Kiger's Notebook

Mayo Clinic extends deal with drug research lab

Here's some from a release I spotted this morning about Mayo Clinic signing an updated agreement with Sanford-Burnham, a research lab with locations in California and Florida.

By the way, the Sanford in Sanford-Burnham is T. Denny Sanford, who is also a big financial backer of Mayo Clinic.

Sanford-Burnham and Mayo Clinic signed a new collaborative agreement to build a pipeline of therapeutic drugs aimed at a variety of diseases with serious unmet medical needs.

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The agreement combines Mayo Clinic’s clinically relevant targets with Sanford-Burnham’s discovery platform in a translational initiative aimed at advancing a portfolio of projects through the initial stages of drug discovery. The new agreement builds on a yearlong pilot phase and expands the number and scope of drug discovery projects derived from Mayo Clinic researchers that are being conducted at Sanford-Burnham.

 

“We’re looking forward to further engaging with our Mayo Clinic collaborators as we develop innovative screens to identify chemical compounds that modulate the activity of clinically relevant targets,” said Michael Jackson, vice president of drug discovery and development at Sanford-Burnham. “If successful, these compounds will form the basis of completely novel—‘first in class’—therapies for devastating diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, and others.”

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“The Mayo Clinic–Sanford-Burnham collaboration provides an avenue for Mayo scientists to rapidly translate basic science discoveries into screening platforms that will enable new drug discovery, and a new paradigm in drug development,” said Andrew Badley, associate dean of research resources at Mayo Clinic.

Mayo Clinic Biz Accelerator already speeding along

Here's some from my 2nd Mayo Clinic Business Accelerator story of the week. I'll have more in seperate post soon.

The just-opened Mayo Clinic Business Accelerator is already bursting at the seams with companies, including some local start-ups that are ready to aim high.

"We want to be the Amgen (the largest biotechnology company in the world) of Rochester," says Dr. John Burnett Jr., who with Dr. Horng Chen founded Zumbro Discovery just a few weeks ago.

The pair develop peptides to help treat medical conditions and two of their previous creations were licensed by out-of-state companies.

"We really had the desire to set something up here," says Chen. And as the inventors, they believe they will be able to better direct the course of the product as well as do it faster.

Their first patented peptide is designed to treat a condition known as Resistant Hypertension. It is generally defined as high blood pressure that standard treatments can't lower. About 10 to 20 percent of people diagnosed with hypertension are believed to be resistant.
It can lead to heart failure, myocardial infarction, stroke as well as kidney failure.

The Federal Drug Administration has already given the doctors the greenlight to begin testing on patients with Resistant Hypertension and they hope to do that by the end of the year.

"Being in the Accelerator is great for a young, virtual company like us. It gives a chance to interact with venture capitalists and network with other businesses," says Burnett. "And it is just a short walk from our lab."

The Accelerator offices in the Minnesota BioBusiness Center were packed this morning as crowds of Mayo Clinic administrators, city officials and community leaders packed into the just-completed space to christian is open for business.

It's "business" is to speed up local business development and ultimately create new jobs.

“The Accelerator is an example of the strength of a strong partnership between Mayo Clinic and the community to make it easier and more affordable for companies to start and locate in Rochester,” says Mayo Clinic CEO Dr. John Noseworthy.

A collaboration between Mayo Clinic, the City of Rochester and Rochester Area Economic Development Inc., the Accelerator is starting out with a full boat of tenants that include biotech businesses, medical device makers, software start-ups, venture capitalists and health care consultants.

Funded by $100,000 from Mayo Clinic and $100,000 from local sales tax money, the 2,500-square-foot cluster of offices is located on the second floor of the city-owned Minnesota BioBusiness Center. RAEDI is handling the management and leasing of the space.

“We hope to provide a nurturing space for new company formation in Rochester,” says Jim Rogers of Mayo Clinic Ventures.

S.E. Minn. is a pretty inventive area

Wrote the latest version of the annual IBM leads all other companies with U.S. patents story for today's paper.

I always enjoy the change to chat with some of IBM's master inventors and look at their patents. I often don't understand much, but I enjoy it. Heh.

This year I decided to see how many patents issued in 2012 included residents from area cities. I found some interesting stuff, including the fact a group of guys from Hormel in Austin were issued a new patent on a bacon bits making process on Christmas Day.

