MARKETING

British educators share biotechnology marketing lessons


There is no magic key to successful technology transfer, but pragmatism helps, a top administrator from a research-intensive university in the United Kingdom told a group at Kansas University on Tuesday.

“Be pragmatic and do a deal that works,” Sir Colin Campbell, vice chancellor of the University of Nottingham, said to a gathering of several dozen KU administrators and researchers.

Campbell joined the top representatives of the British-based company OncImmune in discussing technology transfer and the evolution of a university start-up. The panel included John Robertson, professor of surgery at Nottingham whose laboratory develops the technology for OncImmune; Tony Barnes, the company’s CEO; and Geoffrey Hamilton-Fairley, the company’s chairman.

The speakers discussed the formation of OncImmune, which develops products for the early detection of breast and ovarian cancers. The company plans to launch its first test for cancer in the first quarter of 2008.

OncImmune last year announced that it had chosen Lenexa for the site of its North American headquarters and commercial lab.

“You’re very good at cancer,” Campbell said of what the state has to offer. “You’ve got very good people. We’d like to cooperate with you on clinical trials and the medical and scientific aspects. Our guys, who are very good, chose Kansas because of the people here.”

The speakers gave tips for how to follow their path. Accept and manage the inevitable risk associated with technology transfer, work together respectfully, and be pragmatic, Hamilton-Fairley told the audience.

Campbell also said the University of Nottingham has gone about technology transfer with a great deal of transparency and that was key in its success.

During his visit, Campbell is also stopping at KU Hospital’s Cancer Center, the Stowers Institute and the Kansas Life Sciences Institute.

Marketing firm soars on first day

Investors embrace Constant Contact, despite the red ink

By Diedtra Henderson, Globe Staff

An initial public offering from Constant Contact Inc., a Waltham provider of Web-based e-mail marketing software, commanded a share price that far exceeded its opening price yesterday and a market capitalization that dwarfed its meager revenue.

Within hours of its sizzling debut, shares in the company, which has been operating in the red, soared as high as $30.76, nearly double the initial public offering price of $16 per share.
The stock closed at $27.64, with 6.97 million shares changing hands yesterday.

"Constant Contact has a great market opportunity, solid management team, a stellar investor group, and outstanding revenue growth rate - roughly 80 percent year-over-year," said Ben Howe, chief executive of America's Growth Capital, a research, trading, and investment banking firm focused on emerging growth.

Howe said that "extremely optimistic" investors also were motivated, in part, by the company's potential as a buyout target.

"That said," Howe added, investors were "paying too much today for what the company will hopefully deliver sometime in the future."

Other analysts were puzzled by the investor demand for what they saw as a somewhat risky stock.

The company was launched in 1998 and has 130,000 customers worldwide, among them small businesses and such nonprofit organizations as the United Way of America.

But it continues to rack up millions of dollars in losses per year. In the six months ended June 30, Constant Contact had revenue of $21 million, compared with $8.5 million for the first half of last year.

Its net losses were roughly $5.5 million, compared with a loss of about $2.8 million in the same period the year prior.

"From an investors' standpoint, they represent a slightly higher risk to me. You want to see the company scaling to profitability," said Brian Hamilton, chief executive of Sageworks, a provider of financial information.

Constant Contact's executives declined to comment yesterday.

Nonprofits that rely on Constant Contact to update donors and volunteers said they have been impressed with how easy the company's product makes it to send out polished e-mails, complete with photographs and graphics that look the same on the creator's screen as on the recipient's.

And, because computer filters have grown increasingly sophisticated, they applauded Constant Contact's tool that checks e-mail for the probability it would be blocked as uninvited "spam."

America SCORES New England, which provides after-school soccer and creative writing programs at 12 elementary and six middle schools in Boston, uses the software to send monthly updates to 1,000 families, teachers, community members, and donors.

Managing the mailing list to send such an e-mail, as the nonprofit will do to highlight an upcoming end-of-season poetry slam, took a half day using a different computer software program.

Now, Alex Meader, a development associate at the organization, says sending that e-mail takes just an hour's worth of work.

"It's a really easy tool to make professional looking e-mail," he said.

Through a partnership with Constant Contact, 1,294 United Way local affiliates get the e-marketing services for free - and can reach up to 13 million recipients.

Peter Hahn, director of United Way Creative Studio, predicts that so-called viral marketing could rapidly increase the nonprofit's reach.

New subscribers can opt in within the e-mail, with no extra work done by overworked United Way affiliates.

"We are really very excited about all of the potential of viral marketing," Hahn said.

"It does have the potential of exponential growth: You can start with very few names and possibly spread at a much faster rate than if we were to try to collect each of those names by ourselves."