Bits Blog: Developing Countries Surge in Mobile Broadband, U.N. Finds

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Tool Kit: A Surge in Growth for a New Kind of Online Course

Available globally to hundreds of thousands of people at a time, these classes depend on highly sophisticated digital technology, yet they could not be simpler to use. Signing up takes less time than creating an iTunes account. You can create a user name and password and start exploring the rapidly expanding course offerings.

The major Web sites already provide dozens of courses, as diverse as basic calculus and European intellectual history. It is both new and experimental, and as much as MOOCs have evolved since beginning in recent years, enthusiasts expect many more changes. From an early focus on technical and scientific courses, for instance, offerings now include the humanities and social sciences.

While there are some significant differences among the major MOOC Web sites, they share several main elements. Courses are available to anyone with access to the Internet. They are free, and students receive a certificate of completion at the end. With rare exceptions, you cannot earn college credit for taking one of these courses, at least for now.

“For a decade, people have been asking, ‘How does the Internet change higher education,’ ” said Edward B. Rock, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is the institution’s senior adviser on open course initiatives. “This is the beginning. It opens up all sorts of possibilities.”

Navigating the world of MOOCs begins with three major Web sites.

EdX

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created this nonprofit joint venture in May 2012. It has already offered dozens of courses in subjects as diverse as physics, computer science, engineering, literature, ethics, law, medicine and economics.

Twenty-nine universities have signed up to participate, including the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Texas, Austin; Georgetown; Cornell; the Berklee College of Music; the University of Toronto; and the University of Kyoto.

Courses are offered for a designated period of time, with lectures and reading assignments provided in weekly segments. Videos of lectures are generally augmented with exercises, quizzes, labs and simulators. Like other platforms, edX emphasizes interactivity.

You can audit a course — meaning you don’t take exams or do writing assignments — or you can fulfill all of the requirements to earn a certificate of completion.

Each course’s home page provides an estimate of how many hours a week the course will require. Workloads vary widely. A Global History of Architecture, an M.I.T. class, requires at least five hours a week. Introduction to Computer Science, Harvard’s traditional introductory course, asks online students to complete eight problem sets, each of which will take 15 to 20 hours, along with two quizzes and a final project.

Coursera

Two computer science professors at Stanford began this commercial venture in April 2012. The original partners were Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan. Seventeen months later, Coursera has partnerships with 84 universities and offers more than 400 courses.

Yale, Duke, Wisconsin and the University of Chicago are among the participants, as are the University of Edinburgh and the École Polytechnique in France.

Because courses are free, Coursera hopes to generate revenue in other ways, like linking corporations with students who have learned specific skills. Coursera does not formally offer the option of auditing a class, but people certainly can. Anyone can simply watch the videos and do some, all or none of the reading and homework; you just would not receive a certificate at the end.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 27, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a Web site that offers short videos on academic subjects. It is the Khan Academy, not Kahn Academy.

DealBook: Potential for Deals Drives a Big Surge in the Biotech Sector

Dominic ChavezMichael Thomenius of Epizyme, a new biopharmaceutical company in Cambridge, Mass., thought to be a prime takeover target.

8:28 p.m. | Updated

When Onyx Pharmaceuticals, a cancer drug developer, turned down a $10 billion acquisition bid by Amgen last month and put itself up for sale, its share price soared more than 50 percent, touching off an investor frenzy in biotechnology.

Among the beneficiaries was Epizyme, a newly public Massachusetts company that some Wall Street analysts predict could also become a takeover target. Shares of Epizyme, which is working on drugs to treat types of leukemia and lymphoma, have risen 20 percent since July 1, and they have more than doubled since the company’s initial public offering on May 31.

Six other biotechnology companies completed I.P.O.’s in June, and five or so are lined up behind them — an incredible run considering the window for biotech offerings had been all but slammed shut since the 2008 financial crisis. The hot streak has been driven largely by the potential for deal-making in the industry, investors and analysts said.

The feared “patent cliff” for brand-name drugs has caused billion-dollar blockbusters like Pfizer’s cholesterol drug Lipitor and Bristol-Myers Squibb’s blood thinner Plavix to lose ground to generic competition, so the pharmaceutical industry has been hunting for innovation among small biotechnology companies, as both takeover targets and licensing partners. There were five acquisitions of venture capital-backed biotech companies in the second quarter alone, according to data from Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association.

“I think the big pharma companies are going to continue to look outside to find the next wave of innovative therapies,” said Dennis Purcell, senior managing partner of Aisling Capital, a life sciences venture capital firm based in New York. On June 17, an Aisling portfolio company in San Diego, Aragon Pharmaceuticals, which has a prostate cancer treatment in midstage human trials, was bought by Johnson & Johnson for $650 million up front, plus the potential for an additional $350 million in payments tied to research milestones.

