Windows 7 Home Premium Accelerator Slowed Down in

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Carl Weissman Biotech,Office Enterprise 2007, VC, folks Accelerator Slowed Down in 2009, Expects to Rev Again Up in 2010 Luke Timmerman 12710 Any honest evaluation of Seattle biotech around the previous 5 several years would really need to count Accelerator as one of the many bright spots. But the past year or so has been unusually quiet in the biotech startup incubator. Accelerator a short while ago endured a six-month dry spell when it didn’t see any exciting new investment ideas enter its pipeline,Windows 7 Serial, according to CEO Carl Weissman.
“We can survive these kind of times easily, because what the board essentially expects is that the quality [of investments] never goes down,” Weissman said when I stopped by his office on Seattle’s Eastlake Avenue last week. “We don’t should lower our standards on quality in order to satisfy a quota.”
For those who aren’t familiar, Accelerator is among the central players while in the local life sciences innovation scene. Biotech pioneer Leroy Hood, along with a number of prominent venture firms, founded Accelerator in 2003 to provide some lab space and operational support for scientific entrepreneurs with potentially groundbreaking ideas that desire a little extra proof before they can secure serious venture dollars. Accelerator has raised a total of $43.8 million,Windows 7 Home Premium, some of which it has put to work in 10 startups so far. The roster includes four Seattle companies that have emerged and raised a combined $144 million since graduating—VLST, Theraclone Sciences, Allozyne, and Integrated Diagnostics.
That last company, known as InDi for short, is the most current startup with roots at Accelerator to score venture bucks. It was known as Homestead Clinical in a past incarnation, and it didn’t win follow-on financing from Accelerator’s primary VC backers, but it emerged in October anyway with a $30 million commitment from outside VCs largely because of Hood’s “force of will,” Weissman says. OK, so InDi may well be another notch during the Accelerator belt. But I wondered about the other three startups that were founded at Accelerator within the past two years—PharmSelex (formerly known as GPC-Rx) in June 2008,Microsoft Office 2007, Mirina in August 2008, and Xori in May well of 2009. All three are still operating, and Weissman wouldn’t say much about their future prospects other than, “We’re extremely pleased along with the progress from two out on the three.”
So we’ll should sit tight a while longer to see whether any of those three emerge, or fade away. What was much more surprising to me is what he said about the slowdown during the flow of new ideas for companies. From about June thru December, “there wasn’t much,” with the way of exciting new scientific ideas coming in to Accelerator, Weissman says, even though it has historically been inundated with pitches. That improved a bit last month,Office 2007 Serial, when Accelerator found three new ideas that it considered “very exciting,” Weissman says.
The feast-and-famine cycle at Accelerator “is to be expected,” he says, and that is why the organization doesn’t have a hard quota …Next Page » Luke Timmerman is the National Biotech Editor of Xconomy, and the Editor of Xconomy Seattle. You can e-mail him at ltimmerman@xconomy.com, or follow him at twitter.comldtimmerman.