The title question is my million (not billion yet) dollar question for this year. Arthur Levinson is a board member of Google (Apple too) and in his leftover time he is the CEO of the most successful biotech company so far, that’s Genentech. I would be curious to hear about his biotech-related activity as a G board member from my readers even in the form of guesses. Maybe he is teaching biotech classes to Googlers after both Genentech’s and Google’s investment into 23andMe or just sitting around sometimes at the nice cafeterias at the Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View and explaining knockout technology to coders.
The preliminary program already has over two dozen confirmed
speakers, all of them world leaders in their field. As for previous
conferences I have [co-]organised, the emphasis of this meeting is on
“applied biogerontology” — the design and implementation of
biomedical interventions that may, jointly, constitute a
comprehensive panel of rejuvenation therapies, sufficient to restore
middle-aged or older laboratory animals (and, in due course, humans)
to a youthful degree of physiological robustness. The list of
scientific sessions and confirmed speakers is as follows:
DNA damage, telomeres, cancer
Adam Arkin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Jan Vijg, Buck
Institute for Age Research; Jerry Shay, U. Texas Southwestern;
Claudia Gravekamp, Pacific Medical Center Research Institute; Zheng
Cui, Wake Forest University School of Medicine; Rita Effros, UCLA
The cell niche
Irina Conboy, U. California Berkeley; Judith Campisi, Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory and Buck Institute; Leanne Jones, Salk
Institute; Ken Muneoka, Tulane University; Kevin Healy, Stanford
University
Finally back from my Bay Area trip, the workshop I participated turned out to be very stimulating in terms of people and ideas. Also visiting The Blood Knot performance at the American Conservatory Theater and having a drink with Monya&Dan were absolutely delightful. I missed my flight on Saturday, so I slept in LA (and missed my wife) and discovered the city to the amount of a Taco Bell dinner near to the La Quinta Hotel. Also I did a little geek tourism and visited the South Park area in San Francisco (but forgot to check the Wired headquarters) which was so nicely described in Aaron Swartz’s unfortunately unfinished (but not unfinishable) Bubble city:
Downtown San Francisco is a world of carefully-gridded streets and looming skyscrapers, but hidden behind a gas station on Third is a place that almost looks like another world. The sun shines brightly upon a park with green grass and tall shady trees and vibrant swings with children. The park is an oval and the perimeter is lined with small, pastel-colored buildings. Here and there are a smattering of small cafes and restaurants. And the other buildings are filled with startups. Twitter here. Adaptive Path there. Even Yahoo, when it wanted to encourage its employees to be more startup-y, opened up an office in the neighborhood. Sit on the grass and chances are you’ll sit near a friend from another company or bump into them in line at a cafe. The place crawls with companies and back on the street, surveying the scene with a distant but watchful eye, lie the journalists, whose publications cover with awe the rumblings of those below. It was here that Newsflip made its home.
Leaving New Orleans for the Bay Area for the next 3 days. I am visiting a quite enigmatic workshop in Palo Alto on Feb 22, then I am in San Francisco downtown on Friday evening and Saturday AM. If anybody would like to meet me, I am available there on Saturday near Union Square, just drop a mail.
Travel readings: Wired, March (not online yet, The Ruby on Rails coverage was interesting, but still hesitating whether to read Chris Anderson next airport book ad essay: Free or not, but definitely will read Joshua Davis story on Cougar Ace), Woody Guthrie: Bound for glory
Also a Wired recommendation: How to fly through the airport security in a dignity safe way: laceless shoes and holeless socks.
The personal genomics service 23andMe just launched publicly a corporate blog called The Spittoon that has been internally up for a few weeks. It is a new chapter in biotech corporate blogging. Just like the web page of 23andMe, The Spittoon’s WordPress blog platform, the concept and design is excellent: amongst others you can find scientific blog posts written by Matt Crenson science writer and posts written by founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki in the name of radical transparency. As Wired fellow Clive Thompson wrote:
Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups - and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right - and wrong. Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, dishes company dirt and apologizes to startups he’s accidentally screwed. Venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak.
Radical transparency could be standard in the case of Silicon Valley tech startups but in the Biotech Industry the standards are light years away from that. For instance the 23andMe research team communicates publicly on the biparental inheritance of mitochondrial DNA which is a sensitive issue concerning their genealogy service. The reason why Spittoon is so web-friendly and uptodate and is in fact a paradigm corporate blog for every other biotech company in the future is its web-based business model and Google-like corporate culture thanks to its networking background.
For instance, Anne Wojcicki co-founder introduces the concept of Consumer Enabled Research in her introductory blog post The Power of We:
Our goal at 23andMe is to enable individuals to form communities around shared interests and to empower those communities to be actively involved with research. We call it Consumer Enabled Research. We don’t just want communities to have a voice, we want to provide a platform for them to collectively aggregate their genetic information. One of the significant bottlenecks in research is the lack of data. Researchers and physicians rarely have enough of it to really understand a disease or how to treat it. Our goal is to change that.
