MoneyTree Reports Overall Drop in Q1 Biotech VC Funding, But Smaller Declines in Boston and Bay Area Clusters

April 24, 2009

By Alex Philippidis

Silicon Valley remained the top US cluster with $210 million in first-quarter venture capital, down a little over 16 percent from the $251 million racked up a year earlier. New England's $149 million in biopharma VC marked a nearly 32 percent fall-off.

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In this issue of BioRegion News

Young Investigator Profile

Christopher Maher

University of Michigan Medical School
Research Investigator

Gene Fusions and Transcriptome Sequencing

Christopher Maher is focused on elucidating gene fusions, which he first became acquainted with during his potdoctoral work at the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology. Maher hopes to continue discovering novel gene fusions as well as draw new findings out of already-known gene fusions. Last year, he published a paper in Nature in January of 2009 entitled "Transcriptome sequencing to detect gene fusions in cancer," which he says provides a validation for the approach of using next-gen sequencing to find gene fusions in cancer. This was followed up by a PNAS paper in July which demonstrated the gene fusion concept using paired-end transcriptome sequencing.
Blog

All the Ps

Leroy Hood discusses personalized medicine.

March 09, 2010

Barton Childs Dies

Johns Hopkins University professor Barton Childs dies.

March 09, 2010

A New Approach to Immune Cell Analysis

Researchers have developed a new mathematical approach to analyze molecular data derived from complex mixtures of immune cells

March 09, 2010

The Surprising Variability of Mitochondrial DNA

The mitochondrial genome, long thought to be nearly identical in every cell of the human body, actually varies.

March 09, 2010
Papers of Note

PTB Proteins Induce RNA Looping
Lamichhane, Daubner et al., PNAS
Researchers in the US and Switzerland report that polypyrimidine tract-binding proteins induce RNA looping ― a finding they deduced using FRET, NMR spectroscopy, and in vivo splicing data. They show that two PTB RNA recognition motifs can bind two distant pyrimidine tracts, bringing their 5' and 3' ends in close proximity, thus inducing loop formation.

Aβ as an Antimicrobial Peptide
Soscia, Kirby et al., PLoS ONE
A team of researchers describe the amyloid β-protein as capable of functioning as an antimicrobial peptide in vitro. Their examinations indicate that Aβ, thought to be a key mediator of Alzheimer's disease pathology, demonstrates antimicrobial activity against eight common microorganisms, and may perform this function in the innate immune system ― a finding that contrasts with the current perception of Aβ-mediated pathology.
People on the Move

Adrian Dillon will resign from his job as executive VP of finance and administration and CFO of Agilent Technologies to become chief financial and administrative officer at Skype. He will be replaced at the beginning of April by Didier Hirsch, who currently is VP of corporate controllership and taxes and who will serve as acting CFO.

Pacific Biosciences last week appointed Susan Barnes as its first chief financial officer.

She formerly was senior VP of finance and CFO of Intuitive Surgical and previously served as managing director of the private equity group at Jeffries & Company, among other positions.

Joel McComb is leaving his post as senior VP and GM of Illumina's Life Sciences business to become COO at Synthetic Genomics. McComb will depart Illumina and take on the new position at SGI, where he will report to founder and CEO J. Craig Venter, effective March 1.
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Mar. 10-11 / Chapel Hill, NC
National Human Genome Research Center, National Institutes of Health

Neuronal Circuits
Mar. 10-13 / Cold Spring Harbor, NY
CSHL

PTEN Pathways & Targets
Mar. 16-20 / Cold Spring Harbor, NY
CSHL

The Complex Life of mRNA: From Synthesis to Decay
Mar. 18-19 / Heidelberg, Germany
EMBL

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Mar. 18-19 / Hinxton, UK
EMBL-EBI-Wellcome Trust

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Science
A research team has published a proof-of-principle metagenomics study using short read sequencing to catalog and characterize microbial genes present in the human gut, offering insights into the microbial communities colonizing the gut.
Business
Life Technologies, the Translational Genomics Research Institute, and US Oncology are collaborating on a sequencing study aimed at determining whether cancer genome sequencing can help guide individual treatments.
Funding
The National Human Genome Research Institute would receive $534 million under the White House's proposed $32.2 billion budget for the National Institutes of Health for Fiscal Year 2011, up $18 million over the 2010 appropriation.
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MoneyTree Reports Overall Drop in Q1 Biotech VC Funding, But Smaller Declines in Boston and Bay Area Clusters

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In this issue of BioRegion News

Young Investigator Profile

Blog

Papers of Note

People on the Move

Upcoming Events

Science

Business

Funding

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