.gen Technologies Inc.

The big date is coming for local biotech Arena and its obesity
management candidate lorcaserin. October 22 is the date by which the
FDA will review their application and determine whether Arena has a
viable product or if it’s back to the drawing board. Either way it
will be a big turning point for the company, and exciting times for
San Diego biotech.

http://www.xconomy.com/san-diego/2010/02/26/arena-gets-october-fda-deadline/

Boston-area GenomeQuest makes a bid to move genome search and analysis tools into the cloud, in competition with Seattle-based Geospiza, which is running on the Amazon cloud computing platform. Geospiza and Life Tech have already announced a partnership in this space, so there’s a good chance we’ll see competition heating up just as we did when Microsoft brought Azure to the marketplace competing with Amazon and Google. Could be fun!

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/02/25/genomequest-wants-to-be-the-google-of-dna-data-searches/

Looks like I missed this announcement when it initially came out, but in a major score for Microsoft HealthVault, the team has announced a business partnership with German industrial giant Seimens. This will make Germany the third country to use HealthVault, after the US and Canada.

http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/01/28/siemens-licenses-microsoft-healthvault/

David Cerino of Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group – the HealthVault and the Amalga lineup – announces HealthVault Community Connect at the HIMSS10 conference in Atlanta, and clarifies the group’s strategy of moving consumers to Personal Health Records (PHRs) by selling hospitals on the value proposition first. The new product will be based on the SharePoint platform, and is scheduled for wide availability in the third quarter of this year.

http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/03/01/microsoft-healthvault-makes-pitch-to-hospitals-tries-to-crack-tough-nut-of-health-it-adoption/

Hot off the presses, Life Tech announced a single molecule sequencing technology using nanocrystals this morning at AGBT. Here’s the technology description in this morning’s press release:

The new technology uses Qdot(R) nanocrystals as its core sequencing
engine. Qdots are nanometer-sized semiconductor crystals that have made
them ideal for groundbreaking cellular imaging research and for the
detection of individual protein molecules. Compared to conventional
fluorescence detection with organic dye molecules, the Qdot approach
generates signals more than 100 times greater, enabling simple single
molecule detection. The SMS system uses specially designed sequencing
versions of these nanocrystals, attached to proprietary DNA polymerase
molecules.

The system monitors the real time incorporation of nucleotides (the
building blocks of DNA) into individual growing DNA strands. As
nucleotides are incorporated, they are energized by photons transferred
from the Qdot nanocrystal, generating a characteristic colored flash of
fluorescence light. The prototype SMS system records the time and color
series of these light flashes to determine the DNA sequence of each
individual DNA strand. Uniquely, this approach looks for correlated
fluorescence flashes with Qdot signal decreases – a key feature that is
anticipated to improve the error profile of inherently noisy single
molecule data.

Another unique aspect of the system is reagent exchange, where
individual Qdot polymerases and synthesized templates can be removed and
replaced with new ones. This enables immobilized individual DNA
templates to be sequenced several times in a recursive fashion, allowing
for highly accurate reads with minimal sample preparation. In addition,
reagent exchange enables linking together of multiple long reads to
enable virtually unlimited read lengths.

This new technology will complement Life Tech’s existing plays in SOLiD and capillary electrophoresis. Full press release at http://ir.lifetechnologies.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=61498&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1396698.

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

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

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