After registration readers can make comments and I strongly hope that the comment system will not be shut down (just like in the past at BoingBoing), but for that commenters should be on-topic and moderate. I’ve just commented Wojcicki’s post, but I’d like to share it with you here too: Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
According to the newest Request For Applications (RFA) of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the New Cell Line Awards will support two categories of research:
Category 1: Derivation of new hESC lines using excess or rejected early stage human
embryos generated by in vitro fertilization.
Category 2: Derivation of pluripotent human stem cell lines from other sources using
alternative methods such as (but not limited to) SCNT or reprogramming of neonatal or
adult cells (iPS cells).
The real news is encoded in category 2: from now on even adult stem cell research can be backed by California Embryonic Stem Cell Dollars. The same idea in another form in the text:
• disease-specific or otherwise genetically diverse, pluripotent stem cell lines to support
studying the effects of genetic variation on disease mechanism and response to
treatment, and the discovery and evaluation of new drug candidates
• the discovery and implementation of alternative methods for generating pluripotent
human stem cells, including technology leading to the generation of patient-matched or
disease-specific cell lines
What research trend is behind? The generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The successful reprogramming of differentiated human somatic cells into a pluripotent, embryonic stem (ES) cell-like state that would allow creation of patient- and disease-specific stem cells instead of using controversial embryonic stem cells was recently reported by 2 groups of researchers: the Yamanaka and the Thomson lab.
Under this RFA, CIRM intends to commit up to $25 million to support up to 16 awards,
eight ( in each of the two categories of research. CIRM proposes to fund each award
for up to three (3) years for direct project costs of up to $300,000 per year.
After Jobs-Wozniak, Yang-Filo, Brin-Page, it’s time to memorize the names of the co-founders of 23andMe, the first personalized genome service, who are turning the tech establishment into a biotech mode.
The new faces of Silicon Valley: the age of Blue Jeans/Black T-Shirt co-founder computer nerds is over, welcome to the era of stylish, well-dressed genetics-savvy co-founder business ladies! According to the about page of 23andMe:
Linda Avey has over 20 years of sales and business development experience in the biopharmaceutical industry while the other founder, Anne Wojcicki brings to 23andMe a 10-year background in healthcare investing, focused primarily on biotechnology companies.
23andMe is probably the most well-connected startup in the history of Silicon Valley with an unlimited amount of networking and server capabilities thanks to Wojcicki and board member Esther Dyson.
Psychological homework: What do you think about the body language between the 2 co-founders based on the following Wired Science snippets? Will it be a strong, enduring alliance between the 2?
Detailed article in the New York Times on the early experience of decoding the genetic code and interpreting the customers’ DNA via the service of 23andMe. The buzz name of the project: personalized genetics/genomics. Although other companies are mentioned briefly, the focus is clearly on 23andMe. The basics: get rid of a thousand bucks (sorry, just $999 per person) by build your order online, spit a big (2.5 mls) in a plastic tube in the postal delivered Saliva Kit, FedEx your saliva back to Mountain View (plus shipping and handling cost), wait a couple of weeks for an email and then use the company’s in-built Genome Explorer to find out the surprising details of your genetic makeup online.
From the NYT article: I soon found that I might well be sight impaired during those extra years. According to the five SNPs for macular degeneration I fed into the “Genome Explorer,” I was nearly 100 times more likely to develop the disease than someone with the most favorable A-C-G-T combination.
In the unique state of California there is now an offer for individuals to place orders from October 3 during a $250 million sale of state debt to fund embryonic stem-cell research. The minimum bet is $5,000 and over 1 million you need special permission (just like buying more than 2 iPhones in the early days). That is unique. But wait…
“Of the $250 million issuance, $200 million will fund stem cell research and roughly $45 million will cover the cost of issuing the debt and retiring bond anticipation notes sold while the stem-cell measure was being contested in court.”
Let’s emphasize the role of good food in efficient brainstormings (just like SciFoo was) now and ever. Bad feelings were simply excluded about the food at the Googleplex. I shot these pictures with myPhone. Thanks, chef!
The title question is my million (not billion yet) dollar question for this year. Arthur Levinson is a board member of Google (Apple too) and in his leftover time he is the CEO of the most successful biotech company so far, that’s Genentech. I would be curious to hear about his biotech-related activity as a G board member from my readers even in the form of guesses. Maybe he is teaching biotech classes to Googlers after both Genentech’s and Google’s investment into 23andMe or just sitting around sometimes at the nice cafeterias at the Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View and explaining knockout technology to coders. 
in each of the two categories of research. CIRM proposes to fund each award
After Jobs-Wozniak, Yang-Filo, Brin-Page, it’s time to memorize the names of the co-founders of 
