Calls such as these are just one of the many reasons why so many individual investors feel that the system is unfair. Make no doubt, this is an important issue because it is this perceived unfairness that is keeping many people out of the market. At the end of the day, this hurts both trading volumes (which are at multi-year lows) and the veracity of our overall system. Let’s level the playing field. What is good for one set of investors should be good for all.

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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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It was clear that San Diego’s MediciNova (NASDAQ: MNOV) had a lot riding on the outcome of a mid-stage trial of the company’s lead drug candidate, bedoradrine sulfate. As I reported recently, MediciNova has been developing the compound to treat acute asthma attacks that are not responsive to standard therapy.

So shareholders registered their disappointment in preliminary results that MediciNova released today after regular Nasdaq trading ended—sending shares of MediciNova down by roughly 50 percent in after hours trading. Less than two hours after the news hit the wires, MediciNova’s shares were trading around $1.40, after falling by $1.35, or 49 percent, from $2.75 a share.

Many investors probably didn’t read much beyond the first sentence, which says the Phase 2b trial “did not statistically meet the primary endpoint, improvement in forced expiratory volume (FEV1),” compared to a placebo. In other words, patients who got the drug did no better in exhaling for one second than patients who got a placebo. Yet bedoradrine showed a significant improvement in other ways over the placebo group as well as patients who only received the current standard of care. MediciNova says its drug also reduced hospital admissions in acute asthma cases, and no significant safety or tolerability issues were seen.

Shareholders were likely expecting to see “home-run data,” MediciNova CEO Yuichi Iwaki told me by telephone late this afternoon. “We put the fact that we did not meet primary end point at the beginning,” he said. “If you read through everything, we clearly indicate that the trial was positive, and we’re ready to move onto Phase 3.”

Iwaki says the failure to meet the primary goal of the mid-stage trial was probably due to protocols that called for giving patients a two-hour intravenous infusion, which he says were based on an outdated trial design. The company has maintained that its drug poses a key advantage over the current standard of care in U.S. emergency rooms, which typically use an inhaled drug like albuterol, because constricted airways limit how much aerosol can be absorbed. As an IV drug, doctors have a better understanding of how much bedoradrine a patient has absorbed.

In a statement from MediciNova, Iwaki says, “We believe certain variables, such as administration of off-protocol therapies, especially in the standard-of-care alone group (placebo arm) and somewhat higher-than-anticipated variability in measuring FEV1 values limited the [bedoradrine] outcomes. Our goal is to control for these variables going forward, enabling us to run a successful Phase 3 program. Accordingly, we have filed our End-of-Phase 2 meeting request with the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Rheumatology Products at FDA.”

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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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The votes have been tallied, and the winner of the Republican primary in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district is…Thomas Massie.

With 45 percent of the popular vote, Massie, a Tea Party constitutional conservative, fended off a couple of establishment-backed competitors in the race. That means he will be the heavy favorite (in the red state) to win the general election for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. (More national political context here.)

Why should we care? Because Massie is the founder of SensAble Technologies, the venerable Boston-area firm that was recently acquired by Geomagic. He’s a well-known MIT grad in these parts. And he’s a prolific inventor in the field of touch-based computer interfaces. You can read about his fascinating story here.

Massie is leading a charge to encourage more engineers and problem solvers to get into politics. We will be watching to see how he fares amongst all the pols—and whether more engineers end up following his lead.

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Here’s a potpourri of San Diego tech news, large and small, fresh from the local fields of innovation.

—San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), the world’s biggest manufacturer of wireless chipsets, said it has renewed its global QPrize venture investment competition for the third time. The $1 million pool is almost double the total pool Qualcomm offered when it created the QPrize in 2009 to accelerate wireless technologies in key business sectors. Qualcomm plans to hold regional competitions in China, India, Israel, Korea, North America, Brazil, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe, and award $100,000 in convertible note financing to a finalist in each region. The company plans to award another $150,000 in financing to a grand prize-winner chosen from the eight finalists.

