require a full-blown blog post. In a Tweet directed to Forbes’ Matthew Herper, TheStreet.com’s Adam Feuerstein, and healthcare investor Nathan Sadeghi-Nejad, LaMattina offered comments on a Pfizer HIV drug. “Selzentry mkt uptake may have been limited by availability and expense of diagnostic test,” he wrote. I haven’t personally met LaMattina yet, but it’s only a matter of time now—maybe my next trip to Boston.
Lastly, there are two new people I just started following this past week, and I’m looking forward to what they have to say over time. Maude Tessier (@Maude_Tessier), a licensing manager at Children’s Hospital in Boston, popped up on my radar. She was a prolific tweeter who was essentially acting like a good set of eyes and ears from the BioPharm America conference in Boston. I wasn’t able to attend, but Maude stepped in to fill a role that is traditionally played by journalists—by attending panels and publishing some of the best quotes in real-time on Twitter. Since I found her comments useful, I’ll probably pay more attention now to what she says about other things.
The other person I started following this week was Jason Kelly (@jrkelly). The founder and self-described “DNA hacker” at Boston-based Ginkgo Bioworks chimed in on the latest TechCrunch/CrunchFund controversy. Kelly directed a comment to Atlas Venture’s Bruce Booth (@LifeSciVC) and Quintessence Biosciences’ Laura Strong (@scientre) with this little pearl that caught my eye for obvious reasons: “what we really need is a biotech version of techcrunch — xconomy isn’t really cutting it.” I replied to Jason, asking him, “What would a biotech version of techcrunch look like to you?” Naturally, I looked him up on his site and found that he’s a young PhD biologist from MIT, so I figured I should see if he has something interesting to say, or whether he just wants to be a crank. We ended up having an interesting back-and-forth conversation, out in the open among all our respective followers, about what the biotech community needs to improve its information flow.
When it was done, I realized I met someone who could be a great new member of my network, and that I learned something that could help me do my job better. That’s what it’s all about, and those are the kind of connections that are being made out there for biotechies willing to experiment a bit in how they communicate.
