Video interpretation of the Yahoo bid drama: who is who?

Will JoVE’s new science blog service reinvent the genre?

The pioneer biological video publishing site JoVE (covered here many times) will soon launch a blogging platform and a community site. Nikita Bernstein, the main nerd behind JoVE is building the code and the platform - as Anne Kushnir informed me - should hopefully go live in the next couple of weeks. At least that is what can be known publicly.
The expectations are high and the JoVE guys (co-founders Moshe Pritsker and Nikita) themselves raised the bar with the quality and concept of video-protocols. As JoVE is a startup, not an established company with big inertia, they could be experimental but within the limits of their investors’ patience and money.

The real question for me whether JoVE’s blogging service can renew the genre of science blogging or at least bring a previously non-existing color into it? Points:

- Who will become JoVE’s first generation bloggers? Fresh blood? If yes what will be the source? Senior scientists, high school students, postdocs in the U.S.A., discovering the web?

- Existing bloggers who’d like to syndicate their content? Bloggers from Scienceblogs, Nature Network or from the DNA Network? Independent bloggers from outside theses established circles? Journalists? What will be the bait? For existing bloggers, who are tempted to commercialize their activity somehow the crucial question is whether they can generate any revenue out of this new platform? Will they be paid by traffic, and if yes how competitive are the tariffs? Is it possible to install paid ads, banners on the blogs and the bloggers could be paid based on pay per click methods just like Google AdSense?

- What about content rights? Exclusive, non-exclusive, et cetera? Would there be any topic restrictions? How can quality science blogging and credit is maintained in the long term?

CIRM and NIH stem cell grants to the biotech industry

Different attitudes, same endeavors.

1. The folks at the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) started to offer grants for biotech companies up to $55,000 out of the 3 billion ‘hope’ dollars.

San Diego Union Tribune: Industry and academia team up:

For the first time in its three-year existence, the state taxpayer-funded stem cell institute is offering grant money to biotechnology companies….The stem cell institute wants to issue up to 20 planning grants to allow prospective disease-team members to hold teleconferences and travel to meetings around the state with potential collaborators to work out the details of how their group would function.

The idea is to form a team whose members have expertise in all areas of developing a drug or diagnostic – from the initial idea to testing it on animal models, producing enough of it for experiments and figuring out how it meets the needs of patients.

2. On the other hand, the NIH people in Bethesda, Maryland like the West and East Coast United Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) but not because the company’s single cell biopsy method for creating ethical ES cells.

Reuters: Advanced Cell Technology Awarded Grant from the NIH

Web entrepreneurs and biotech: strangers from distant lands

Elrond: Strangers from distant lands, friends of old you have been summoned here to answer the threat of Mordor. Middle Earth stands upon the brink of destruction, none can escape it. You will unite or you will fall. Each race is bound to this fate, this one doom. Bring forth the ring, Frodo.
[Frodo puts the ring on a stand for all to see]
Boromir: So it is true. In a dream, I saw the Eastern sky grow dark. But in the West, a pale light lingered. A voice was crying, “The doom is near at hand, Isildur’s Bane is found.”
[Reaches for the Ring]
Boromir: Isildur’s Bane…
Aragorn: Boromir!
Gandalf: speaking the words engraved on the Ring] Ash Nazg Durbatuluk, Ash Nazg Gimbatul, Ash Nazg Thrakatuluk, Agh Burzum-ishi Krimpatul.
[the light darkens and the air rumbles; Boromir backs away from the Ring]

Let us form the first real alliance of BT folks and IT people through personalized genomics (and later with regenerative medicine as I hope so), but take care, biologists and geneticists have way too powerful tools and web entrepreneurs are greedily looking for new territory with their unconceivable computational and storage capacity and perpetual hunger! Go, go, push, push! (Of course, there is no such thing as an outside threat of Mordor in this situation, the real threat (the other side of the reward coin) as in every revolutionary case is the shared ambition of tech people to make formerly impossible things possible).

The following words are from David Ewing Duncan’s Welcome to the Future:

Some analysts predict that the genetic-testing market 23andMe is entering could be worth a staggering $12.5 billion by 2009. Naturally, this has attracted the interest of Web entrepreneurs. They see an industry that is largely unregulated (so far) and costs only a few million dollars to enter—the price of a few brilliant programmers, a website, and marketing—and are betting that people will pay to test their own DNA directly. One indication of the potential market is that online medical-information companies are starting to make real profits. WebMD, for instance, attracts 40 million users a month and expects to net more than $30 million this year, mostly from ad sales. “I’m convinced there is an early-adopter market here,” says Sue Siegel, former president of Affymetrix and now a venture capitalist at Mohr Davidow. “Millions of people are used to getting health-care information online.”