—Newbury Park-based Sauer Energy, a wind power technology developer, said it has acquired 100 percent of the assets of San Diego-based Helix Wind, a San Diego maker of small vertical axis wind turbine systems that ceased business operations at the end of 2010. Helix, which was trying to commercialize its iconic design for helical-shaped turbines, had an accumulated deficit of nearly $42 million. In a statement, Sauer Energy CEO Dieter Sauer says, “We purchased only the assets, therefore there are no liabilities, no obligations or debt whatsoever to Sauer Energy.”

—San Diego-based Pelfunc, founded by Sanjay Nichani and Ray Fix, launched their mobile app “Skqueak” for the iPhone in Apple’s iTunes App Store. Skqueak lets users record audio while simultaneously sketching or animating a design over a photo, map, or other image. The result is a kind of multimedia postcard that can be shared through social media and embedded in blogs.

—Qualcomm’s top European executive, Andrew Gilbert, met with reporters to talk about the wireless giant’s technology licensing strategy for wireless charging systems that can be used to charge electric vehicles (EVs) as well as smartphones and other devices. Gilbert also showed off an all-electric Le Mans prototype racer, and said Qualcomm remains on schedule with its plans to install its wireless charging technology for as many as 50 EV taxis in London.

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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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Here at Xconomy we are coming down the home stretch of preparations for our biggest annual event: XSITE 2012, on June 14 at Babson College. That’s (gasp) just over three weeks away.

XSITE 2012 is our fourth annual full-day conference and celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship—involving not just startups, but also big companies, universities, and other organizations. You can check out the updated speaker list here.

But today I want to talk about just startups. Specifically, seed-stage, pre-Series A tech companies, the kind that are under the mainstream radar, but which we have gotten to know in the course of reporting on the innovation community.

At XSITE, we traditionally feature a small group of these companies—potentially transformative ones—in an afternoon session called the “Startup Xpo,” where 10-12 companies give short pitches to our audience. It’s one of the big highlights of the day. And this year will be no exception, though we are focusing more specifically on tech/IT/software companies (no health-tech or cleantech tracks this time).

I’m pleased to announce the following speakers/companies that are confirmed for this year’s Xpo:

—Varun Chirravuri, co-founder and CEO, Laveem
—Paul Harkins, founder and CEO, NeighborPower
—Ben Jabbawy, founder and CEO, Privy
—Jonathan Kay, founder, Apptopia
—Dave McLaughlin, founder and CEO, Vsnap
—Fatma Yalcin, co-founder and CEO, Curisma
—Yifan Zhang, co-founder and CEO, Pact

The unusually perceptive among you might notice that only seven companies are listed. That’s because, well, a couple of others are pending. But it also means we’re looking for at least one more startup to round out the list. If you’d like to be considered—again, your company should be seed-stage, or early-stage bootstrapped—please drop me a note to the address below. (Don’t call me or I’ll be very unhappy. Unless you have a scoop for me. Or some Facebook stock you’re looking to dump (not).)

As for the rest of you, we are expecting quite a crowd, including plenty of out-of-town speakers and guests. You can register for XSITE here. Hope to see you there on June 14.

And this just in: Gus Weber from Polaris Ventures and Dogpatch Labs has agreed to emcee the Xpo. So we’re ready to rock and roll.

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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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Sue Siegel, one of the leading venture investors in the field of personalized medicine, is leaving her gig as a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures to join GE as the CEO of its $6 billion healthymagination unit, which is seeking to foster innovations that lower healthcare costs.

Siegel, 52, was the president of Santa Clara, CA-based Affymetrix (NASDAQ: AFFX) before joining MDV to help lead its push in molecular diagnostics and digital health. At MDV, she participated in the firm’s investments in Menlo Park, CA-based Pacific Biosciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PACB]), Foster City, CA-based Navigenics, Lexington, MA-based RainDance Technologies and Waltham, MA-based On-Q-ity among others.

The healthymagination program is a sizable one, even by GE (NYSE: GE) standards. The industrial giant has said it plans to invest $3 billion in R&D to foster at least 100 innovations to lower health care costs by 2015. The rest of the money is set aside for financing and technology development to bring health IT to rural and underserved areas. Mohr Davidow, along with other VC firms like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Venrock, and MPM Capital, has been involved with GE in figuring out ways to put that money to work, partly through a $100 million global open innovation challenge, which will award prizes to innovative startup teams.

