Good Things Come to Those Who Bait

Even if you’ve never pulled on a pair of waders, you know that to hook the right fish you need the right lure. Why do so many people forget this when angling for jobs?  It’s all about specificity. About what sets off your strengths to make it obvious you’re particularly perfect for a particular job.

Think metrics. After many years of placing high-level commercialization people, I still puzzle over why business leaders who live and die by sales and revenue numbers so often leave metrics off their resumes.  In my experience, there is a direct correlation between your showing good metrics, and my clients’ being interested in speaking with you.  Whenever possible, bait your line with numbers: sales numbers, product line revenues, quota achievements. You will get many more call backs.

Tell and show. One of my candidates, a successful marketing director in the medical device field, took his excellent resume one step further by creating a professional-quality website to market himself. The site gave employers a full portfolio of the candidate’s white papers, marketing brochures, and PR pieces. Perhaps as important, however, the site showcased those materials in a way that demonstrated my candidate’s marketing skill – and thus his suitability for the position he sought.  Employers were able give him a virtual test drive. By the way, he got the interview and the offer.

Consider graphics, but stint on the stunts. I have seen a few rainbow-colored resumes in my time, and a few wild fonts, as well. Need I mention that I’m not a fan? There is, however, a place for different kinds of resumes that include thoughtful, well-executed visual information. One mechanical engineer I placed illustrated his resume with CAD designs of next gen sequencers and robotic equipment, and captioned the visuals with just the right amount of descriptive text. This inventive resume allowed employers to see in a glance what the candidate had designed and built, and allowed them to judge for themselves  the candidate’s experience with microfluidics, optics, etc.  Since I’ve placed this engineer in two jobs in eight years, we can safely conclude that resume works.

Next Gen Sequencing Comes Into Its Own – Big Time.

There’s an undeniable excitement when a new technology really hits its stride, and that excitement pretty much sparkled all over John Boyce's third Consumer Genetics Show. There was the A-list of academic and corporate speakers. There was the participation of the full range of stakeholders, from regulatory experts, genomics CEOs, and academic leaders to cancer patients (the affordable $20 entrance fee helped). There was the fact that John is one of the most well-networked people in our business, and he’s got a Midas touch when it comes to anticipating markets and opportunities. Bonus points for the “old home week” feel for former ABI-ers like me. Above all, though, there was the – no other word for it – thrill of witnessing a technology reach wow level. That makes for one heck of a conference.

One huge conference headline is that people are finally making real money off NGS. Jonathan Rothberg was radiant throughout  his presentation. Wouldn’t you be, if you’d sold Ion Torrent to LifeTech for $350-725M (depending on milestone payments)? He dazzled the audience with the story of Ion Torrent’s sequencing the deadly E. coli outbreak in Germany – in two hours. Jay Flatley was justifiably jubilant, too. He’s grown Illumina's market cap from $4B to $9B, and done it in a single year. Outstanding financial returns – and with the MiSeq platform about to be launched this summer, it looks like the rest of 2011 will be bountiful for Illumina shareholders too. Jay continued where he left off last year by loading his entire genome on an iPad 2; then extended the show-and-tell to include a look at the annotations and software for personal genome analysis. He also announced a dramatic drop in whole-genome sequencing prices to only $7,500 for an individual or $10,000 for a tumor and a patient. Incredible.  

This NGS market will drive a great deal of opportunity. George Church, our resident Harvard expert, predicted that very soon there will be hand-held NGS devices with no PCR or special sample prep, and that in-situ 3D/4D NGS for cancer and infectious diseases will be emerging. He predicted, too, that we are hitting the data deluge, which means advances in interpretation and integration software will take center stage. That's good news for Ingenuity, Selventa, GeneGo, DNA Nexus, and lots of those bioinformatics companies poised for just this opportunity. Paul Morrison, our Dana Farber Cancer Institute NGS guru, led a lively panel discussion that included some of the powerhouses in NGS platforms. Illumina was there, as were new entrants such as NobleGen, NabSys, and GnuBio. They’re all hoping to “pull a Rothberg" – and let's hope they can.

What’s really becoming clear is that the power of Next Gen Sequencing and other developments could help shift the traditional balance between the drug industry and its poor stepchild, the diagnostic industry. Randy Scott, CEO of Genomics Health, made the point that oncology drugs are effective in only about 20% of patients. That means that we are usually not providing the correct treatment for patients, and are therefore needlessly over-prescribing chemotherapy when another approach would be better. No wonder, then, that Randy joined Steve Burrill and a chorus of others in calling for a strong independent diagnostic industry not subservient to the pharma industry. Amen.

In closing, let's all hope that our drug costs go down and our access to highly informative personalized diagnostics tests go up. And let's also hope that John Boyce, now CEO of GnuBIO, a new entry in the Next Gen sequencing space, is eating his Wheaties and will still have time to organize a great fourth conference June 2012. Kudos again to you John.

