CHICAGO - A team of our editors is covering the Biotechnology Industry Organization's annual meeting, which convened May 3 in Chicago. They are posting dispatches on the official presentations and side-bar discussions at the IN VIVO blog; those will be gathered each day here:

Pim's Cup Runneth Over: Greetings from Chicago! Fantastic weather for early May, an economy on the upswing, not to mention a certain conference that's in town, make the City of Big Shoulders particularly lively this week. One way to take the temperature of a conference - and last year's BIO in Atlanta barely broke a sweat - is to check in with the folks scrambling for deals and having hushed conversations in discreet corners.

Before BIO got fully underway Monday morning, it was already hard to find a quiet place to sit. One of our first chats was with Willem "Pim" Stemmer, the inventor of the DNA shuffling technology that underpinned Maxygen, which last year transfered most of its assets into a joint venture with Astellas Pharma (Also see "Maxygen And Astellas Form Joint Venture, Combining Cash And Staff" - Pink Sheet, 2 July, 2009.), and the recently-IPO'ed biofuel firm Codexis. (Maxygen also birthed the next generation protein play Avidia, which Amgen bought in 2006 for $290 million plus earnouts.)

Stemmer's latest endeavor also aims to squeeze several companies from one. The parent, Amunix Inc., is working on two things. The first is an ion-channel research program using venom toxins to generate leads, with Pfizer as the first customer. The second, which started as a side project, is a half-life extension technology called XTEN that adds a recombinant polypeptide chain to known molecules, without the manufacturing and safety concerns of pegylation. That's the claim, anyway, and it was enough to convince European VC Index Ventures to solely fund a spin-out, Versartis, charged with developing Amunix's lead compounds, the first of which is an XTEN-enhanced version of the diabetes drug exenatide.

But wait there's more! There's a second spin-out coming called Ios, so newly dubbed that it doesn't have a website. Ios will hold Amunix's ion-channel program, which Stemmer said he wants to become a "research hub" with several pharma partners and a goal of being acquired in the next two to four years. For drug leads, it is testing venom toxins against ion channel targets, using XTEN for half-life extension. Stemmer was in Chicago this week unfurling the Ios banner, and scouting for discovery deals to replace or supplement the existing three-year deal with Pfizer that expires at the end of the year.

Unlike Versartis, which is strictly a product development company, Ios will include Amunix's microprotein platform technology, Stemmer said.

Take Our Molecules...Please! After hosting a steady stream of panels on biotech-pharma in-licensing over the years, biotech lawyer Barbara Kosacz put it in reverse at BIO Tuesday May 4. The head of Cooley Godward Kronish's life science practice asked her usual lineup of big-pharma business development honchos about out-licensing, long considered a BD backwater -- "The Scarlett 'O'," as Kosacz put it in her blurb.

There has been movement toward making it legit - Merck said at Elsevier's Pharmaceutical Strategic Outlook conference meeting in February that its group was formally open for business - but plenty of hurdles remain. For one, said Kosacz, there's "about a postage stamp" of common ground between pharma out-licensers and the venture capitalists who want to extract assets on the best possible terms.

Indeed, the panelists - heads of BD or licensing at Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and AstraZeneca - were happy to blame VCs, who weren't around to defend themselves. (Here's a sample quote from GSK Chief of Worldwide Business Development Adrian Rawcliffe on whether pharmas should take equity in startups that form around outlicensed assets: Take equity, he said, but only if you follow on with your investment in future rounds, "or else you get shafted by the VCs.")

Merck Chief Licensing Officer Barbara Yanni had a different lament. Just as Merck finally decided to put things up for sale, she said "isn't it ironic" that biotechs that normally might seek pharma assets have no cash in this tough environment. (Alanis Morrissette was not around to defend herself.) AstraZeneca Global Head of Transactions Shaun Grady summed up the general big-pharma attitude quite well when he said, "Out-licensing isn't our raison d'etre, and it's not going to move the needle, but we recognize now that it's a source of value."

Funny, though, that the crowds of biotech BD execs who typically come to see the same folks at in-licensing panels and ply them with business cards afterwards only half-filled the room this time. Perhaps it was the "Big O" that scared them away.

And more news reported from BIO:

- the Fast Forward venture philanthropy awards New Zealand biotech Innate Therapeutics $550,000 to help fund Phase IIa testing of its novel immunomodulator MIS416 in patients with progressive forms of multiple sclerosis (see Also see "Innate Therapeutics Wins $550K From Fast Forward For Therapy Aimed At Progressive MS" - Pink Sheet, 5 May, 2010.);

- Holders of Phase II Small Business Innovation Research awards from the National Cancer Institute can compete for access to 30 hours of consulting time with either therapeutics or diagnostics specialists at FDA (Also see "NCI Will Offer Regulatory Coaching To SBIR Grantees" - Pink Sheet, 3 May, 2010.).

-Alex Lash (a.lash@elsevier.com)

Scene And Heard At BIO - From The IN VIVO Blog

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