Siegel replaces Mike Barber at healthymagination, as he will be moving on to a new role as vice president and general manager of molecular imaging at GE Healthcare.

“Sue Siegel’s great passion for advancing healthcare is matched by her keen understanding of innovation, her sharp business sense, and her proven leadership,” GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt said in a statement. “As we continue to work with our partners to revolutionize health, we need a leader to connect GE with new healthcare businesses, thought leaders and governments.”

“We are very happy for Sue and believe her move to GE is a positive both for her and for us,” Pamela Mahoney, a spokeswoman for MDV, said in an email. “Her new role at GE will allow her to continue to pursue her deep passion for personalized medicine and the technologies that enable it on perhaps the world’s best platform for doing so.”

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Waiting for the biotech industry to advance new treatments for male pattern baldness (as well as female hair loss) might seem about as exciting as watching hair grow. But some people have a lot of skin in the game, if you know what I mean.

More than just a few people, actually. San Diego’s Histogen estimates that hair loss affects some 40 million men and 21 million women in the United States alone. Histogen, which has been developing a bio-engineered treatment for stimulating hair growth, says less than 7 percent seek treatment for their hair loss “due to the limitations of available options.”

For these people, any incremental improvement in hair growth can be thrilling—even life-changing—which helps explain a burst of enthusiasm we’ve noticed in recent days in messages penned below a 2011 article about Boston-based Follica on the Xconomy Boston website. With close to 1,500 comments posted over the past 14 months our readers have shown no loss for words, making this one article a defacto online message board and a virtual support group for the follically challenged.

As I reported in 2010, few life sciences companies have gotten as much mileage from a pilot trial that enrolled two dozen patients as Histogen has for its much-anticipated treatment. The company says its formulation consists of proteins, including growth factor molecules, secreted by human fibroblast cells grown in a laboratory culture. The concoction is injected just below the scalp.

Over the past week, gentle and not so-gentle visitors to the Follica comment page have seized on the early results of Histogen’s latest experimental trial, which Histogen CEO Gail Naughton presented a week ago in Raleigh, NC, during the annual meeting of the Society for Investigative Dermatology. Naughton gave an oral summary of the data on May 11 and presented a poster the following day on “Stimulation of hair growth in humans by cell-secreted proteins.”

The data has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, according to a Histogen spokeswoman. “We are not releasing an announcement at this time,” she adds.

Yet Histogen has summarized its early findings on its website, where a PDF copy of the May 12 poster also can be downloaded. The company says 56 patients were enrolled in … Next Page »

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CardioKinetix has spent 10 years and $80 million in venture capital working on an implantable device for people with heart failure. Now it’s got some evidence that suggests it could be on track with a real product.

The Menlo Park, CA-based company is announcing today it has passed a study of 31 patients who got an implantable device designed to help the heart beat more efficiently after the muscle is damaged by a heart attack. About 16 percent of the patients died or had to be hospitalized within one year of getting the heart failure implant, and 32.3 percent suffered that fate within two years.

The trial lacked a control group, so it’s impossible to directly compare how those patients would have done otherwise. But historic studies have shown that about 40 percent of patients can expect to die or be hospitalized after one year, and about 60-65 percent would normally end up that way on standard treatments, according to CardioKinetix’s executive director of therapy development, Barry Templin.

The findings, being presented today at the EuroPCR meeting in Paris, mean that CardioKinetix is now in position to see if its product can really pass muster in a more rigorous study of 500 heart failure patients in the U.S.—the kind of evidence it will need to win FDA approval. The CardioKinetix device isn’t intended to help all of the 2.5 million people worldwide diagnosed annually with different types of heart failure, but it could end up being a new option for about 20-30 percent of patients with a form of this chronic disease, Templin says.

“Our device isn’t just a quick fix, we’re seeing long term benefit,” Templin says. One of the study’s investigators, Marco Costa of the Interventional Cardiovascular Center at Case Western Reserve University, gushed in a company statement saying, “it is difficult to contain our enthusiasm because the procedure is relatively simple and the outcomes are surprisingly remarkable for such a high-risk population. The sustained and concordant improvements in symptoms, heart function, and clinical outcomes are compelling, with a very acceptable safety profile.”

