Source: The Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON -- The House health-care bill presents more problems for drug makers than legislation in the Senate, but it gives the medical-device industry better breaks.

The variations in the bills underscore why health-care companies have been lobbying vigorously on Capitol Hill. Billions of dollars are at stake, depending on which version is adopted.

The Senate Finance Committee in October approved a bill that would place a $40 billion tax over 10 years on medical-device makers. That figure is halved to roughly $20 billion in the House version. Senate leaders are also preparing to reduce the tax to around that level, according to industry officials and congressional aides.

Under the House bill, the 2.5% levy on device makers applies to revenue at the point of sale, though it excludes certain retail purchases. The Senate Finance version would tax device makers according to their share of the market and would go into effect three years sooner.

The drug industry took a big hit in the House bill. For elderly people who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid, the bill mandates rebates from the drug makers so that the Medicare system ends up paying less. Those rebates are estimated to cost the industry $60 billion over a decade.Read more

Source: MedicalDataLink

Source:BioOptics World

As more therapies become available, doctors increasingly wish to identify diseases as early as possible and monitor their initial stages in order to address them appropriately. In the case of eye maladies such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), they need to watch the retina so they can time the treatment properly.

FIGURE 1. Images of the pupil (above) and wavefront (below) obtained with the Shack-Hartmann sensor (left) and with a digital wavefront camera (right) demonstrate a significant difference in resolution. Click here to enlarge image

Achieving this goal requires imaging the retina at the highest possible resolution. Because diffraction imposed by the iris's diameter determines maximum image resolution, getting the best result with iris diameters greater than 3 mm necessitates a highly capable aberrometer. An aberrometer, which passes light through the eye and then measures that light as it exits the eye, is the tool an ophthalmologist uses to measure wavefront-the change in shape of the front of the light waves as they exit the cornea. A very capable aberrometer can produce highly resolved 3D images of both the wavefront and the intensity of the light coming out of the eye-with superior dynamic range and in real time. Ophthalmic aberrometry relies on wavefront sensing technologies to enable not only early disease diagnosis and monitoring, but also treatment such as corrective lens prescription or LASIK surgery to improve visual acuity. To read more, click here.

Source: BioOptics World

Last November, the Cleveland Clinic (Cleveland, OH) ranked an optical molecular imaging system as one of the year's top ten medical innovations. "We believe this technology to be a game changer," said Jennifer Hunt, the clinic's head of surgical pathology. "When we're talking about tumors, we're talking about what information we can gain about that tumor to guide and direct therapy, prognosis, and diagnostics," she said, referring to the clinic's use of the Nuance system by Cambridge Research & Instrumentation, Inc. (CRi; Woburn, MA). "Being able to analyze multiple markers in a single cell to understand the behavior of signaling pathways will significantly aid in disease diagnosis and therapy development."

While the first big application for in-vivo optical molecular imaging was infectious disease, oncology has been an important next step according to Caliper Life Sciences' (Hopkinton, MA) Stephen Oldfield PhD. Indeed, Carestream Health Molecular Imaging (Rochester, NY) reports a surge of interest from oncologists just in the past couple of years. William McLaughlin, Director of Research and Advanced Applications for Carestream, says that at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting two years ago, he saw significantly more interest in analytical techniques such as gel documentation and western blotting-but in 2008 noticed that more people were asking about the newer technology. Then at this year's AACR meeting (April 18-22, Denver, CO), the majority of leads were for in vivo imaging, he said. To read more, click here.

Marie a en premier lieu rappelé que la France est la première nation mondiale en termes d'usage open source, portée par le gouvernement et de grosses entreprises telles que EDF ou Peugeot. L'open source connait une croissance annuelle de 33% en France. Les témoignages de Black Duck et Nuxeo ont notamment insiste sur le caractère particulièrement favorable de la France pour l'implémentation d'entreprise, et le caractère essentiel d'une telle implémentation pour assurer le support technique attendu par une clientèle exigeante. Le talk s'est termine par une discussion entre les participants et invites.

Le pole System@tic a été évoqué lors de la présentation, et Hubtech21 a rappelé la venue d'une délégation de 10 sociétés du pole a la mi-novembre, notamment 2 sociétés open source. Le Café des Sciences du 17/11  permettra à 2 sociétés, MLState et Kayentis, de présenter leur technologie et projets de développement aux Etats-Unis.

Source: Innovation Economy blog

Forced to spend an hour or two this morning inside MIT's Kresge Auditorium awaiting President Barack Obama, there was really nothing to do but schmooze. Once you'd entered the hall, you couldn't leave, and so it felt a little like being together on a spaceship.

One without refreshments. (...)

Most of the cleantech bigwigs present were hanging out down by the stage, and there were a few rows of seats marked "Reserved" nearby with white pieces of paper that featured the Presidential seal and the VIP's name. One of the seats was reserved for Yet-Ming Chiang, an MIT prof and co-founder of the battery-maker A123 Systems. He's pictured at right with Helen Greiner, an MIT alumnae and co-founder of iRobot Corp. Greiner mentioned that she'd just been in DC testifying before a Senate subcommittee on space exploration.

There was quite the contingent of venture capitalists in the house. (I was told that the New England Venture Capital Association received 25 tickets for its members.) They included Bilal Zuberi and Hemant Taneja from General Catalyst, senior associate Robin Lockwood from Flybridge Capital, Amir Nashat from Polaris, and, up in the cheap seats, Noubar Afeyan and Jim Matheson of Flagship Ventures.

