The Future of the Planet: Capturing Carbon

Big energy geek news this week as the Lacq carbon capture coal plant finally came online in France; the first carbon capture and storage (CCS) retrofit on a commercial scale. The technology came from energy company Total, which retrofited an existing gas-fired boiler to the tune of 60 milion Euros. Britain, which pioneered study of CCS but then dropped the ball, was embarrassed and defensive as quoted by the Guardian. In its ideal performance, CCS could trap 90 percent of a power plant's carbon emissions. Although everyone agrees that carbon capture is an absolute necessity to get greenhouse gasses under control, the technology has moved much more slowly than expected, and is still years away from being commercially viable on a large scale. Let's get moving, people, the glaciers can't wait for you to get your oxycombustion calculations right!!

A New Prostate Cancer Drug Wows Doctors

It's hard to weed the hope from the hype when it comes to new cancer drugs, but a new study in this week's issue of Science introduces a drug worth paying attention to. Currently known by the uncharismatic designation MDV3100 (presumably it'll get a more memorable name before it gets to market) it's made by local San Francisco biotech Medivation and results of a Phase 1-2 trial were impressive. So impressive, in fact, that the company's rushing to launch a Phase 3 trial, and if you're a candidate I'd suggest trying to get into it. This drug's not going to be the next blockbuster, at least not soon, since its target patient population is fairly limited. But for those folks -- men with prostate cancer that's resistant to anti-androgens-- it could make a life or death difference. 

An unlucky subset of patients has prostate cancer that's "castration-resistant," which sounds like it should be good, but is in fact bad. CRPC means the tumors are resistant to traditional anti-androgen drugs, specifically bicalutamide, the regimen of choice. The men in Medivation's recent trial had already failed standard hormonal therapies, and many had also failed standard chemo as well. In other words, they were running out of options fast. In one third of the men who took it, MDV3100 showed a significant drop in PSA, a sign the medication worked to stop the tumor's advance. 

Medivation's a company to watch from a business and entrepreneurship standpoint as well. They developed the experimental Alzheimer's drug Dimebon, which Pfizer bought the rights to in September for $725 million.

There are still spots available in the ongoing Phase 1-2 open label trial, and a new Phase 3 study, announced March 19th, will enroll 1200 men across the country. If you or a man you love has CRPC that hasn't responded to chemo, find the closest trial center by visiting Medivation's trials page.

Open Source Online Textbooks In Classrooms Now

I love it when VCs give a vote of confidence to something I've hailed as a worthwhile innovation; makes me think once in awhile I get it right. That's what happened this week when Flat World Knowledge, the open source online textbook start-up I wrote about for CNN Money and Fortune Small Business in December, got an $8 million injection of VC funds from Valhalla Partners, Greenhill SAVP and High Peaks Venture Partners. Now, I know 8 mil is small potatoes, but with VC channels all but dry right now and this being Flat World's first round (previous funding was all from unnamed Angels), it's one of those times the thought counts.

The pinch hitting schools, students, and their families may mean good timing for the plucky start-up, which has its first ten titles -- all aimed at management and business schools -- ready for show and tell to college faculty this spring.

Catching Cancer Before It's Cancer with Magnetic Nano-Particles

What if it were possible to find cancerous tumors while they were so small they were really just clusters of hyperactive cells circulating in the blood? (Which is what tumors really are, except on a larger, and scarier, scale.) That's the promise of a new magnetic nanotechnology currently in development as a joint project at Stanford and UC Santa Cruz. Described by the research team as "real-time magnetic nanotag sensing" in a recent paper, the technology uses nanosize magnetic beads as "tags" that attach to multiple cancer-related proteins -- known as biomarkers -- in a blood serum sample. Still in the prototype stage, it's much more sensitive than other fluorescent assays currently being tested, most of which can detect only one biomarker at a time. The research is being supported by the National Cancer Institute's Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer, an iniative that we hope will deliver on the promise of nanotechnology to catch cancer while it's still curable. Two of the lead researchers, Dr. Shan Wang of Stanford and Nader Pourmand have cofounded a startup, MagArray, to develop the technology. Definitely worth keeping a watch on.

"Innovation Journalism" -- What Is It?

I'm planning to attend the 5th annual Innovation Journalism Conference at Stanford (one of my alma maters) May 21-23. What, you may well wonder, is innovation journalism? Looking at the conference program, it seems many people are wondering that too, including -- perhaps -- the organizers. The concept seems to cut both ways; about 50 percent of the presentations are about covering innovation, while the other 50 percent provide a forum to discuss the ways journalists, and journalism organizations (read: newspapers desperate to stench the bleed), can get on board with high-tech innovation. So, as expected, there are presentations such as "How to keep a critical perspective when covering innovation?" (Right up my alley.) But there are also presentations on how social media are changing the way people consume news, which would be of more interest to a Gannett exec than to me. It'll be interesting to see how all these perspectives collide.