Boston's answer to the JP Morgan Life Sciences Conference

Once again, the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center scored a direct hit with their Early-Stage Life Sciences Conference VII. Partnering with the Merck Research Labs, they lined up an impressive array of new companies loaded with pedigreed, serial entrepreneurs from Harvard, MIT, Genzyme, Hologics, and other leading academic centers and corporations. Each of the sixteen companies had ten minutes to pitch their newco to investors and the biotech community – which gave the proceedings a kind of mini- JP Morgan Life Sciences Conference feel. Presenters ranged from medical device, Rx, and Dx companies to tools players. 

Donna Ambrosino kicked things off as the keynote speaker and conveyed some riveting examples of MassBiologic ’s successes, including the stellar story of developing an antibody Rx for SARS in only 31 months. There were several platform companies that caught my eye, including NobleGen Biosciences, a single-molecule DNA-sequencing company that has developed an optical nanopore sequencing approach. It looks to give Pacific Biosciences a run for their money and has the speed to sequence an entire genome in one hour, something we never dreamed about during my days at Celera. The winners of the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition in 2005 presented Pharyx, a novel microfluidic bioreactor platform; and Alexey Wolfson introduced us to an exciting gene knockout RNAi company, Advirna, that could be a great acquisition target for Thermo Fisher, Life Technologies, or others. Optasia Medical and Translational Sciences presented some exciting new solutions to interpret and analyze CT and PET imaging.

In terms of new medical device companies, one of my Flagship Ventures colleagues, Jay Schwartz, presented Acuity Bio, an exciting drug delivery company with a polymer implant for treating non-small cell lung cancer. He also discussed potentially lucrative secondary markets, including colon and breast cancer. As we all know, crossing the blood/ brain barrier is not easy, but Al Kyle showcased Perfusion Technology, which utilizes ultrasound as a non-invasive method for drug delivery to the brain. There was also a new ablative therapy company, Thermedical, that will be able to offer revolutionary treatments for ventricular tachycardia and liver cancer. And then there was eye-opening (sorry!) idea of medication via contact lenses. Dr. Joseph B. Ciolino from Mass Eye & Ear is working with the famous drug delivery wizard Bob Langer to develop a contact lens that can deliver medicine in a time-release fashion to treat glaucoma.

Okay, now for the drugs... On the therapeutic side, two oncology companies presented: Bryan Oncor and OncoPep. OncoPep, developed at Dana Farber, is launching a new line of cancer vaccines to combat a broad spectrum of cancers. Bryan Oncor’s drug is based on a somatostatin peptide and has an imaging diagnostic paired with their Rx for lung cancer. Basically, they run a peptide imaging diagnostic on potential patients. If their cells light up positive for the somatostatin receptor, they are a match for the therapy. A very exciting combo – that yes, illustrates the promise of personalized medicine that I wrote about in an earlier post.

Continuing on with protein-oriented drugs, does the thought of oral antibody therapies seem farfetched? If so, it won’t for long. Avaxia Biologics has developed an oral antibody therapy to combat inflammatory bowel disease, attacking a $3.5B market.

One fun health-techy company that presented was Segterra. It is a web-base personalized path to health, wellness, and performance. They analyze a sample of your blood, and in conjunction with your individual goals for health or athletic achievement, provide the diet, nutrition, and exercise plan best for your signature biochemistry. Looks promising, though I’ll admit that it gives me some pangs of guilt about gobbling down that hot dog for dinner. On the other hand, skipping my morning run to attend the conference was totally worth it!

The personalized medicine market heats up

One of the markets that’s got the industry most excited lately is personalized medicine – the use of detailed diagnostics to determine individualized medical treatments. Little wonder that the approach is garnering attention, as the number of stakeholders seeing new ways to benefit seems to grow daily. Think platform tool providers, whose imaging and genetic tests are going to be relied on in completely new ways. Think pharma companies, who’ll be able to increase their shot at getting drugs through clinical trials by weeding out non-responders in advance. And of course, think hospitals and physicians, who’ll be able to pinpoint treatments that will get patients better sooner and decrease toxicity and other negative side effects. 

Cardiovascular disease is good example of personalized medicine in full swing. In the past, a cardiovascular patient’s newly-prescribed blood thinner often became a mini science experiment. Too high a dosage could mean hemorrhage; too low a dosage, and clots could land patients them back in the OR. Today, a quick (genetic) blood test determines optimal dose and is radically reducing hospitalization rates.  

But where more and more industry people are really expecting to find pay dirt is with the application of this kind of customization to an intractable problem like breast cancer.
We’re thankfully already past the time when the disease was identified and treated almost exclusively according to its tissue of origin – a crude categorization, as breast cancers are not all the same – but we’re far from where personalized medicine will be taking us soon. Today, genetic testing allows several cancers to be typed and paired with individualized therapy, and the area is expanding fast. 