There were a bunch of folks there from A123 Systems, the Watertown battery-maker that went public earlier this year: Desh Deshpande, chairman, David Vieau, CEO, and co-founder Ric Fulop, along with the aforementioned Chiang.

MIT prof Ely Sachs (currently on leave) and Frank van Mierlo, collaborating on the next-gen solar company 1366 Technologies, were there. To read more, click here.

Source:R&D Magazine

In the face of a severe global recession, the world`s 1,000 largest publicly traded corporate research and development spenders increased spending on R&D in 2008, affirming the critical importance of innovation to their corporate strategies, according to global management consulting firm Booz & Company`s fifth annual analysis of global innovation spending, released today. R&D outlays for these companies rose by 5.7 percent to US$532 billion, even as sales were up only 6.5 percent. While the increase in 2008 R&D spend was less dramatic than 2007's gain of 10 percent, it was just slightly less than the 7.1 percent global five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for R&D.

Overall, more than two thirds of companies maintained or increased their R&D spending in 2008, despite more than a third (34 percent) reporting that net income plummeted last year, according to the study. More than a quarter of companies decreased their R&D allocation in 2008.

Booz & Company analyzed the world`s top 1,000 public corporate research and development spenders-the Booz & Company Global Innovation 1000-in a study looked at R&D spending and its link to corporate performance, uncovering insights into how organizations can get the greatest return on their innovation investment. New to the study this year is an in-depth survey of nearly 300 senior managers and R&D professionals from 250 companies around the globe that probes the impact of the downturn on innovation spending and strategy. To read more, click here.

Source: The Economic Time

Pfizer prefers a buyout and may well pay a hefty premium for Wockhardt’s Rs 100-crore biotech business, valuing it close to the Indian company’s total market value

, the banker said, requesting anonymity.

Source: R&D Magazine

For years scientists have struggled with the difficult physics of inertial confinement fusion. This is the attempt to compress a target capsule containing isotopes of hydrogen with high-powered lasers to high enough pressure and temperature to initiate fusion burn.

To achieve fusion scientists must put as much laser energy on target as possible, a task complicated by energy loss due to laser backscatter, or reflection. Fusion is the basic energy-producing process of the sun, and is a source of energy released by nuclear weapons.

Los Alamos scientists Lin Yin and Brian Albright of Applied Science and Method Development, along with Los Alamos guest scientist Kevin Bowers, are using an adapted version of VPIC, a particle-in-cell plasma physics code, on Roadrunner to model the nonlinear physics of laser backscatter energy transfer and plasma instabilities to assist colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as they attempt to reach fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) next year.

"These are the largest plasma simulations ever done, looking at 0.4 trillion particles on the whole system," said Lin. "It would not be possible to do this without a petascale computer like Roadrunner, but even so, we are still only looking at a tiny segment of a laser beam." To read more, click here.

Source: MHT

The National Cancer Institute has awarded MIT with a five-year grant, valued at $3.5 million per year, to create a new Physical Science-Oncology Center. The grant will enable MIT physical scientists to engage in four cancer research projects.

MIT is one of 12 institutions to form physics-oncology centers, with the goal of bringing non-traditional approaches to cancer research. The institute applies physical laws - such as computational modeling and statistical analysis - to the research.

Alexander van Oudenaarden, MIT physics professor, will direct the Physical Science-Oncology Center, which will also include input from researchers at the Whitehead Institute, the Broad Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston University, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Stanford University, University of California at San Francisco and Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands. Van Oudenaarden and Tyler Jacks, director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, are studying the evolution of cancerous colon stem cells. 
To read more, click here.

Source: MHT

President Barack Obama lauded the scientific and entrepreneurial spirit at MIT and across America in creating a clean energy economy, and expressed his confidence that the country will be the dominant force in the industry.

Speaking at what the president called "the greatest university in this part of Cambridge" Friday afternoon, Obama called clean energy the major challenge of this era and one that is looking to be answered through a global "peaceful competition."

"The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy, and I want America to be that nation," he said.

In a 20-minute speech, the Harvard University-educated president cited some of the technologies he saw during his brief tour of MIT's energy research labs, from windows that generate solar energy to batteries fueled by organic materials.

To read more, click here.

Last week, Hubtech21's San Francisco offices hosted a cleantech event featuring smart grid efficiency startup companies from the Netherlands.  The event was organized in conjunction with the Netherland America Foundation, one of the oldest non-profits in the United States and drew over 60 high-level attendees from the clean tech and venture sectors.  The following article was written by the event's moderator, cleantech journalist Eric Wesoff.

 Source: Greentechmedia.com

How can you be against the smart grid? Or against smart meters?

Isn't it like being anti-motherhood or anti-apple pie or anti-education? Apparently not, according to a recent citizen uprising in Fresno. And a recent smart grid panel I moderated.

First the panel. I moderated a relatively contentious panel at the Netherlands America Foundation on Thursday night. Execs from smart grid hardware and software startups including [more]:

Source: Wall Street Journal

A small but provocative study showed that a form of gene therapy significantly improved the vision of patients left legally blind by a rare genetic eye disease. The benefit was especially striking among children.

Researchers said the findings amount to an important advance toward medicine's ambitious but generally unrealized dream of replacing disease-causing mutant or missing genes with normal DNA to treat and cure debilitating illnesses.