SENS3: The stem cell marketplace by Linda Powers, Tucan Capital (slides)

Linda Powers is the managing director and co-founder of Toucan Capital Corp, a $120 million venture capital fund (SBIC) focused on seed and early-stage life science and advanced technology investments (the fund markets itself as the The Leading US Investor in Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine). Out of here insights and facts presented on the SENS3 conference (I caught some of her slides with my iPhone, see below) I’d like to highlight the following ones:
- the anti-aging market today is approx. 42 billion dollars,
- the number of issued and published U.S. stem cell patents has been decreased for the first time since 2000 compared to the earlier year,
- viable business models in regenerative medicine are still missing,
- first-to-trial and -market is not always advantageous in regmed.

Are we really in the age of Regenerative Medicine 2.0? A comparison by Chris Mason

In the age of compelling technology analogies and nomenclatures it was unavoidable that somebody at last identifies enough differences in the history of industrial regenerative medicine to tell Regenerative Medicine 1.0 from 2.0. The man behind is Chris Mason, Group Leader of Stem Cell + Regenerative Medicine Bioprocessing Unit, University College London and cofounder and co-organiser of the London Regenerative Medicine Network (LRMN). His papers can be downloaded from his website and I advise to start with the one titled Regenerative Medicine 2.0, a term also abbreviated as RegenMed 2.0, but I would call it simply RegMed 2.0. The best way to focus on the differences between the 2 periods of RegMed is to show the comparative and quite exhaustive Table 1 made by Chris (in 3 screenshots). It is worth discussing his points and tenets and put the question: Are we really in the age of Regenerative Medicine 2.0 or the analogy with Web 2.0 is unestablished in many respects?

20 medical enterprises out of 100 fastest growing tech companies in 2007

Check out Business 2.0’s 100 fastest growing tech companies and read the excellent little summaries on the first 25 out of which 5 are medical related. In regenerative medicine LifeCell has a high position with competitors like Genentech (here think about the recent 23andMe story), Amgen Inc, Gilead Sciences.

BioTech(nically), Business 2.0’s new biotech blog

Business 2.0 Blog Beta Network’s new blog BioTech(nically) was launched written by Marie Cannizzaro who says about herself in the intro post, March 27: “Before joining Business 2.0, I wrote for Dow Jones VentureWire and Stanford Magazine. I have a degree in Human Biology with a concentration in Biotechnology and Bioethics from Stanford University.”

At the present moment, the blog is in an experimental condition, and it takes time for the blogger to form an idiosyncratic style with special topic selection and get a highly targeted stable audience. But as BioTech(nically) is a member of a very prestigious blog network of professional journalists, it is a superb advantage that could easily shorten the experimental period. Good luck to Marie and welcome to the emerging biotech blogdom.

Truth to be told: I would be really happy to do this biotech blog job for Business 2.0. In fact I did try to apply this job even when it was non-existing, but I was sure this fits into Business 2.0’s web and high tech focused profile. Here are some sentences from my pushy mail to Erick Schonfeld, from October, 2006 with the subject: joining Business 2.0 Beta as a biotech blogger: “I found the Business 2.0 Beta aggregator idea fascinating but what I really missed out of the blogs you have is an uptodate and cool biotech-regmed blog.

Technological breakthroughs in Regmed according to a Global Strategic Business Report

Research and Markets has announced the addition of Regenerative Medicine - Global Strategic Business Report to their offering for EUR 3,407.00. Link

“This report analyzes the worldwide markets for Regenerative Medicine in Millions of US$. The report provides separate comprehensive analytics for the US, Japan, Europe, Canada, and Asia-Pacific, and Rest of World. Annual forecasts are provided for each region for the period of 2003 through 2010. The report profiles 107 companies including many key and niche players worldwide. Market data and analytics are derived from primary and secondary research. Company profiles are mostly extracted from URL research and reported select online sources.”

In this research focused industry I’d like to highlight the content of chapter 4 of the Business Report on technological innovations in regmed: how many of them have you ever heard?

4. Technological Innovations / Breakthroughs II-27
Biovest International Launches AutovaxID™ II-27
Stelic Institute Announces New Treatment Method for Acute Liver Failure II-27
TissueGene Initiates Phase 1 Clinical Trials for TG-C II-27
ISTO Announces FDA’s IND Approval for Neocartilage Graft II-28
Cook Biotech Introduces Surgisis® AFP™ Anal Fistula Plug II-28
Korean Scientists Make a Major Breakthrough in Stem Cell Lines II-28
Japanese Researchers Regenerate Jaw Bone II-28
Geron Researchers Differentiate Hepatocytes from hESCs II-29
Geron Demonstrates Potential of hESCs in Treatment of Parkinson’s disease II-29
Geron Researches Cardiomyocytes for Heart Disease II-29
Endovasc Announces New Findings at Texas Heart Institute Research II-29
Geron and Celera Genomics Complete Characterization of Active Genes in hESCs II-30
Rockefeller University Develops Solution for Maintaining Plupotency in hESCs II-30
Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer II-31
Manipulating Cells to Develop Tissue II-31
Terumo All Set to Regenerate Cardiac Muscle Tissues II-31
ThermoGenesis Innovates Bioengineered Cornea Cell Implant II-32
Organ Rejection Risk Minimized by Filtering Antibodies from Blood II-32
Regenerative Medicine for Acute Renal Failure Patients II-33
Tepha Develops PHA4400 Thermoplastic Polyester Biomaterial II-33
Regenerated Eye Transplantation Mastered in Tadpoles II-34
Investigations on Role of Microgravity in Regenerative Medicine II-34
Geron Researches Derivation of Neurons and Neural Progenitors from hESCs II-34