I hadn't look at these community numbers, since I wrote a big package in early 2010, where I determined that Rochester was the most inventive city inMinnesota and probably the U.S. (per 100,000 residents).

It is interesting to note that Rochester people had 488 patents issued to them in 2009, so the numbers have gone up considerably since then. I may need to take a run at this story again.

 

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This is a breakdown of how many patents issued in 2012 included at least one inventor from these southeastern Minnesota cities:

• Rochester — 652 patents

• Byron — 42 patents.

• Stewartville — 10 patents

• Austin — 75 patents

• Mantorville — 27 patents

• Zumbrota — 12 patents

• Pine Island — 36 patents

• Dodge Center — 10 patents

• Lewiston — 14 patents

• Oronoco — 38 patents

Mayo, Roch. and RAEDI join forces to speed biz growth

Here's some from my story about a new project at the Minnesota BioBusiness Building:

To help launch fledgling companies, Mayo Clinic, the city of Rochester and Rochester Area Economic Development Inc. are creating a new "accelerator center."

The Rochester City Council gave the green light Monday night to move ahead with a proposal to create 2,500 square feet of office space on the second floor of the Minnesota Biobusiness Center in downtown Rochester.

Mayo Clinic is giving $100,000 to turn the unused space, which is owned by the city, into offices. RAEDI will handle the management and leasing of the space.

"It is a great collaboration," says Jim Rogers, chair of the Mayo Clinic Ventures, which manages the clinic's intellectual property and patents. "It is something we are very excited about."

Mayo Clinic leases the top five floors of the eight-story building for a variety of offices, including Mayo Clinic Ventures. That leaves the bottom three levels for outside tenants. When it opened in 2009, the goal was to attract biotechnology and medical device firms that would benefit by being near Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota Rochester.

The downswing of the recession stalled the growth of that type of biobusiness, so the city began reaching out to other types of tenants, such as Think Mutual Savings Bank, College of St. Scholastica and Hirman Insurers.

This new approach is aimed at sparking more action in the biotech sector by the focusing on early stage start-ups that just need "a place to hang their hats," says Doug Knott, the city's development director.

About 86 percent of the building is now under lease, he says. The accelerator will bring that percentage close to 90 percent.

"Using a relatively small space for this could potentially bring a big pay-off," says Knott.

Plans for the accelerator center are still being finalized, but it is expected it will include about six offices plus a conference room and other public areas. HGA, which was the architect firm for the building, is working on designs for this space. Rents are expected to range from $13 to $15 per square foot.

"The intent is to accelerate the growth of these businesses," says Knott. "And then move them to other parts of the building or elsewhere in the center, when they outgrow it."

The ultimate goal is to take advantage of the influence of Mayo Clinic's efforts to spin off related businesses and generate more local jobs.

"We hope to have it ready to open by the first of the year," says Gary Smith, RAEDI president.

Mayo Clinic Ventures leader leaving for Colorado gig

Here's an interesting tidbit.

Steve Van Nurden, the chair of Mayo Clinic Ventures, is leaving Mayo and Rochester to take a new position in Aurora, Colo.

As the head of the division that licenses Mayo Clinic research and patents to companies as well as launching self-made start-up firms for the clinic, I've worked with Steve on many stories in the past years about projects like Preventice, Cardio3, Resoundant and EnteroMedics.

I have a call to Mayo and Steve for more info, but here's some from the press release the City of Aurora, Colo.

Following an extensive national search, Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority has named Steve VanNurden as its new President and Chief Executive Officer, beginning in late May. The announcement is made by John M. Shaw, Chair of the FRA Board of Directors, who said: "Steve, a seasoned leader in the life science/bioscience space, comes to us from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota."

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He will be working with universities, local economic development agencies, state and local governments, and the bioscience industry to promote the successful development of the 180 acre Colorado Science + Technology Park, which is adjacent to the University of Colorado's Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.

Steve Hogan, Mayor of the City of Aurora and FRA Board member stated, "Steve is the partner we need to fulfill the promise of the bioscience industry park. His working relationships span nationally and internationally, which will be a great advantage for us."

IBM/ Xbox chatter about system-on-a-chip 'Oban'

Here's a tidbit of unconfirmed speculation on Computerandvideogames.com about IBM's work on the processor (said to be nicknamed "Oban") for next generation of Microsoft's Xbox.