In the study, 12 patients, including four children between ages 8 and 11 years old, underwent a surgical procedure in which a gene that makes a protein critical to vision function was injected into one eye. The second eye wasn't treated. While normal sight wasn't restored in any of the patients, all reported some improvement. Six gained enough vision that they may no longer meet criteria for being legally blind, researchers said, including the four children for whom substantial recovery of vision appears to have transformed their lives.(more)

Source: Xconomy

What type of drugs have the greatest potential to fill the void in Big Pharma company pipelines, as the industry barrels toward the well-documented patent expiration crisis of coming years? What are the best techniques pharma companies can use to stimulate innovation at smaller biotech companies? How can drugmakers raise the odds of success in this notoriously risky business? And why is Big Pharma continuing to bet big R&D dollars in partnerships, venture investing, and its own research centers in the greater Boston area?

These are some of the questions we are planning to dig into at the next Xconomy Forum— Pharma’s Bet on Boston Innovation—which is coming up the afternoon of Nov. 4 at the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, MA. We are thrilled to have assembled a top-notch group of pharmaceutical executives, biotech CEOs, and venture capitalists with a wide range of perspectives on how to take some of the best ideas at Boston’s great academic centers and help them find new ways to survive and thrive inside some very big companies during the later stages of development.(more)

Source: Newsweek

Source:Xconomy

What’s the connection between hardcore, chest-pounding video game action and Neils Bohr’s interpretation of wave-particle duality? It’s an Iranian-American physicist-turned-entrepreneur named Shahriar Afshar. Five years after Afshar announced the results of one of the most controversial experiments in the recent history of physics—one suggesting that it is possible, contrary to Bohr’s long-accepted theory, to observe light behaving as both particles and waves at the same time—the Cambridge, MA-based startup he founded, Immerz, is about to launch an “acousto-haptic” device that lets gamers both hear and feel gaming action at the same time.

Immerz’s product, called Kor-fx, is essentially a pair of woofers for your chest cavity, designed to enhance the sense of being immersed in a game (or a movie or a song)—hence the company’s name. Immerz showed off the device for the first time last week at the i-stage competition in Phoenix, AZ, where the Consumer Electronics Association—the same organization that runs the giant CES convention in Las Vegas every January—chose it as one of the 11 most innovative consumer technology products shipping next year. The company plans to bring the product to market in the first quarter of 2010, focusing first on PC gamers, and later on console players.(more)

Source: Katie Fehrenbacher, earth2tech.com

Sounds like the smart grid partnership between search engine Google and conglomerate General Electric could still deliver some real products, according to remarks from GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt at the Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday evening. “We will see more collaboration between GE and Google around the home,” said Immelt and that could include actual products “coming in the near future.” (more)

Source: Bloomberg.com

Many of the newest oncology medicines target proteins not shared by everyone, so they may not help some patients, Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE and Indianapolis-based Lilly said today in a statement.

Screening to find those proteins, or biomarkers, will save time and money and help patients avoid exposure to drugs that won’t work, the companies said. GE and Lilly plan to focus on breast, ovarian and lung cancers, and possibly on gastric malignancies as well. The mapping technology has been tested on colon and prostate cancer tissue samples, and the companies said it may work with all kinds of malignancies.

“This is one of the real holy grails in health care: embedding diagnostic capability inside a therapy company and vice versa so that you can develop more-effective drugs faster,” GE Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt said in an interview.(more)

Source: Xconomy

Luminus Devices in Billerica, MA, may hold the record among Massachusetts technology companies for the shortest time between conception and launch. But the journey since then has been anything but straightforward.

One summer day in 2002, recent MIT PhD graduate Alexei Erchak and his former advisor, physicist John Joannopolous, were meeting to talk about whether Erchak should accept a lucrative job offer he’d just received, or start his own company—perhaps around the work he’d done in Joannopolous’s lab on ways to use photonic crystals to extract more light from LEDs. “John said, ‘Let’s give Ray Stata a call and see what he thinks,’” says Erchak.

Stata, of course, is the famous MIT alum who co-founded Analog Devices, and a frequent venture investor in local startups. He took the call, and said he had half an hour to talk—but only if Erchak and Joannopolous could come to his office right away.

“We flew out of John’s office, sped down the Mass Pike at 90 miles per hour—at this point I still had jeans and a T-shirt on—and we ended up at that meeting,” Erchak recalls. “We walked into a big board room totally unprepared, except for some slides I’d grabbed out of my PhD presentation. We said ‘We have no idea how to deploy this technology, but if you give us some seed funding, we’ll go figure it out.’ Ray, being a very entrepreneurial-minded person, said that was all he needed to hear.”(more)

Source: Decision News Media

The FDA has warned consumers about the spread of counterfeit H1N1 treatments after the agency bought products advertised as Tamiflu (oseltamivir) that contained none of the active ingredient.

Since H1N1 began spreading in humans in April numerous websites have set up offering products, including vaccines, shampoos and gloves, that claim to prevent or treat swine flu.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sought to warn consumers about the ineffectiveness, and potential dangers, of buying unapproved products.

In its latest warning the FDA bought products online that claimed to be Tamiflu. One of these orders arrived in an unmarked envelope with a postmark from India and contained unlabeled, white tablets taped between two pieces of paper.

Following analysis of the tablets the agency found they contained talc and acetaminophen but none of the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) oseltamivir. The website disappeared shortly after the FDA placed the order.

Various levels of oseltamivir were found in the other products bought online but none were approved by the FDA. No prescription was needed to buy several of the products and they failed to arrive quickly enough to treat someone infected with H1N1.(more)

Source: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Just a few years ago, most conversations Christian Wetzel had about his research began with a quick explanation of LEDs.

