The life sciences industry was focused on the west coast, not the east, this week. Virtually all of the industry’s movers, shakers, and wannabes were at the 31st Annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco Jan 7-9. My colleague Luke Timmerman will be combing his notebooks for features from this premier industry meeting for weeks to come, but there was plenty of news made at the meeting, some of it by companies near the Atlantic.
—Biopharma companies always love to announce deals at JP Morgan, and this year was no different. Cambridge, MA-based BIND Biosciences of Cambridge, MA had one of the biggest: Amgen (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMGN]]) of Thousand Oaks, CA, will invest as much as $180.5 million, and possibly more in future product royalties, under a joint drug development effort using the startup’s nanomedicine technology. BIND CEO Scott Minick told me that the deal represents a validation for nanomedicine and predicts other large pharma companies will now move into the field.
— Foundation Medicine, also in Cambridge, announced at the meeting that Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner joined a $13.5 million expansion of its Series B financing. Foundation is developing genomic technology to improve cancer care.
—Another Cambridge startup, Lotus Tissue Repair, used the meeting to announce that it was acquired for an undisclosed sum by
