Ryan and Luke profiled some extremely interesting companies this week. More on those, and the rest of the week’s New England life sciences news, below.
—Billionaire investor Carl Icahn succeeded—at least partially—in his attempt to gain representation on the board of Cambridge, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BIIB]]). Roxanne reported live from the highly contentious annual meeting at which four board seats were up for grabs. The voting was so close, however, that only three winners were initially named–among them, Icahn portfolio manager Alex Denner. After the meeting, Bob got an exclusive interview with Denner and Harvard Medical School’s Richard Mulligan, who talked about why they thought Icahn’s attempt this year attempt to get his people on the Biogen board was more successful than a similar attempt last year. And late yesterday Biogen announced that Mulligan has won a seat on the board as well.
—Life Image CEO Hamid Tabatabaie told Ryan about his year-and-a-half-old startup’s efforts to address the problem of over-utilization of medical imaging with a system that would allow healthcare providers to better store, search, and share X-rays, MRIs, CT scans, and other digital medical images. Life Image, whose core software was developed at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, raised $2.5 million in April in a Series A round of equity financing from Partners Innovation Fund and Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation.
—Ryan got the scoop on the technology being developed by Cambridge, MA-based Seventh Sense Biosystems, which closed its $4.75 million first round of financing from Flagship Ventures, Third Rock Ventures, and Polaris Venture Partners in December. CEO Doug Levinson (a Flagship partner) explained that the hitherto secretive startup wants to develop simple-to-use, unobtrusive health-monitoring tools. They would take the form of tattoo-like marks
