BioMedTexas

David Sym-Smith , Partner at Addison, TX-based venture capital firm Mobility Ventures , is a 20+ veteran of the mobile industry . I met David about two months ago at the kick-off event for Health Wildcatters , a Dallas-based healthcare-oriented seed accelerator where David serves as a startup mentor (see my previous post about the kick-off event here ). At the event we had a brief but fascinating conversation on mobile technologies and their impact on healthcare. We got together a few weeks later at a local Starbucks for a follow-up chat. I found the ensuing conversation so interesting that I asked David whether I could post a synopsis of our conversation on my blog; David kindly acquiesced. Below are some highlights from what David had to say:  Indoor mapping is the next frontier in mapping. Companies involved in online maps and mobile navigation (e.g.,  Google , Apple , etc.) are all actively working on providing maps and navigation capabilities for indoor spac...

Last Tuesday I attended a kickoff  meet-and-greet  for  Health Wildcatters , a new Dallas-based healthcare-oriented seed accelerator . My impression of the event? Electrifying. The venue (" Tech Church ," headquarters for both Health Wildcatters and its older sibling  Tech Wildcatters ) was filled to the brim with people collectively representing an incredibly diverse array of business and technical expertise. For an illustration of the diversity of talent present within Health Wildcatters' orbit, take a look at the profiles of the  mentors  (58 in all) who have signed up to serve as coaches for its incoming startups. I had the fortune of having conversations with a number of them at the event. One was with  Charley Kiser ,  President & CEO of  management consultancy  C. H. Kiser & Company, LLC , who told me that the difficulties that exist in sharing patient information between hospitals is driven only partially by t...

I've been pleasantly surprised to discover since starting this blog that Texas has a much more robust startup scene in LifeSci/MedTech than I had suspected. The Texas Bio Corridor Alliance website,  http://www.texasbiocorridor.org , does a terrific job of consolidating much of the information about it. Its list of in-state incubators/accelerators and venture capital funds is particularly eye-opening. With the most recently posted item in its " Corridor News " section dated June 13, 2012, it appears not to be the most actively maintained website; indeed, it does not mention some of the very latest developments I have come across (more on this in future posts). However, it is so well-organized and generally complete that any future post I write on this topic will most likely serve merely as an addendum to the information contained there. I encourage everyone to take a look at it.   http://www.texasbiocorridor.org This evening I will be attending a networking ev...

This post was written as an article for the Postdoc Informer, the UT Southwestern postdoctoral community's bimonthly newsletter. It is featured as the June-July 2013 issue's  lead article.   -IH In light of the Budget Control Act of 2011, a.k.a. "the sequester," the NIH is operating this year at a program level of $29.15 billion, a decrease of $1.71 billion (approximately 5.5%) from 2012. First, the good news. Because of uncertainty surrounding the effects of the sequester in the beginning of the year, non-competing continuation awards made in the early months of 2013 were generally funded at a 10% reduction from the originally committed amount. With the uncertainty now gone, these reductions will be partially restored to more closely reflect the 5.5% reduction of the total NIH budget (e.g., 2013 noncompeting grants at NIGMS will be reduced by 3.5%, and NCI will trim ongoing grants by ~6%). The bad news? While the NIH intends to keep the average size of compe...

While HHS/NIH is a key source of SBIR funding for LifeSci/MedTech companies, it is not the only source. I came to appreciate this while perusing the company profiles of Texas-based SBIR award recipients on www.sbir.gov (see my previous post ). I discovered that 25 of the 85 Texas-based companies that were awarded HHS-sponsored SBIR grants between 2008 and 2012 (approx. 29%) obtained additional SBIR awards from other federal agencies as well. These companies are listed below.  Take-home message:  LifeSci/MedTech companies seeking to apply for SBIR funding should look at  solicitations  from non-HHS agencies as well.  - Isamu Hartman, PhD

[Click here to download  (in .xlsx format)  the raw data presented in this post.  -IH] In my initial post dealing with Texas-based recipients of HHS-sponsored  SBIR grants*, I concentrated on the amount of funding that individual companies, as well as individual cities, were capturing through this federal grant mechanism. This time, I wanted to gain an understanding of the types of companies within the Texas biomedical industry that were being funded by the SBIR program. In order to do this, I read the abstracts of individual HHS-funded SBIR projects being pursued by each company and then manually assigned each company to one of six categories**: 1) Small Molecules/Biologicals, 2) Molecular Diagnostics, 3) Medical Devices - Diagnostic, 4) Medical Devices - Therapeutic, 5) Computation/Software, and 6) Other/Multiple Categories. As with my previous post, I looked at grants awarded between 2008 and 2012. The spreadsheet below (scrollable) lists each company, its...