Remember the brains of the first Xbox (as well as Nintendo's Wii and PlayStation) were created right here at IBM's Rochester campus.

I can add to the pile of unofficial IBM/Xbox buzz by throwing out that a local fifth-hand casual source says they heard this Xbox will be voice-activated.

And it is worth noting that the new incarnation of Nintendo's gaming system to be called Wii U is also in development here.

Here's some from the Computerandvideogames.com piece:

According to a new rumour, IBM and Global Foundries are hard at work on the main processor for the next-generation Xbox.

Reportedly codenamed 'Oban', the processor is said to be a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) - a 32nm processor that incorporates a PowerPC CPU and an ATI Southern Islands GPU - basically a modified version of the 7000 series GPUs.

Fudzilla reports that Microsoft put the two companies to work on the new chip in December last year.

The site's 'sources' say a 2012 release is therefore unlikely, pitching 2013 as a more likely year for MS to make its next-gen move, with a possible announcement before the end of the year.

The report also speculates that MS could be ready to start handing out development kits as early as March or April.

IBM's top in patents again

Here's much of my article on IBM dominating the the U.S. patent list for the 19th year in a row.

Weeks after the latest Blue Gene supercomputer shipped out from Rochester, IBM has topped the U.S. patent list for the 19th year in a row.

Big Blue tallied a whopping 6,180 patents issued in 2011. About 500 of those patents originated in Rochester.

IBM substantially outdistanced its nearest corporate competitors. Samsung came in at second with 4,895 patents, followed by Canon at 2,822.

A trio of local IBM software engineers working on the latest generation of supercomputers were not surprised by their company's continued dominance in patents.

"The cool thing about working on something as advanced like Blue Gene the ideas come naturally… We're always trying to do things that no one has done," says Brian Smith. "You've got to think of new ways to do things. The old ways just don't apply anymore."

And those new solutions result in patents.

Smith, Mike Blocksome and Charles Archer have worked on about 175 patents during their careers at IBM.

"This whole cycle generates patents, from the back and forth between software and hardware…finding ways to work around problems," says Blocksome.

A shiny example of IBM's patent-generating innovation left Rochester in mid-December. The first of 96 computing racks of the Blue Gene/ Q computer called Sequioa were sent on their way to the U.S. Department of Energy at the Argonne National Laboratory at Argonne, Ill.

Supercomputers, like the Blue Genes, are usually ranked like sports cars — by their speed.  But like sports cars, they consume a lot of energy to be that fast.

Figuring out how computers can use power more efficiently is the focus on the latest patent issued to Smith, Blocksome and Archer.

"The big supercomputers use a lot of power or gigaflops per watt. We have do things at software level to coordinate that," says Smith.

The team worked out a method to reduce power requirements when the machine is not computing. During the communication phases, it doesn't need as much energy.

This innovation is not in use yet in any IBM products, though it is patented.

"Our goal is to make something cutting edge, start using it in something huge like Blue Gene and then it can trickle down small machines to laptops," says Archer.

Popular Mechanics visits IBM Roch. to track work on super computer

Popular Mechanics has a pretty cool behind-the-scenes, under-the-hood coverage of the-nuts-and-bolts (Think I can use any more mixed metaphors in the this sentence? Heh) of IBM's hardware gurus building Big Blue's latest secret weapon here (Still had one more, I guess) in Rochester.

Here's a few excerpts from this piece by Glenn Derene in PM's latest issue:

Chris Marroquin is waist-deep in a hole in the floor.

He's a tall guy with a medium build, but he looks awfully short now, and his shirt is pumped up to Schwarzenegger size by a 60-degree breeze blustering all around him. Grappling with a 1-inch-diameter hose, he attempts to explain the liquid-cooling system of IBM's next-generation supercomputer to me, but I can barely hear him over the howling wind.

We're in a development room of IBM's Rochester, Minn., facility, where engineers test and assemble the company's Blue Gene supercomputers.

The air buffeting Marroquin cools a small, four-rack Blue Gene/P system capable of 13.9 teraflops per rack, but the hose he's holding is part of a far more advanced cooling system. Filled with deionized water, the anti-corrosive agent benzotriazole and a dose of biocide, the tube feeds into a prototype of the company's new Blue Gene/Q computer.