Before diving in too deep into the details of this study, a little background is required on what CardioKinetix is attempting to do. The private company got its start in 2002, and has raised its cash from a well-known syndicate that includes SV Life Sciences, New Leaf Venture Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, Panorama Capital, and H&Q Healthcare Investors. CardioKinetix has about 30 employees today, Templin says.

The big idea at CardioKinetix is to develop what it calls its Parachute Ventricular Partitioning Device. The way this works, a technician slides a narrow catheter into a patient’s femoral artery in the leg, threads it into the heart with the Parachute device tightly bound to the catheter. Once inside the heart’s left ventricle, the device gets popped open like a parachute, and it has tiny hooks on the edge that enable to to anchor itself in position in the heart muscle. The procedure is supposed to take 40-60 minutes.

Once the implant is in place, physicians hope to essentially wall off part of the heart muscle that gets loose and damaged after a heart attack, which makes it harder for the heart to pump blood in and out efficiently. Walling off part of the heart … Next Page »

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Buried in the news of the past month, which was admittedly a busy one, was a press release headlined: “Geomagic Acquires Sensable 3D Design and Haptics Businesses.” As far as I can tell, no media outlets besides Xconomy picked up on this deal or its historical—and now, political—significance. Woe is them.

That’s because “Sensable” would be SensAble Technologies, the Woburn, MA-based maker of touch-based computer modeling and design systems. The venerable New England firm started back in 1993 and went on to pioneer all sorts of applications in 3-D modeling and haptics technology—a field of human-computer interfaces that involves touch feedback, sort of like the kind you feel in modern video-game controllers and smartphones.

After nearly 20 years, SensAble’s acquisition by North Carolina-based Geomagic—the price wasn’t disclosed, but was rumored to be just a few million dollars—is an unceremonious ending to one of the most intriguing companies of its era. [Disclosure: Xconomy CEO and Editor-in-chief Bob Buderi was an early investor in SensAble.]

Yet even more compelling than the company is its founder, a young engineering whiz from MIT named Thomas Massie. Over the years, that whiz kid developed many other passions besides building computer interfaces and running a tech company. Things like energy independence. The pursuit of individual liberty. Faith and family. And guns—lots of guns.

After leaving SensAble in 2003 (read on for what he says about that), Massie moved back to the heartland of his home state of Kentucky and spent a few years running a farm and building a solar-powered, off-the-grid house for his family. Then he got into politics. In 2010, he ran for the office of Judge-Executive of his rural county, and won in a landslide.

Now, in a stunning move to those who knew him in Boston, he is running for Congress in one of the most heated races around the country. He has been endorsed by U.S. Representative and presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX) and his son, Senator Rand Paul—both prominent figures in the conservative Tea Party movement. The Republican primary in Kentucky is next Tuesday, May 22, and as of last week polls showed Massie in the lead. Since the county is predominantly Republican, if he wins, he will be the presumptive favorite to represent Kentucky’s 4th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

That’s right, the boy-wonder genius from MIT—the founder of SensAble, a pioneer of haptics—is now a political hero of the Tea Party. And he wants to reform our government. An unlikely story? You be the judge.

Diversity Was a Catholic

Thomas Massie grew up in northeastern Kentucky, in a small town called Vanceburg, on the Ohio River. From a young age, he was interested in taking apart radios and vacuum cleaners, blowing things up with gunpowder, and building mechanical contraptions—everything from a self-watering flowerpot to a robot arm. He entered numerous science fairs and competitions from grade school through high school and often won, despite not having much in the way of resources. That changed when he got to MIT as a freshman in 1989 and was surrounded by world-class facilities (and fellow geeks).

“He was probably the first person from his ZIP code that ever went to MIT,” says Bill Aulet, a current MIT faculty member who helped lead SensAble Technologies as its president from 1996 to 2002. “He would say, ‘Diversity where I came from was a Catholic’—a Catholic, singular.”