More recently, however, he’s noticed that the mention of LEDs — light-emitting diodes — no longer prompts puzzled looks. He rarely has to delve into the elevator pitch about LEDs needing only a fraction of the energy required by conventional light bulbs, or mention that LEDs contain none of the toxic heavy metals used in the newer compact fluorescent light bulbs. He no longer has to sell the idea that LEDs are incredibly durable and long-lived.

The virtues of sustainability and efficiency are now so engrained in the public consciousness, Wetzel said, that he can usually skip over the nuts and bolts of solid-state lighting and instead launch right into his work on developing a high-performance, low-cost green LED.

“Going green means different things to different people. For most, it means being more conscious about the environmental and global impacts of one’s actions. For companies, going green also means making a profit by selling equipment and services that allow one’s customers to be more efficient and reduce costs,” said Wetzel, professor of physics and the Wellfleet Professor of Future Chips at Rensselaer. “I’m doing both of those, but I’m also trying to make an LED that literally shines green light.”(more)

Source: UC Berkley News

A bright point of light from a single plasmon laser emanates from the optical setup used by UC Berkeley researchers (enlarged closeup at right). These semiconductor lasers — the world's smallest — are extremely efficient, so the small amount of scattered light is clearly visible, even in ambient room lighting. Camera saturation of the bright laser light gives the impression of a larger spot. (Courtesy of Xiang Zhang Lab/UC Berkeley)

"This work shatters traditional notions of laser limits, and makes a major advance toward applications in the biomedical, communications and computing fields," said Xiang Zhang, director at UC Berkeley of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, and head of the research team behind this work

The achievement helps enable the development of such innovations as nanolasers that can probe, manipulate and characterize DNA molecules; optics-based telecommunications many times faster than current technology; and optical computing in which light replaces electronic circuitry with a corresponding leap in speed and processing power.(more)

Source: Yahoo! News

An estimated 1.5 million to 2 million people in the United States suffer from lupus, a disorder in which the body's defenses turn inward. The condition can cause symptoms similar to those of arthritis and rheumatic diseases.

At issue is the immune system's ability to take out the trash -- to get rid of cells that don't have long to live. "Just like in mice, in humans, if you don't clear the dying cells, then that predisposes you to lupus," said Lata Mukundan, a Stanford University School of Medicine researcher and co-author of a study published online Oct. 18 in the journal Nature Medicine.

"If you look at patients with lupus, they have an inability to clear those dead cells," Mukundan said in a statement.

The study authors report that they gained insight into how immune-system cells detect which other cells are dying in order to dispose of them. They looked at human and mouse cells outside the body and in genetically engineered mice.

The researchers suspected that a molecule known as PPAR-delta was crucial to the process. "We wanted to know, if you took a mouse and only deleted PPAR-delta from its macrophages, is that sufficient to cause an autoimmune disease?" asked Dr. Ajay Chawla, assistant professor of endocrinology and co-author of the study, in a statement. "Apparently it is," he said.(more)

Source: Laser Focus World

The nearly 16 million Euro LIFT project is intended to consolidate Europe's scientific, engineering, and production-related leadership position in fiber lasers. Laser suppliers, producers of optical and optoelectronic components, manufacturers of photonic fibers, fundamental researchers, and application engineers will work on several projects.(more)

Source: Laser Focus World

StockerYale will continue to operate both StockerYale Ireland (SYI; Cork, Ireland), which manufacturers LED systems based on its proprietary chip-on-board LED technology, and Photonic Products, Ltd. (PPL; Hertfordshire, England), which distributes premium laser diodes and manufactures custom laser modules. SYI and PPL represented approximately 47% of total StockerYale revenues in 2008.

"In acquiring these two product lines, we gain access to the machine vision market and expand our bioinstrumentation opportunities through the laser diode module business," said John Ambroseo, president and chief executive officer of Coherent. "We also add core fiber technology, which will improve our time to market and enhance both the performance and reliability of our fiber-based product platforms."

Source: Laser Focus World

In the automated adjustment procedure, the laser-diode bar is activated and the collimator lens is located in front of the diode laser with the help of a precision positioning system. Associated metrology hardware then collects and evaluates the laser radiation. The innovation lies in the fact that several positions of the collimator lens in front of the laser-diode bar are tested, aided by digital image-processing analysis of the intensity distribution of the laser radiation. The optimized position for the lens is defined by the help of appropriate alignment algorithms. Finally, the lens is fixed in the proper position in front of the laser-diode bar.(more)

Source: Harvard Business Publishing

Oliver Yeh, a first-year Mechanical Engineering student at MIT, just successfully designed, launched and retrieved a camera 17.5 miles into the atmosphere and took 4,000 photos — at a cost of just $150.00! That's probably less money than he will spend on his celebratory dinner.

Not only is this story inspirational to someone like me, who after millions and millions of miles in the air (no exaggeration) still sits glued to the window when I fly over Manhattan or the Grand Canyon, but it points out how the minimum efficient scale of doing fantastic things is getting orders of magnitude lower in some industries. This lower cost of entry can be magnified and accelerated when you have someone come to the design problem with an entirely new set of expectations.

Craig Newmark's Craig's List is estimated to have about $100,000,000 in revenue — with 30 employees. That's $3.3 million per employee, and even if it costs $70,000,000 to run it (which it can't), that's a profit-per-employee of $1,000,000. (Compare that with Amazon's profit-per-employee of approximately $30,000.) His model is so disruptive because he gives away all the ads except those for jobs, thereby turning what was once newspaper profits into what economists know as consumer surplus.