In   my previous post   I had assembled a list of Texas-based LifeSci/MedTech companies listed on the two major US stock exchanges, NYSE and NASDAQ   [ Note: I've added an additional company, Hanger, Inc., to the list since originally publishing the post ]. I felt this was a good start, but I realized I'd also have to identify the large privately held companies i n order to get a really good sense of who the major players are in the Texas biomedical industry. I decided to define "largeness" as a function of the company's latest annual revenue as reported by LexisNexis*. I used a cut-off of $10 million, which seemed reasonable with respect to the annual revenues being reported by the NYSE- and NASDAQ-listed companies seen  previously . I excluded companies that are subsidiaries of other LifeSci/MedTech companies. I did, however, include companies that are owned by private equity.   Below is the list of privately held TX-based biomedical companies wi...

[Monday, 22 April 2013:  I added Hanger Inc. (HGR, NYSE), an Austin-based prosthetics and orthotics company I had originally missed, to the list] [Thursday, 02 May 2013:  fixed the location of Hanger Inc. (HGR, NYSE) - changed from Dallas to Austin] I have another few posts coming up on Texas-based awardees of the SBIR program. But first, a quick digression. +Levi Shapiro  asked me the following question during a phone conversation we had earlier today:  who are the "Big Players" in the Texas biomedical industry that are listed in the major stock exchanges? I knew about Luminex (LMNX, NASDAQ) off the top of my head. Other than that, though, I really had no idea. Following the advice of +Lauren Nise  , I used LexisNexis (courtesy of the UT Dallas Eugene McDermott Library ) to generate a list of publicly traded biomedical companies headquartered in Texas that are listed in either NYSE or NASDAQ. Here are the companies I found: (Open spreadsheet as a se...

The SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) program is a federal initiative that provides funding for small businesses to engage in research and development.  Tracking SBIR awardees, I believe, should be a great method for identifying entrepreneurial, innovation-oriented players within the Texas economy.  I decided to identify which Texas-based companies in the healthcare/biomedical industry have received SBIR awards in the recent past, and how much funding they have obtained. The SBIR website contains a well-curated database of all current and past awardees (for visualizing national trends, be sure to check out their amazing "Graphical Tools" page). I pulled up a list of all SBIR awards given to Texas-based companies between 2008 and 2012 that were sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services – thus limiting the search results to grants awarded to companies in the healthcare/biomedical industry. The list consisted of 186 grants awarded to 85 different co...

In a previous post  I described  the geographic distribution of pharmaceutical companies within Texas. I went back to the same   directory of Texas-based pharmaceutical and medical device companies  [see disclaimer below, *] and,  this time,  took a  look at the geographic distribution of companies working in medical devices. The list [see technical note below, **] contains a total of 171 medical device companies - almost twice the number of pharmaceutical companies listed. Here is how they are geographically distributed:  The number in each wedge = the number of medical device companies in that city. "Other" consists of  Bryan/College Station (4 companies),  Athens (3),  Corpus Christi (2),  El Paso (2),  Amarillo (1),  Beaumont/Port Arthur (1),  Longview  (1),  Lubbock  (1),  Midland (1),  Mineral Wells  (1), and  Waco  (1). As with pharmaceutical companies...

Here is a synopsis of the of the 2012 Texas Biotechnology Industry Report  (the editor of the UT Southwestern  Postdoc Informer was kind enough to let me post this article up on my blog before the next issue of the newsletter is released) . The report is definitely worth reading in its entirety (it's 36 pages long), but the collection of highlights below should be enough to pique the curiosity of anyone out there who might have an interest in this topic. [Insertions and corrections within the synopsis based on my own research are indicated by bracketed italics.] Happy reading! ----------------------------------- 2012 Texas Biotechnology Industry Report  synopsis: Private funding of Life Science-related companies in Texas: According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, venture capital firms invested $1.27 billion in 152 Texas biotech and medical device companies between 2006 and 2011. Of this total, $568 million (in 96 companies) were investments in the medical device and...

[Monday, 18 March 2013:  I just noticed that the  directory  I discuss in this post contains the  following disclaimer : "The company listings in this directory are provided as a broad, representative sample of Texas companies in three major areas of the biotechnology industry. This directory is not a comprehensive source of all biotechnology or health-related companies in the state. Due to space limitations, the Office of the Governor Economic Development and Tourism division is unable to include all relevant firms in this document." Thus, whatever interpretations I make based on it should be  considered a rough estimation at best.  -IH] I've written a synopsis of the  2012 Texas Biotechnology Industry Report  (see previous post), but I'm going to hold off on posting it here until it first comes out on the next issue of the Postdoc Informer, the UT Southwestern postdoctoral community's bimonthly newsletter. In the meant...

I've been working in Texas as a postdoctoral research scientist in biology for six years now, so I've gotten to know the local lay of the land pretty well as far as academic research goes. But commercial activity in biomedical research in terms of pharmaceuticals, biotech and medical devices? I didn't have much of a clue at all. A bit of Googling took me to  http://www.texaswideopenforbusiness.com , a website put together by the Texas Economic Development Division within the Office of the Governor of Texas. They've put together reports detailing the status within Texas of a variety of industries , including Biotechnology and Life Sciences. The 2012 Texas Biotechnology Industry Report is particularly useful; it's probably the single best overview of the Texas biomed scene out there. Also useful is their  directory of Texas-based biotechnology, pharmaceutical and medical device companies . Over the upcoming weeks, I hope to do some analysis of the information contain...