We covered a variety of subjects on the biotech beat this week—cloud computing for genomics, a new idea for bioinformatics, an environmental health startup co-founded by Corey Goodman, and a profile of the new CEO of BayBio. Read on to catch up on the week’s headlines.
—Gail Maderis has spent a career working up the executive ranks of biotech at Genzyme and Five Prime Therapeutics, and now she says it’s her time to give back as the CEO of BayBio.
—Calithera is the latest startup to emerge from the UC San Francisco lab of Jim Wells, a longtime scientist from Genentech and the founder of Sunesis Pharmaceuticals. Calithera has raised $40 million in venture capital, including some from the new Mission Bay Capital fund, to develop a new class of cancer drugs.
—Genentech, the U.S.-based unit of Roche, said this week it has filed an application with the FDA for clearance to start selling T-DM1, the souped-up antibody drug for breast cancer. I wrote an in-depth feature about this drug on the day we launched Xconomy San Francisco last month.
—Amazon (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMZN]]), the Seattle-based online retail giant, is starting to see genomic researchers adopt its cloud computing service to help manage the massive amounts of data as gene sequencing gets much faster and cheaper.
—DNAnexus, a Palo Alto, CA-based startup, is seeking to build on Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure to become the leader in bioinformatics, which all about making software to help genomic researchers analyze and visualize all the new sequencing data.
—iPierian, the South San Francisco-based developer of stem cell technology for drug discovery, said it has raised a $22 million Series B venture round, led by Google Ventures. The company also is making a leadership switch, as Michael Venuti is replacing John Walker as CEO.
—Corey Goodman is known as a medical biotech entrepreneur, but now he’s making his first foray into an environmental health startup. The new company, PhyloTech, told me about its plans in this in-depth feature.
—Ingenuity Systems, the Redwood City, CA-based company that offers search capabilities to life scientists, has secured $15.3 million in new equity financing, according to a regulatory filing. We also spotted a $13.2 million financing in the regulatory filings from Invuity, a San Francisco-based startup with technology to help surgeons better visualize what they are doing.
—Lastly, we had a notable guest editorial relevant to the life sciences. Joseph Jackson talked about “The Open Science Shift” in a thought-provoking post in advance of a big meeting in Berkeley he’s preparing for July 29-31.