The Blue Gene/Q rack sitting on the raised floor has its own circulatory system—850 feet of copper pipe, with check valves, quick-disconnect rubber hoses and an electronic monitor that measures flow rate, pressure and dew point—designed to shut down if anything goes awry. "You don't want any drips," Marroquin says.  

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The folks at IBM Rochester betray little interest in China's goal of supercomputing dominance . Their job is to work out the engineering for Blue Gene/Q, and they deliberately focus on the technology, not the politics. They are classic pocket-protector engineers, and their titles are inelegant bureaucratic artifacts that offer little clue to their actual roles.

"We're a very small, roll-up-your-sleeves team effort," says Pat Mulligan, development manager for Global Server Integration (who, for the record, had his sleeves rolled up when we spoke). "We're not overly nationalistic, we just want to make the best computer we can."

The building where Marroquin, Mulligan and the rest of the IBM team are creating the 21st century's most powerful computers is a monument to mid-20th-century corporate futurism. Designed by architect Eero Saarinen (who also designed the St. Louis Gateway Arch), the sprawling structure is clad in dark blue glass. Hallways a half-mile long stretch through the interior.

At some point IBM—always pushing the technological envelope—concealed wires in the hallway floors to guide robots that delivered parts and machinery from one assembly room to another. The robots are long gone, a dream of mechanical efficiency undone by reality: They were slow and broke down so often that the facility switched to human-guided forklifts.

Mayo's Breath Hold device + Philips CT systems

Here's a kind of interesting tidbit about a Mayo Clinic developed medical device.

Breath Hold, a breath monitoring deal that is using during medical imaging exams, was originally developed by Mayo Clinic researchers.

In 2009, Medspira was formed in Minneapolis and it markets a commercial version of the Breath Hold device.

On Monday, a press release was floated out about Breath Hold being adding as an additional option for customers buying Philips Healthcare CT systems.

It sounds sort of like getting the sunroof and the whitewall tires on the new car you are ordering.

Not sure what this could mean, if anything, for Mayo. My guess is that this will up sales and that will in some way benefit Mayo Clinic.

Here's some from the release:

Medspira, the innovative medical device company, announces a collaboration with Philips Healthcare to offer Medspira's Breath Hold™ interactive breath control monitoring system as an option for Philips' BrightView XCT SPECT/CT systems. Developed by Mayo Clinic physicians, Breath Hold™ is a user-friendly system that enables patients to easily and consistently reproduce a breath-hold reference point to help maintain a consistent breathing pattern during imaging exams and other medical procedures.

According to Jody Garrard, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Philips Healthcare, "A significant number of SPECT/CT studies involve the chest and abdominal organs and are often affected by respiratory motion. Providing respiratory feedback during a CT exam has the potential to reduce motion artifacts in the CT image without compromising the SPECT/CT workflow."

"We believe Medspira Breath Hold will help enhance SPECT/CT exams," said Ryan Gruening, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Medspira. "The device provides a simple, unobtrusive way for patients to use biofeedback to control their own breathing, and for the operator to know if the patient is complying with their breath hold instructions, at a relatively affordable cost for the medical facilities."

Canned meat battle Spam vs Prem ends in a tie

Here's some from an article by the PB's legal eye Matt Russell about the resolution of Hormel Foods tussle with Netherlands-based Zwanenberg Food Group.

More of the article can be found here.

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A trademark infringement case involving the iconic yellow and blue packaging of Spam food products has been dismissed in federal court.

A settlement between Austin-based Hormel Foods and Zwanenberg Food Group led to the dismissal of the suit by Judge David Doty Tuesday in U.S. District Court, with both parties agreeing to dismiss all claims and counterclaims.

Hormel filed the suit in March, alleging that Zwanenberg used packaging starting in 2010 on a competing product, Prem, that was "confusingly similar" to Spam.

While Zwanenberg altered the label design at Hormel's request, Hormel maintained that the new label still created confusion because it still used a yellow-on-blue color scheme. The products were sold in Japan and the Philippines, according to the complaint.

Zwanenberg responded that its packaging was unlikely to cause confusion with Hormel's packaging, adding that Spam's yellow lettering on a blue background "is generic and/or otherwise unprotectable as a matter of law."