What makes a health care VC stand out in the minds of entrepreneurs? According to a first-of-its-kind survey by Windhover, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Wilson Sonsini, and Applied Information Networks, the answer is value-added services. Entrepreneurs prize VCs who assist them, pre-financing, with constructive feedback and sharing of due diligence results. VCs do pretty well here. But they do less well on the more important post-financing criteria: helping their portfolio companies secure additional financing and recruit customers, partners, and employees.

ImaRx Therapeutics Inc. aims to use a diagnostic contrast agent as a vehicle for drug and gene delivery. The company will encapsulate a therapeutic payload in a synthetic microbubble, inject it into the body, then apply ultrasound across the skin to rupture the microbubble at the targeted site. Shockwaves from the rupture are thought to permeate capillary walls and drive the drug or gene instantaneously into the targeted tissue.

IBM thinks that the life sciences industry, where it has had little presence to date, is now big enough and ripe enough to be worth pursuing. It aims to get in at the start of the value chain via bioinformatics. The computing giant has bigger plans than smaller players that moved earlier to focus on bioinformatics-and it has the means to see them through. Pioneers got stuck doing fee-for-service work, but IBM can sell Big Pharmas hardware, software and most importantly, all sorts of services. IBM's debut product in life sciences is DiscoveryLink, which lets data from disparate sources be queried as though they were all in one, giant database. It's also meant to broadly support software created by specialized applications developers. Installations will have to be custom jobs-ideally, part of bigger IT contracts. Other computing concerns also perceive opportunity in life sciences; indeed it's clear a battle is brewing between big hardware suppliers. But they're cooperating to a degree: calling for data standards, so they can compete on products not technology. IBM has credibility from other sectors, but it's uncertain how applicable it expertise will be in life sciences, even if it can find and train enough people. Also unclear: whether drugmakers actually want and will pay big money for integrated solutions. Though a newcomer to life sciences, IBM may be uniquely suited to serve the industry-not only because of its own deep and ongoing research into computational biology, but because it can offer drugmakers one-stop shopping.

In the course of validating disease targets or developing drugs, researchers need tissue samples from patients with specific types of diseases as well as from healthy patients.BioSample Inc., has an internet-enabled biological material procurement solution to the pharmaceutical/biotech community.