As an undergrad, Massie worked in roboticist Kenneth Salisbury’s lab in the old Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. (Salisbury would move to Stanford University in 1999.) One of their later projects was to build a device that would simulate being able to touch and manipulate objects in the virtual world with your hand. It consisted of a computer-connected robot arm with a thimble on the end that you could stick your finger into; when you moved your finger, the computer sensed your precise motions through the movements of the robot arm, and then provided force feedback through the apparatus to simulate the feel of an object on the screen (a button, say). Massie built early versions … Next Page »

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We’re anticipating a lot of news out of a big cancer conference that begins next week in Chicago. Here is your head start.

—Cancer researchers have talked for decades about finding the silver bullet that could kill cancer cells without harming the healthy cells nearby. These days, the industry is focusing on the development of “empowered” or “armed” antibodies, or antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). Luke put together a list of venture-backed life sciences companies that are focusing on ADCs. His list includes San Diego’s AnaptysBio, Fabrus, and Ambrx.

—San Diego’s Elevation Pharmaceuticals said a mid-stage dosing trial of its lead drug candidate, an aerosol dubbed EP-101, generated positive results among patients with moderate to severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The company said it tested four doses of EP-101, with all four doses showing EP-101 was safe and effective in helping COPD patients breathe easier. Elevation raised $30 million in a Series B round five months ago that should enable the company to complete a follow-up round of testing this year.

—With the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting set to begin next week in Chicago, Luke used his BioBeat column to provide a rundown on eight cancer drugs to watch from biotech companies throughout the U.S. He picked them because they are either on the cusp of reaching the market, or just beginning to show their potential.

—BioSurplus, a San Diego company that provides pre-owned lab instruments to the life sciences industry, said it raised $1.5M to fund its expansion into Boston. The company recently opened similar equipment showrooms in the San Francisco Bay Area and Korea. BioSurplus said most of the funding for the move came from San Diego-based KI Investment Holdings.

—Good News for Xconomy: Our national biotech editor, Luke Timmerman, is one of four finalists in the blogging category of this year’s Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. Whatever happens, he’s put Xconomy in good company. The other blogging finalists work for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Reuters. Winners will be announced June 26.

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It’s been an eventful 24 hours for MIT.

The university held the finale of its $100K Entrepreneurship Competition last night, naming CloudTop the grand prize winner.

The company comes from the Web/IT track of the competition and is developing an application allowing users to access of all their online content and applications through a Web browser. It has also developed an application programming interface to help other Web developers easily integrate Dropbox, Gmail, and other services into their own applications.

And just this morning, MIT elected a new president, L. Rafael Reif, to succeed Susan Hockfield, who announced in February that she was stepping down. Reif has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1980. He has been chief academic officer since 2005, and is currently the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technology in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

But back to the entrepreneurship competition. Todd Park, who is now chief technology officer of the United States, having replaced Aneesh Chopra, kicked off the night with a energetic talk on how the government is taking its cues from MIT and its efforts in running business plan competitions and hackathons. Park joined the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as chief technology officer in 2009. He’s advanced the agency’s efforts in putting much of the health data the government has online and making it accessible for entrepreneurs to use as starting points for new software applications.

The government has held “health datapaloozas,” in which it brings in entrepreneurs who have built these technologies to give TED-style talks. The next one is coming up on June 5 and 6 in Washington, DC.

“We’re copying your play,” Park said.

He touted the fact that all of these startups have the potential for vastly improving the healthcare system and adding new jobs, and are working off of data the U.S. government has already collected.

All in all, Park was very jazzed up about the potential for entrepreneurs to transform areas like public safety, education, and finance, and said he was going to “double down” on the government’s efforts to support innovation in these areas.

“I’ve seen entrepreneurs who have invented the future. It just needs to scale,” said Park, who’s also an Xconomist.

And what got last night’s audience most excited about the future? Getting every last drop out of mayonnaise and ketchup bottles. LiquiGlide nabbed the $2,000 audience choice award for its slippery, non-toxic coating that can be applied to food packaging to allow for easy and complete dispensing of condiments. So there’s that.

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Chris Lynch, the tech exec who said venture capital was not for him, is the newest member of the technology team at Atlas Venture, the Cambridge, MA-based firm announced today.

