The San Diego Business Journal summarizes local biotech giants Illumina and Life Technologies’ race to the $1000 genome. Spoiler alert – analysts favor Illumina’s Solexa technology over Life Tech’s SOLiD.
 
http://www.sdbj.com/article.asp?aID=144667&link=perm

The Economist weighs in on the political chances of healthcare reform in the US. In a nutshell, there’s an outside chance the House will pass the Senate bill then modify, but it’s more likely it will all wither like Hillarycare.
 
In the meantime, the ARRA HITECH provisions for moving doctors to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) stand, so we can continue to expect more money to flow into Healthcare IT.
 
NOTE: Link may be under subscription for the remainder of this week.
 
http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15453116

Local biotech Isis Pharmaceuticals reports strong results for their cholesterol therapy mipomersen, at the same time broadening potential patients from those that are homozygous for familial hypercholesterolemia to those who are heterozygous as well. Isis and partner Genzyme plan to move this treatment to market in 2011.

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/02/10/genzyme-and-isis-report-positive-results-for-cholesterol-lowering-drug/

An exciting announcement from Microsoft Research – Microsoft is going to give away free Azure cloud computing access to researchers through the National Science Foundation. It will be fun to see more scientific computing solutions on the .NET platform as a result of Microsoft's research support!

 

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/feb10/02-04NSFPR.mspx

The New York Times editorial team provides an item-by-item comparison of the House and Senate Healthcare Reform bills. This is a great synopsis of hundreds of pages of legislation, and it’s a definite must- read for individuals working in healthcare, pharmaceuticals and biotech.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/opinion/27sun1.html?_r=1

A spectacular result for local biotech Isis Pharmaceuticals with their cholesterol candidate mipomercen. This trial saw an average 25% reduction in LDL for genetically suseptible patients, with some seeing reductions of 70 – 80%. That’s great news for Isis and marketing partner Genzyme.

http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/isis-cholesterol-drug-hits-bulls-eye-pivotal-trial/2009-11-17?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal

Great news! Local biotech Cyntellect, which produces a wet-lab-in-a-box product for cell cultures and analysis, announced they've raised $15.5M in a secondary round that they expect to total $18.6M before they're done.

 

Cyntellect is on my short list of most-interesting local companies; they have a great technology solution, and embedded software integrated with a Windows Server application developed on the .NET platform to communicate with hospital and lab information systems. It's also just good to hear that the stock market's "animal spirits" have recovered enough to keep great small and medium sized technology efforts like this in the black. What a huge change from six months ago!

 

http://www.xconomy.com/san-diego/2009/11/12/cyntellect-raises-15-5m-as-it-expands-biotech-instrument-business/

A brilliant move from local biotech Orexigen – combine an existing obesity drug candidate with an antidepressant for a potential blockbuster coctail. Patients in this IIb (mid-late) stage trial lost a whopping 9.9% of body weight during the 24 week period, averaging 22 pounds. And I’ll bet they had fun doing it too!

http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/orexigen-wows-analysts-iib-obesity-data/2009-09-30?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal

…or how to turn $32M into $170M in two years of the worst economic downturn since the depression. Seriously, it’s great to see a venture capital success story from the stodgy old world of software.

 http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/13/intuit-to-acquire-former-techcrunch50-winner-mint-for-170-million/

14 down, 86 to go – this week Bay Area gene sequencing provider Complete Genomics completed 14 of the 100 human genomes they committed to finish in the second half of this year. If they succeed, both the $5000 price point and the service provider business model could prove disruptive to sequencing tools businesses at San Diego firms Illumina and Life Technologies.

 http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2009/09/09/ovp-company-does-14-genomes/