Cut the Cord: Wireless Electricity Comes to Market

I wrote this for Business 2.0 last spring, but it's still circulating from blog to blog, so I thought the interest level merited a revisit. Here's a video clip that Powercast showed at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where they made another splashy presentation.
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How much money could you make from a technology that replaces electrical wires? A startup called Powercast, along with the more than 100 companies that have inked agreements with it, is about to start finding out. Powercast and its first major partner, electronics giant Philips, are set to launch their first device powered by electricity broadcast through the air.

It may sound futuristic, but Powercast's platform uses nothing more complex than a radio--and is cheap enough for just about any company to incorporate into a product. A transmitter plugs into the wall, and a dime-size receiver (the real innovation, costing about $5 to make) can be embedded into any low-voltage device. The receiver turns radio waves into DC electricity, recharging the device's battery at a distance of up to 3 feet.

Picture your cell phone charging up the second you sit down at your desk, and you start to get a sense of the opportunity. How big can it get? "The sky's the limit," says John Shearer, Powercast's founder and CEO. He estimates shipping "many millions of units" by the end of 2008.

For years, electricity experts said this kind of thing couldn't be done. "If you had asked me seven months ago if this was possible, I would have said, 'Are you dreaming? Have you been smoking something?'" says Govi Rao, vice president and general manager of solid-state lighting at Philips (Charts). "But to see it work is just amazing. It could revolutionize what we know about power."

World's 11 coolest products

So impressed was Rao after witnessing Powercast's demo last summer that he walked away jotting down a list of the industries to which the technology could immediately be applied: lighting, peripherals, all kinds of handheld electronics. Philips partnered with Powercast last July, and their first joint product, a wirelessly powered LED light stick, will hit the market this year. Computer peripherals, such as a wireless keyboard and mouse, will follow in 2008.

Broadcasting power through the air isn't a new idea. Researchers have experimented with capturing the radiation in radio frequency at high power but had difficulty capturing it at consumer-friendly low power. "You'd have energy bouncing off the walls and arriving in a wide range of voltages," says Zoya Popovic, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Colorado who works on wireless electricity projects for the U.S. military.

That's where Shearer came in. A former physicist based in Pittsburgh, he and his team spent four years poring over wireless electricity research in a lab hidden behind his family's coffee house. He figured much of the energy bouncing off walls could be captured. All you had to do was build a receiver that could act like a radio tuned to many frequencies at once.

"I realized we wanted to grab that static and harness it," Shearer says. "It's all energy."

Entrepreneur finds 'suite' dreams

So the Powercast team set about creating and patenting that receiver. Its tiny but hyperefficient receiving circuits can adjust to variations in load and field strength while maintaining a constant DC voltage. Thanks to the fact that it transmits only safe low wattages, the Powercast system quickly won FCC approval--and $10 million from private investors.

Powercast says it has signed nondisclosure agreements to develop products with more than 100 companies, including major manufacturers of cell phones, MP3 players, automotive parts, temperature sensors, hearing aids, and medical implants.

The last of those alone could be a multibillion-dollar market: Pacemakers, defibrillators, and the like require surgery to replace dead batteries. But with a built-in Powercast receiver, those batteries could last a lifetime.

"Everyone's looking to cut that last cord," says Alex Slawsby, a consultant at Innosight who specializes in disruptive innovation. "Think of the billion cell phones sold last year. If you could get Powercast into a small percentage of the high-end models, those would be huge numbers."

Could Powercast's technology also work for larger devices? Perhaps, but not quite yet. Laptop computers, for example, use more than 10 times the wattage of Powercast transmissions.

But industry trends are on Shearer's side: Thanks to less energy-hungry LCD screens and processors, PC power consumption is slowly diminishing. Within five years, Shearer says, laptops will be down to single-digit wattage--making his revenue potential even more electrifying.

Originally published in Business 2.0 magazine.

The $64,000 Question: Will the Cancer Recur?

If a test existed that could tell you whether your loved one's cancer was curable or was particularly likely to recur within the next five years, would you want to know?

Two teams of cancer researchers have made discoveries that, if they pan out, could provide a crystal ball to predict which cancers are most likely to spread, and provide an answer to every cancer patient's $64,000 question: Will I be cured, or will the cancer come back?

• Researchers at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have discovered genetic markers, clearly visible in tissue samples, that can identify which early-stage lung tumors are likely to recur within 5 years.
• A team of scientists based in the Life Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have discovered that a naturally occurring protein known as SATB1 appears to have the power to reprogram breast cancer tumors, turning them into the aggressive type that metastasize, or spread.

While both discoveries are still in an early stage of research, both have clear potential to lead to new diagnostic tools as well as new approaches to treatment. Patients whose lung tumors show the molecular "flags" identified by the Hopkins team or whose breast tumors test positive for SATB1 might be reclassified as high-risk and treated as such. Such knowledge could be powerful -- and scary.

Would you want to know, even if the news wasn't good?