Now, there's been a lot of interest in "disruption" ever since Clay Christensen did his pathbreaking work on The Innovator's Dilemma, which chronicled how incumbent companies were upended by competitors or substitutes who arose from "lower" markets to create a new cost and demand base. Southwest Airlines did it in air travel, and Wal-Mart in retail. You know the story.(more)

Source: ChiefExecutive.net

Source: The Economist

Source: Xconomy

I spent an enlightening week in Tokyo earlier this month participating in the Kauffman Fellows Japan Summit. This summit was the brainchild of three visionary Kauffman Fellows who are on a mission to instill entrepreneurship into the Japanese culture. During the three days we heard about the current (dismal) status of venture capital and entrepreneurial success in Japan—especially in the life sciences—in contrast to the unbelievable track record of Japanese engineering and precision manufacturing, as well as the country’s output of patents, which rivals that of the U.S.

Walking around Tokyo and interacting with the many smart minds at the summit, I had to scratch my head—at first blush, the ingredients of great entrepreneurship in life sciences are there. But why is there no soup? One of the most staggering statistics presented at the meeting was that just $200M was invested in local life science companies in 2008, with one pharma spin-out venture taking half the total!

Source:optics.org

With the global economy in the dumps, this looks like no time to be starting a new photonics business. But even now, argues David Nugent of Elucidare, determined innovators can still connect with capital.

David Nugent

Elucidare of Cambridge, UK, is a boutique investment advisory and business development consultancy that specializes in photonics, semiconductors, medical imaging, renewable energy and pharmaceuticals. With clients spanning the investment spectrum - from university technology-transfer units to institutional fund managers - Elucidare has helped more than 250 companies create intellectual property, raise investment funds, and exit through trade sale or initial public offering (IPO). To read the interview, click here.

Source:New England Tech Wires

Cambridge, Mass. -- BBN Technologies, a Cambridge-based developer of advanced technologies, announced that the GENI project, which is based at BBN, has received an $11.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for 33 academic/industrial research teams to accelerate prototyping technologies for the project. GENI is a "virtual laboratory at the frontier of network science and engineering for exploring future internets at scale, creates major opportunities to understand, innovate and transform global networks and their interactions with society," according to the organization. A list of the new grant recipients is available at the link below. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

Fraunhofer USA Inc. officially opened its Center for Sustainable Energy (CSE) Systems, a photovoltaic module innovation laboratory, in Cambridge today. The MIT Energy Initiative and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative first announced news of the facility in April of 2008.

The launch of the laboratory was celebrated today with a ribbon cutting ceremony involving Ian Bowles, Massachusetts secretary of energy, and German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth.

The laboratory will host research, development, testing and evaluation of materials and processes associated with PV solar modules. A second facility, with both indoor and outdoor testing capability, is also in progress to enable development of residential energy management, photovoltaics for buildings and energy retrofits. The goal of the center is to develop more affordable PV modules for more widespread use.
To read more, click here.

While the Dow Jones industrial average might have closed above the 10,000 level once again, the venture capital industry isn't exactly out of the woods yet.

By Tim Mullaney

Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Venture-capital fundraising dropped to its lowest point in six years during the third quarter as financial turmoil continued to curb universities and pension funds’ investments in startup companies.

Venture firms raised $1.56 billion in the quarter, the National Venture Capital Association said in a statement. The number of dollars committed was the lowest since the first quarter of 2003, while the 17 investment pools raised were the fewest since the third quarter of 1994.

Fundraising in the venture-capital industry has been buffeted by the slowing market for initial public offerings, Ray Rothrock, a partner at Palo Alto, California venture firm Venrock said in an interview last month. There have been only 14 IPOs of U.S. startups since the end of 2007, according to NVCA data. Read more

Source: Fierce Biotech

A start-up biotech that counts a Nobel laureate among its founders has settled in Jupiter, FL with $8 million in venture cash in the bank. Landing the fledgling biotech company is a win for Florida economic development officials, who have been anxious to built a new cluster around the research institutions which have moved to the state. 

Envoy Therapeutics has set out to discover new drugs that can target proteins in the brain. And the Palm Beach Post says that Envoy intends to build a pipeline of new therapies for schizophrenia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, drug addiction, epilepsy, anxiety and depression and other disorders.

Source: MassDevice

The health information technology sector could come out a big winner if recommendations from the Health Care Payment System Commission are implemented.

In testimony before the healthcare reform financing committee on Beacon Hill, JudyAnn Bigby, secretary of the Executive Office of Health and Human Services, told the joint legislative body that better HIT systems are critical to the kind of collaboration across physician networks needed to implement a switch to a global payment system.

The hearings, held in a sweltering and jam-packed basement hearing room at the Statehouse, were meant to solicit public comment on recommendations made by the commission in July, when it released a 77-page report advocating for changes to the way healthcare is paid for in the Bay State. Among those recommendations was a call to switch from a fee-for-service model — in which doctors are paid per procedure by insurance companies — to a global payment system, whereby physicians are paid an annual fee per patient by insurance companies.(more)

Source: Wall Street Journal 

By DAVID PEARSON

 PARIS -- The French government Thursday said it plans to spend €1.5 billion (about $2.2 billion) on creating a battery-charging network for electric vehicles as part of a broader state plan to encourage the development of clean vehicle technology and battery manufacturing.

