The Wall Street Journal article featuring CommerceNet portfolio company CollabRx and CommerceNet CEO Marty Tenenbaum ("Putting Drug Development into Patients' Hands") is capturing the interest of many bloggers and healthcare-related websites, including:

• Science Commons
• Medelis
• The Health Care Blog
• EmpowHer
• FierceBioResearcher
• Corante Brain Waves
• SmartBrief
• OncoBlog
• LungBlog
• NeuroTalk

CommerceNet Chairman Marty Tenenbaum and CommerceNet portfolio company, CollabRx, are featured in a Wall Street Journal article, "Putting Drug Development in Patients' Hands," by Amy Dockser Marcus.

Putting Drug Development in Patients' Hands

An Entrepreneur Stricken with Cancer Sets Up Firm to Develop 'Virtural' Biotechs

"Jay M. Tenenbaum became a multimillionaire in the Internet boom of the late 1990s. But it wasn't until he was diagnosed with a lethal cancer that he found his calling as an Internet entrepreneur."

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Listen to "Partnering for a Cure" podcast

Premier Farnell plc, a leading multichannel, high-service distributor supporting millions of engineers and purchasing professionals, named CommerceNet board and executive committee member Robert Rodin to its panel of judges for Live Edge 2008. This will be Mr. Rodin's second year judging the competition.

Live Edge 2008 is a competition focused on electronic design for the global environment. Last year's inaugural event was a huge success, with thousands of electronic design engineers and students from over 102 countries worldwide sharing their innovative designs for products aimed at reducing humankind's environmental impact on the planet.

Source: Science Commons Blog 

Over at the FasterCures blog, Margaret Anderson, the organization's Chief Operating Officer, has a post on the recent Institute of Medicine forum: Breakthrough Business Models: Drug Development for Rare and Neglected Diseases and Individualized Therapies. Anderson, who moderated a panel at the forum, observes that while the Michael J. Fox Foundation is often cited as an example of what's working well, surprisingly few research foundations embrace its innovative approaches. Key among them: pursuing collaborations with for-profit companies.

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Mass High Tech The Journal of New England Technology 

By Jay Rizoli, Special to Mass High Tech

"...It's information, said Marty Tenenbaum, the chairman and founder of CommerceNet who helped launch PatientsLikeMe and Medstory, later acquired by Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT). Patient-volunteered information is not subject to HIPAA regulations, which apply only to physicians and providers, and the potential multimillions of health care records represent an opportunity to do research in a way that's never been possible before...."

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Source: David Bollier, onthecommons.org Blog

"For those of us who don't venture into the laboratories of science, it's difficult to appreciate how fragmented, proprietary, and inefficient drug and disease research truly is. At a time when the Internet is making it easier than ever to share and collaborate, some of the most well-funded, high-tech scientific projects today still operate in their own isolated silos. They are effectively cut off from vast quantities of potentially useful research, scientific literature, emerging ideas, and potential collaborators.

"As Marty Tenenbaum and John Wilbanks put it, the current system is plagued by 'dibilitating delays, legal wrangling, and technical incompatibilities that frustrate scientific collaboration....'"

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CommerceNet portfolio company, PatientsLikeMe, is featured in a New York Times Magazine article, "Practicing Patients," by Thomas Goetz.

"At first glance, [PatientsLikeMe] looks like just any other online community, a kind of MySpace for the afflicted. Members have user names, post pictures of themselves and post updates and encouragements. As such, it's related to the chat rooms and online communities that have inhabited the Internet for more than a decade.

But PatientsLikeMe seeks to go a mile deeper than health-information sites like WebMD or online support groups like Daily Strength. The members of PatientsLikeMe don't just share their experiences anecdotally; they quantify them, breaking down their symptoms and treatments into hard data. They note what hurts, where and for how long. They list their drugs and dosages and score how well they alleviate their symptoms. All this gets compiled over time, aggregated and crunched into tidy bar graphs and progress curves by the software behind the site. And it's all open for comparison and analysis. By telling so much, the members of PatientsLikeMe are creating a rich database of disease treatment and patient experience."

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