Genomic Health, Agendia and Myriad have diagnostic tests that can help pair patients with the most effective treatment regime, in effect personalizing their treatments. Multi-gene tests, such as Agendia’s MammaPrint™, include more genetic information, and are advancing the field. And that’s just the beginning. 

A guy to watch in personalized medicine is Raju Kucherlapati, Ph.D., Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.  He is definitely a key thought leader driving this field forward, and he’s a truly lovely person, to boot. He also organizes a great, not-to-be-missed conference through Harvard and Partners every November. 

We expect to be placing more and more leaders and researchers in personalized-medicine-related fields this year. Kind of nice when a big new idea promises a healthy future for us all medically – and financially, too!

Where will tomorrow's leaders emerge?

I know, I know – you’re busy and your budget is tight. All the more reason to help young scientists and entrepreneurs advance. Student internships are an excellent way to add additional horsepower to a tactical project while helping train our next "best and brightest." At Flagship Ventures, I engaged a number of the MIT Harvard e-Lab graduate students. They did an excellent job developing competitive landscapes, researching markets and conducting due diligence on new companies and opportunities we were considering. Many of the [executives in my network] and I have found that hiring summer lab interns can help defray the workload pinch when full timers go on vacation. And what a great way for a student to learn how sequence DNA or write a business plan!

This year the Mass Life Science Center has announced a renewal of their internship program. Last year’s program received almost 900 applications and placed 170 interns at 94 companies throughout Massachusetts. If you are a student of a Massachusetts college or university, or are a Massachusetts resident attending an out-of-state college or university, consider applying to this great program. If you are a company, consider helping to train the next generation of leaders. Who knows? That summer intern may become a valuable full time addition to your company.

Spring is in the air and — cautiously — so are IPOs and buyouts.

Venture capital and investment funding continue to be tight for emerging companies, but the first glimmers of hope are out there – really BG Medicine, which I had the pleasure to help found, successfully launched their IPO on NASDAQ in February. Granted, they didn’t raise as much as they’d hoped in 2008; but they now have the capital to continue their biomarker/cardiovascular plans. February also saw about $75 million raised by Fluidigm, an emerging leader in microfluidics and genomics. After spending their first few years developing a protein crystallization platform, Fluidigm has wisely moved into the larger RT-PCR genomics market and are peripherally selling into the Next Gen Sequencing area.  

Next Gen Sequencing itself has been surrounded by doldrum-defying activity for a while now, and the continuation of this trend adds to the promise of a springtime economic thaw. It started in with Life Technologies spectacular acquisition of Ion Torrents. Will they hit all their milestone payments to earn the $750M?  I'd put my money on Jonathan Rothberg any day and so far it looks good. Complete Genomics, a Next Gen Sequencing service provider, contributed to the buzz by successfully raising $54M in an IPO in November.

On the diagnostics side of things, Quest Diagnostics is in buying mode and just purchased Athena Diagnostics, a small diagnostics service, for $740 million in cash. It’s a move that will help make Quest a leader in neurological disorder testing. They’ve also announced they’re buying Celera Corporation for $671 million.

It’s beginning to look like these events are part of a fresh start: an upswing in investments and in exit strategies for new companies with solid technologies and market opportunities.  Here’s to spring!

Upcoming conferences – get there!

Spring offers a great crop of life science meetings in the Boston area, and you still have time to sign up.

March 21-22: The Massachusetts Biotechnology Council's Annual Meeting is focusing on personalized medicine. There will be exciting presentations and panels on an array of subjects, but I hear the gene patents panel will be of particular interest.

March 23:  The LRIG New England Chapter is hosting an event at AstraZeneca. Ion Torrents, part of Life Technologies, will be presenting their NextGen Sequencing platform. IonTorrents was started by the serial entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg, who founded 454 Sequencing, CuraGen (now part of Celldex), and RainDance Technologies. 

April 14:  The Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center sponsors a great NewCo opportunity for investors and entrepreneurs to see or show new companies in the pipeline. Billed as the Early-Stage Life Sciences Technology Conference VII, this is an annual event held at The Merck Research Labs to showcase companies with platform technologies developed at the research institutions, hospitals and universities. 

June 7-9: Consumer Genetics Conference.  John Boyce has done an amazing job capturing the consumer genetics landscape in this two-day meeting. He attracts top science and business people in the field; past presenters have been Francis Collins (NIH), George Church (Harvard), Jay Flatley (Illumina) and Greg Lucier (LifeTech).  

June 2:  Massachusetts Life Sciences Innovation Day is one of my favorite one-day conferences because of the breadth of platform, medical device, and pharma presentations. Past presenters have included George Whitesides from Harvard, Matthew W. Emmens from Vertex, Mara Aspinall from On-Q-ity, and James J. Mongan, President/CEO of Partners Healthcare.