It also said it would seek financing of €900 million for its €1.5 billion plan from a state loan that's planned to be launched next year. Read more

Source: OPN

Dynamic interferometers are used throughout the world for making critical measurements of large mirrors, telescopes and other optical systems. The combination of application-specific analysis software and vibration-insensitive measurement hardware makes it possible to measure optical systems with segmented clear apertures. To read more, click here.

Source: OPN

Paleontology has come a long way since early fossil-hunters roamed the Wild West at the end of the 19^th century. Back then, they used sharp eyes, picks, shovels and horse-drawn wagons in the field, and hand tools and calipers in the lab. Now, 21^st century paleontologists are using lasers to record three-dimensional images of their discoveries, to analyze fossils, and to date rocks. To read more, click here.

Source: Micromanufacturing

Recent advances in femtosecond laser technology have greatly enhanced the spatial precision of laser microprocessing and given access to interaction mechanisms that can be utilized to alter work materials in new ways. While femtosecond lasers have been used commercially since the early 1990s, these developments may expand their use by industry.

Femtosecond lasers ablate material so rapidly that virtually no heat is propagated in the workpiece. In addition, tightly focused femtosecond laser pulses can deposit energy into micrometer-scale volumes in the bulk of transparent materials, offering the potential for 3-D microfabrication. (Bulk refers to the entire lateral and vertical region between the front and back sides of the material.) When a visible or infrared laser pulse of femtosecond duration (one-quadrillionth of a second) strikes a material, the photons in the beam interact only with the valence electrons (those in the outer shell of an atom). Immediately after the substance is hit, there are the extremely hot valence electrons and a lattice of ionic cores that remain at, essentially, room temperature.

Limiting the time of the laser pulse is the key to heat control. Eric Mazur, professor at the Department of Physics and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, explained: "It takes on the order of 10 picoseconds before the lattice equilibrates to the electrons. Therefore, if you use a pulse that is longer than a few picoseconds, the lattice and the electrons heat together in tandem because, as you feed energy to the electrons, they transfer part of the energy to the lattice during the laser pulse. So, when a laser pulse of picosecond duration or longer strikes a material, the entire material heats up in way that is not much different from that of an oven." To read more, click here.

Source: FirstWorld

The value of the global pharmaceutical market is expected to grow 4 to 6 percent in 2010, exceeding $825 billion, led by stronger near-term growth in the US market, according to a forecast by IMS Health. In addition, the company raised its expectations for five-year growth in the international prescription drug market by one percentage point in its latest forecast, to between 4 and 7 percent per year through 2013, "partly due to the stronger demand being experienced in 2009."

In the US, the pharmaceutical market is expected to increase 4.5 to 5.5 percent in 2009, and 3 to 5 percent in 2010. In its previous forecast in April, IMS had predicted a decline of 1 to 2 percent in the US prescription drug market for this year.

IMS attributed the strengthening of near-term growth possibilities in the US to sustained price increases by drugmakers, their increased use of discounts and rebates, as well as changing inventory stocking patterns by pharmacies. In addition, prescriptions may be helped by the overhaul of the US healthcare system due to previously uninsured patients gaining access to treatments, particularly those for dyslipidaemia and diabetes, suggested Murray Aitken, IMS' senior vice-president for healthcare insight.(more)

Breakfast Event, Oct 27^th 8:00 to 9:00 am

Location: Hubtech21, Cambridge Innovation Center,One Broadway, 14th floor, room: Charles, Cambridge, MA 02142

This event is free of charge.

In France, high-tech market actors, corporations and government administrations have been early proponents of open source technology, and can provide insight on what the future of open source holds.

• Large and local government agencies (Finance Dpt., Police, Parliament, Regional and local bodies such as the Paris Region and the city of Paris) have massively deployed their next generation IT infrastructure on free and open source software,
• Large industrial groups as well as high-tech SMEs have leveraged open source to optimise growth and cost: Priceminister.com, SNCF (the national railway company), Peugeot
• New markets have emerged for services and have defined new categories such as the SSLL (Sociétés de Services en Logiciels Libres - Free Software Services Companies): Linagora, Alterway, Smile.
• Many new software start-ups have elected to build and to market their software products as open source: Talend, Nuxeo, ExoPlatform, Wallix.

in France, open source is becoming the backbone of IT infrastructure and a driver that is reshaping the IT industry.  With uncertain times ahead, the trend of open source as an engine of new growth and value creation is likely to gain even more momentum.

Who should attend?

Anyone interested in learning about:

• Business Opportunities in France
• Best practices from current players there (French & American)
• Local support for companies developing in France

Speakers:

• Marie Buhot-Launay, Business Software Director, Paris Region Economic Development Agency
• Alan Facey, Executive Vice President, International, Black Duck
• David Cloyd, General Manager - Americas, Nuxeo Corp

Participation by RSVP only: mbuhotlaunay@paris-region.com or Hubtech21@hubtech21.com

About the Speakers

Marie Buhot-Launay

Marie Buhot-Launay has been Business Software Director at the Paris Region Development Agency since September 2006. She is responsible for the identification and support of foreign investors in business software and IT services. She has assisted in  the location in the Paris region of such successful ventures as the Canadian company Smart Technologies, the world's leading manufacturer of interactive whiteboards. Marie is also VP International relation of the Open World Forum, the davos of the open source taking place in Paris every year. She also works on the development of an open source cluster in the Paris Region.  

Marie graduated from Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris, (Paris Business School). In 2000 she founded Istation, a company dedicated to the installation of internet access points. Between 2003 and 2006 she was an independent consultant specialising in marketing consultancy for SMEs and entrepreneurs.