LabAction.com: new player on the science video niche market

Well, I am pleased to announce that we’ve just entered into an era of online scientific video sharing as there exists now a nascent niche market around. After the first mover JoVE (Journal of Visualized Expermients, covered many times here), LabAction.com was launched on 21st March 07 with as many as 3 biology-related videos. And I am more happy since one of my post had a little role as founder Ian Brown emailed me: “I read one of your blog on Science: video protocols can help to share the tacit dimension that appeared in October 06. It really inspired me to do a YouTube for LifeScientists. It took me quite some time to figure out what it takes to built a video sharing site but yes that was a good experience. I have recently launched a site www.labaction.com for sharing Biology videos.”

Ok, so LabAction is a definitely a YouTube-like video sharing surface, where everybody can upload their scientific related videos on protocols, products and so on. That means there won’t be any quality control here in contrast with JoVE’s editorial review process due to the novelty and required quality of video science publishing, but on the other hand LabAction could be popular because everybody can upload videos here. It could become a pop science site and for instance it may also be the place of high tech product adverstising, just like this cool microarray video ad, where at the turntable there is a guru made out of pipette tips scratching with a magnetic mixer, while eppendorf hiphop freaks are enjoying the perfomance of microarray built high tech break dancers.

From Ian’s writeup: LabAction.com presents a portal where researchers can share the much needed information on essential steps of new protocols and techniques. Videos and commentaries on every aspect of biology ranging from basic molecular biology to complex protein microarray experiments or trickiest surgery could be made accessible using video formats.

Carnival of Biotechnology on Babybiotechs

The recent Carnival of Biotechnology is hosted on Babybiotechs and is rather industry and business oriented which is a good sign of a more mature industry. Check the posts and form an opinion.

How much do you think a scientific blog post is worth (in US dollars)?

Ok, this is the question I asked yesterday at LinkedIn Question&Answers service: How much do you think a scientific blogpost article of 300 words is worth (in US dollars)?

Is your biotech company Nasdaq listed?

Yesterday I shot Nasdaq on 4 Times Square Plz. Do you know how many public, stem cell-related, biotech companies are included in the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index? You can check that.

80 year old Lokey’s $33 million donation for Stanford Stem Cell Labs

Such a Californian story: Lorry I. Lokey, the founder of Business Wire will give a minimum of $33 million to help build a home for Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. Lokey says: “The important thing to me is that stem cells might not only extend life, but also improve the quality of life, as so many people suffer in their later years,” said Lokey, who will turn 80 in March. “But I think stem cells will have applications across the entire life span.” Lokey’s contribution to the School of Medicine—its largest single gift to date from an individual—will launch construction of new stem cell laboratories on campus where scientists will probe the power of these elusive cells in treating conditions as diverse as cancer, stroke and diabetes. Lokey launched Business Wire in San Francisco in 1961 with $2,000 of his own money. It quickly grew to become a news industry powerhouse, now distributing an average of 17,000 corporate and academic press releases a month. “The biotech revolution has become so important to the quality of life,” he said. “To me, the biotech field is going to be very, very hot for the next generation.” Link

Disruptor candidate stem cell therapies

Stem cell therapies are likely to be disruptive treatments for the following medical sectors according to the Stem Cell Market Analysis Fact Sheet:

What is interesting in the following list: all the target tissues are of mesodermal origin.

• Total knee implants: Stem cell therapies that repair worn articular or meniscus cartilage will delay and potentially reduce the need for total knee replacement surgery

• Sports medicine: Stem cell therapies will extend the continuum of care for “weekend warriors.” It is highly likely that stem cell therapies will become the standard of care for torn meniscus or damaged articular cartilage

• Heart muscle repair following heart attacks

• Vascularization: To improve flow of blood by stimulating growth of new capillaries and vessels to the heart muscle

• Use of bone marrow transplants: stem cell therapies significantly reduce the effects of graft vs. host disease in patients with transplants.

• Treating the broad range of inflammation in the human body.