In March, Lynch left his role as CEO of Vertica Systems, a year after the data analytics company was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $300 million.

At the time of his departure, Lynch told my colleague Greg Huang that he was looking to work hands-on with Boston-area big data entrepreneurs, but not in a VC role. So what changed?

“I’ve seen so many more deals than I ever thought I would,” Lynch says. “I thought I’d be working a lot harder to find a needle in the haystack, but it’s been a haystack of needles that have dropped on my head.”

Lynch has made about half a dozen angel investments, in companies like Mortar Data, Kinvey, PowerInbox, and Azuki Systems. But he says working with Atlas will give him a “broader platform to leverage so I can do more deals faster than I could do on my own.” He didn’t initially pursue VC after leaving Vertica because he thought there “weren’t any firms that were interested in investing at the venture level to form these [big data] companies.”

Co-investing with Atlas on a couple of his angel deals (Kinvey and PowerInbox) must have changed his mind, though. Lynch also worked as an entrepreneur in residence in 2010 at Atlas, which has been busy investing at the seed and early stage level and has previously backed big data companies like DataXu, Recorded Future, and Hopper.

Lynch will be working full-time with Atlas, but the firm shied away from naming a specific title for him. “We don’t really see a whole lot of need for titles or hierarchy,” said Jeff Fagnan, a partner in the technology group at Atlas. (We’ll ignore his title for the purpose of this story, though.)

For Atlas, scooping up Lynch was a talent play, says Fagnan. Not long ago the firm added Ryan Moore to its technology team. “Ryan was kind of the top general partner free agent out there at the time that a bunch of firms were chasing,” Fagnan says. “Our single motivation is to have all the best people as part of the platform. With Ryan and Chris, we’re building up to take advantage of what’s happening in the Boston-Cambridge marketplace.”

Most of the deals Lynch has been scouting are in the Boston area, but others come from Austin, New York, and northern California, he says. So, you ask, does Lynch have any big data investments in the works for Atlas? Not yet, but he is bringing over companies he saw as an angel investor to evaluate as potential deals. “I’m keeping the guys very busy,” he says.

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What began as an effort by a couple of San Diego engineers to bring computer vision to the iPhone has resulted instead in “Skqueak,” a mobile app that enables users to sketch over photos and videos on their iPhones. The Skqueak app is now available in Apple’s iTunes App Store.

Sanjay Nichani, who moved to San Diego in 2006 after working at Cognex (NASDAQ: CGNX) the Natick, MA-based pioneer in machine vision, says he founded Pelfunc (Skqueak’s parent company) with Ray Fix, another former Cognoid, in mid-2010. The original idea was to develop an app capable of recognizing electric circuit designs or the kind of molecular geometries used to depict chemical reactions.

“We said it would be nice to have audio with the pictures, and that’s how Skqueak evolved,” Nichani says. As the Pelfunc founders made it possible to overlay sketches (along with messages and graphics) with audio over photos and videos, Nichani says they realized what they had was more of a social networking tool than a computer vision app.

By the end of 2010, they decided to run with their new concept, even though “it meant that we’d need to develop a website and backend system support” so users could create their own accounts for storing and sharing their Skqueaks, Nichani says.

Skqueak employs a drawing function that reminds me of Draw Something, the Pictionary-like mobile app developed by Omgpop, the New York company acquired by Zynga in March for $180 million. You draw by dragging your finger across an image on the iPhone display screen.

With Skqueak, however, users also can record audio while they sketch a handlebar mustache and devil’s horns—or anything else—on one of their own photos or videos. The result is a sort of multimedia postcard. The founders envision users sending “Skqueaks” to their friends, attaching them to e-mails and tweets, posting them to their Facebook pages, and even embedding them in their blogs. Here’s an example:

“A big part of our strategy is to use social media to promote Skqueak as a platform, and then to build different verticals,” Nichani says. For example, users could create a multimedia classified ad that could be embedded on Craigslist by taking a photo of something they want to sell—say, a car—and using the Skqueak app to draw arrows that point out the custom wheels, tinted windows, and other features. “There are a lot of possibilities for working with other partners,” Nichani adds.

In developing Skqueak, the partners conducted a … Next Page »

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