Alan Facey

Alan brings more than 25 years of experience building high-performance sales teams in start-ups and established software companies. Most recently, he was Vice President of Global Sales and Services at database auditing specialist Lumigent Technologies.
Prior to Lumigent, Alan was Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Services for content management systems vendor ClearStory Systems and interim Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing at compliance solutions provider Obian. His successful career at application development and database leader Progress Software spanned nine years as Vice President, Europe, Middle East & Africa Operations, and later as Vice President, North American operations and global channels. Facey's background also includes international sales and general management roles at Cleanwise, Holistic Systems, Lucas Engineering & Systems and Metier Management Systems.

David Cloyd

Over the past 20 years Mr. Cloyd has built a significant track record of success in managing the sales and marketing efforts within software companies, large and small, with a particular focus on startup ventures for European based technology companies.

In this capacity he has been directly responsible for building ground sales organizations that have grown to over $20M in revenue. Most recently he launched and served as President of North American operations for Fabasoft, a publicly traded software company based in Austria.

Prior to joining Fabasoft he served in senior management roles leading the sales and marketing efforts for Cimage, and Staffware Corporation, both headquartered in the U.K. and both acquired as strategic assets in large part due to the success of their North America operations which were led by Mr. Cloyd.

While Mr. Cloyd is a seasoned startup veteran, he has had the very fortunate experience of working for two of the most highly respected sales organizations in the world, General Electric and Xerox. The experiences and education that he has taken away from these first class organizations have been the cornerstones of his success.

Source: FierceBiotechAny loyal reader of our weekly profiles on emerging biotech companies knows that just about everyone running a fledgling biotech company today always has one eye on the exit door. One of the most popular scenarios: You get your programs in the clinic and if you do well, a buyer may come along with an offer you can't refuse. It's especially popular since the IPO exit strategy virtually disappeared from the list of possibilities 18 months ago. Venture backers dream about that. It's virtually a biotech tradition.

But the Boston Globe covered a group of some prominent biotech executives who gathered in Boston yesterday to warn the industry that if you aren't planning on staying independent and growing your biotech company, you're not operating in the real world.

"Cultures that depend on survival are absolutely critical for this industry to succeed,'' said Barry Greene, president of Cambridge biotech Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. "If you don't want to (stay independent), you're not a company. You're a project.''(more)

Source: MassHighTech

Source: MHT

The huge Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) International Convention is coming back to Boston, city officials announced Monday.

The BIO International Convention brings together life sciences companies and organizations, as well as investors, in the world's largest biotech industry gathering.

The event, which typically draws about 20,000 attendees and 500 journalists from around the world, will come to the city in 2012, Mayor Thomas M. Menino and others said. By 2012, organizers expect the crowd could reach 26,000 and on peak nights require 10,000 hotel rooms, officials said.

The convention took place in Boston in 2007. At the time, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick used the convention as his stage for unveiling the state's $1 billion life sciences stimulus package, the 10-year industry funding bill.To read more, click here.

Source: MHT

Bay State officials are looking for help to bring the public transportation sector into the digital world, with the announcement today of a new conference and a coding challenge.

The Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation will host a free Developers Conference on Nov. 14, 2009, at the Tang Center at MIT in Cambridge. Starting today, however, the EOT is launching the 2009 EOT Developers Challenge, which will encourage developers to create both applications and data visualizations about transportation on the MBTA. The apps will be submitted to the EOT and ideally released to the public, officials said. 

The two top submissions will receive a CharlieCard valid for one year of free travel on the MBTA, according to EOT officials.

Within the past few weeks, Massachusetts-based companies Sparkfish Creative and Wonderland Development launched iPhone applications to help users navigate the MBTA system. And an application called UniBus is already using transportation data for all state agencies, creating a statewide transit scheduler for the iPhone.  To read more, click here.

Source: MHT

The group Mobile Monday lived up to half its name last night, as it held a meeting and panel discussion on a Wednesday at the Boston Harbor Hotel. The large crowd heard a clear message from the panelists: 2009 really is finally the year of mobile.

Andy Miller, CEO of Quattro Wireless, put the year in context in response to a question from moderator Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School: "The mobile web today is like the wired web was in 1997 or 1998. Is that exciting? I think that's pretty exciting," Miller said.

The panel also included Bill Scott, vice president of business development at Calif.-based application aggregator website GetJar; Jason Jacobs, founder of fitness app maker Runkeeper Inc.; and Seth Priebatsch, CEO of Scvngr Inc. As a sign of the activity in the mobile space, almost all of the panelists - as well as many of the audience members asking questions - took some time to note they were hiring and in great need of good talent.

"Yes, it's difficult to hire and find people," Priebatsch said in response to an audience question. "But I would rather do it here than anywhere else." To read more, click here.

Source: MHT

The MassTLC Innovation unConference has grown fast, with 437 people attending the second annual installment of the open-ended conference organized by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council - up from 285 at the first conference last October.

Session topics - which are proposed ad-hoc and posted at the beginning of the day - ranged from a demo of the flying car made by Woburn-based Terrafugia Inc. , to a discussion titled, "All the bad things VCs want to do to you," led by Richard Dale of Sigma Partners.

Paul Maeder of Highland Capital led a discussion on noncompete agreements in advance of a public hearing to be held next Wednesday (he's against them), and Hub Angels Investment Group's  David Verrill and Pixability Inc. CEO Bettina Hein talked about how to raise money from angel investors.
To read more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

Mayor Tom Menino touted today the arrival of Ginkgo BioWorks and Eutropics Pharmaceuticals, two biotechnology firms lured to the Boston area with assistance from the city's LifeTech initiative.

