Brown has a particular leaning towards creating biotech spin-offs, perhaps because of the infrastructure that cell therapy company Cytotherapeutics Inc. created in Providence, the locale of Brown's main campus. Seed stage funding from the Slater Center for Biotechnology, which funds Rhode Island biomedical start-ups, has also helped many Brown spin-offs get off the ground.

A preview of the emerging health care companies profiled in the current issue of Start-Up. This month's profile group, Drug Delivery, features profiles of Cell Based Delivery Inc., Solgene Therapeutics LLC, Spherics Inc. and Zars Inc. Plus these selected Start-Ups across Health Care: Helios Health Inc., Optimize Inc., Triad Therapeutics and Protiveris Inc.

Cell Based Delivery is engineering human muscle to serve as "living factories"--implantable bioreactors which have been genetically engineered to overexpress biotherapeutics--for making and delivering drugs such as growth factors, growth hormones, cytokines, or antibodies, over long periods of time. The company is first using its system, called ImPACT, in cardiovascular disease.

As an industry segment, drug delivery was virtually created by two companies--Alza Corp. and Elan Corp. PLC. These companies have since evolved into drug companies, abandoning a significant part of the field to second-generation arrivistes. Such companies that have survived the funding drought for small-cap companies have benefited, Inhale Therapeutics, for example, has a number of partnerships for its pulmonary delivery technology. Alkermes, probably the leading drug-delivery pure play, now has its first approved product. What is somewhat surprising about the industry is how little it has consolidated, particularly when one considers that no single drug delivery technology is applicable to a majority of drug delivery problems.