The initiative, created in 2004, aims to attract life sciences firms to Boston by assisting with low-interest loans, site location and permitting. The Boston Redevelopment Authority manages the initiative.

Ginkgo BioWorks received a $150,000 LifeTech Innovation Fund loan from the Boston Local Development Corp. The synthetic biology firm was developed by five MIT researchers and has its 3,400-square foot laboratory located in  the Marine Industrial Park on the South Boston Waterfront.
 (...) In July of 2006, Mayor Menino announced a plan to have 10,000 biotech-related jobs in place by the year 2010.

Mass High Tech last reported on new biotechnology firms brought to Boston through the LifeTech iniative in 2008. The companies at that time included Soadco SL, Paratek Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Cogito Health Inc.  To read more, click here.

Source: Fierce Biotech

Armed with a plan to invest $100 million in the next year in the life sciences and technology, the newly-formed Google Ventures has made its first biotech investment, leading a Series D for the antibody start-up Adimab. And Managing Partner William Maris has joined the Lebanon, NH-based Adimab board.

Google may be bringing more than just its cash to the table. In a sign of Google's specific interest in biotech, Adimab relies on some powerful computational resources to whip up antibodies much more rapidly than the current standards allow. "We give you a diversity to choose from that nobody else can offer you," CEO Tillman U. Gerngross, tells Dow Jones. "In three months, you walk way with hundreds of fully human antibodies." Gerngross co-founded GlycoFi, which Merck bought for $400 million.

Google's name elicits images of vast wealth and resources, but if this first step is any indication, they're not looking to splurge. The size of the round was not disclosed, but a source told Dow Jones that the round totaled only about $13 million. The developer's previous investors--Borealis Ventures, Polaris Venture Partners, OrbiMed Advisors and SV Life Sciences--joined in.(more)

Source:Mass High Tech

As European wind turbine makers look to the United States as a source of new business opportunities, one Vermont commercial-scale turbine maker is hoping to build on early success in Europe with its first international beachhead in Zurich.

Northern Power Systems has already booked about 5 million euros, or $7.28 million, in orders for its 100 kilowatt turbines across Europe, and company officials say a dedicated sales staff will further drive the company's recent success. To know more, click here.

Source: Laser Focus World

A low-cost, imaging-based force-feedback device has been created that allows users to perceive real Brownian motion and viscosity when using optical tweezers; in effect, the user can "feel the force" exerted as objects are manipulated by a trapped bead.¹ The device is the result of a collaborative effort by researchers from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, France), CEA Laboratoire Interfaces Sensorielles (Fontenay-aux-Roses, France), the University of Glasgow (Glasgow, Scotland), and the University of Bristol (Bristol, England).  To read more, click here.

Source: Laser Focus World

Cassical bench-top microscopes are sophisticated tools based on a universal platform to meet diverse needs without significant reconfiguration. They are ideal for research work, but less so for many emerging applications including disease screening.

Detection of malaria or tuberculosis, for example, requires high-resolution images (from several to several hundred), which makes specimen evaluation lengthy and tedious. In addition, the need for highly trained operators limits the use of standard microscopy and image cytometry in poor and underdeveloped regions.

In fields such as cancer diagnostics, endomicroscopy can enable high-resolution in vivo imaging, increasing the screened tissue volume and providing guidance for acquisition of biopsy samples for subsequent histopathology. Endomicroscopy can also enable in situ tumor margin detection, assessment of targeted therapies, and evaluation of drugs during development.  To read more, click here.

Source: Laser Focus World

Because its probe and reference beams follow the same path, a common-path interferometer can measure changes in optical phase while being mostly unaffected by ambient variations such as air turbulence. This sort of instrument is useful for precision motion control, as well as for measuring vibrations, surface profiles, variations in refractive index, and other attributes. Phase-shifting versions of common-path interferometers, either temporal (sequential phase steps) or spatial (three or four simultaneous side-by-side beams, each one phase-shifted by a different amount) provide a particularly good signal.

Two researchers at Hitachi (Yokohama, Japan), Toshihiko Nakata and Masahiro Watanabe, have developed a spatial phase-shifting common-path interferometer that is built around photonic-crystal polarizers (PCPs), making the design compact and simple, and many of its components monolithic.1 The instrument, which is about the size of a man's thumb, has another advantage: the probe beam makes two round-trips between the reference mirror and the sample instead of the usual single round-trip, doubling the phase change and thus the sensitivity. To read more, click here.

Source: Harvard Business Publishing

What makes visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple's Steve Jobs, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Ebay's Pierre Omidyar and Meg Whitman, and P&G's A.G. Lafley tick? In a question-and-answer session with HBR contributing editor Bronwyn Fryer, Professors Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of Insead explain how the "Innovators' DNA" works.This post is part of HarvardBusiness.org's Creativity at Work special package.

Fryer: You conducted a six-year study surveying 3,000 creative executives and conducting an additional 500 individual interviews. During this study you found five "discovery skills" that distinguish them. What are these skills?

Dyer: The first skill is what we call "associating." It's a cognitive skill that allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas. The second skill is questioning — an ability to ask "what if", "why", and "why not" questions that challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture. The third is the ability to closely observe details, particularly the details of people's behavior. Another skill is the ability to experiment — the people we studied are always trying on new experiences and exploring new worlds. And finally, they are really good at networking with smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn.(more)