Still, biotechnology is more prone to disappointments than perhaps any other industry — a risk that came to light not long before this recent run of I.P.O.’s. In May, shares of a former high flyer, Aveo Pharmaceuticals, fell nearly 50 percent when an advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration urged the agency to reject the company’s kidney cancer drug because of questions about its efficacy.

That so many investors have been able to overlook such uncertainty and jump into a new class of companies with unproved science shows a new tolerance for risk on the public market, some experts say. The robust deal-making environment helps.

“People are hungry for growth,” said Erik Gordon, a professor specializing in life sciences entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan’s business school. “When you see something like Onyx telling Amgen” its offering price is too low, “you have to ask, what’s the downside? The downside is bad news, but if that doesn’t happen, the company you’ve invested in could be taken out at a huge gain.”

The 16 biotechnology companies that have gone public this year are up 48 percent on average from their offering prices, according to data provided by Nasdaq. As of Tuesday, four of the top 10 performing companies on the Nasdaq year-to-date were biotechs: Stemline Therapeutics, Bluebird Bio, Epizyme and Prosensa Holding.

“The fact that these companies can get out reloads the capacity of the venture funders” to turn to the public markets, said Samuel Isaly, managing partner of OrbiMed Advisors, which manages the Eaton Vance Worldwide Health Sciences Fund in addition to private equity and hedge funds. “We’re back to the good old days of before the financial crash.”

The biotechnology I.P.O. market is so frothy, in fact, that some companies are not waiting to take advantage of it. Hans Schikan, the chief executive of the Dutch biotech company Prosensa, said he and his management team originally planned their I.P.O. for a week or so after the Fourth of July holiday, but when they saw the positive investor response to Epizyme and others, they rushed out on June 28 instead. “When the window’s open, you’d better use it,” Mr. Schikan said. Prosensa’s shares opened $7 above its $13 offering price and are up 102 percent so far. It closed up 1.1 percent in trading Thursday on the Nasdaq, closing at $26.26.

One gateway for acquisitions in the biotech sector is research partnerships, and those are increasing as well.

Epizyme did not start human testing of its lead drug until late last year, but it attracted plenty of interest from big pharmaceutical companies long before that. The company formed research partnerships with GlaxoSmithKline, Celgene and Eisai, which together were worth $125 million in nonequity financing.

Simos Simeonidis, an analyst at Cowen & Company, predicts that if one of Epizyme’s two leading cancer drugs shows even a hint of success in clinical trials, “a lot of big pharmas or big biotechs are going to want to own the platform. The possibility of an acquisition in my mind would be very high,” he said.

Several other members of this year’s biotech I.P.O. class have rich partnerships. Bluebird Bio of Massachusetts signed a three-year oncology research deal with Celgene in March, which included a $75 million upfront payment. Bluebird’s I.P.O. was on June 19, and its stock has climbed 78 percent.

PTC Therapeutics, a New Jersey company that went public the next day and raised $114 million, has a $30 million deal with Roche to study treatments for spinal muscular atrophy, and an oncology partnership with AstraZeneca that included an undisclosed upfront payment. Both deals included the potential for milestone bonuses. Its shares have risen 9 percent. On Thursday, they rose 3.4 percent to close at $16.34.

Robert J. Gould, the chief executive of Epizyme, said he was aware that research partnerships often blossomed into full-blown buyout offers. But “we have no intention of positioning ourselves to be acquired,” he said. Bluebird and PTC, both still in post-offering quiet periods, declined to comment.

Venture capitalists in life sciences predict that both the pace and the value of licensing deals will accelerate. “Pharma certainly is evaluating every single asset of every single company that’s out there and acting on it,” said Noubar Afeyan, managing partner and chief executive of Flagship Ventures, an investor in Agios Pharmaceuticals of Massachusetts, which announced its intention on June 10 to raise $86 million in an I.P.O. Agios has a $150 million cancer drug development deal with Celgene.

It is not just cancer treatment that is generating excitement among investors. Prosensa is developing drugs to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy and other muscle disorders. PTC has its own treatment for muscular dystrophy and is also developing drugs to fight cystic fibrosis and infectious disease. The one unifying theme in all the companies that have generated excitement on Wall Street is the rise of personalized medicine, said Christoph Westphal, a longtime biotechnology entrepreneur and a founder and partner of the Longwood Fund. “Many companies that have done well recently have a specific molecular-medicine approach to a serious disorder that has no other therapies,” he said.

Prosensa’s two lead drugs for muscular dystrophy, for example, are being tested in small groups of patients whose disease is caused by specific genetic mutations, which can be detected with diagnostic devices that the company is using with the drugs.

Another factor in the biotech industry’s favor is that regulators have become more supportive of drugs that address high unmet medical needs. In July 2012, the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act established the “breakthrough therapy” designation, which gave the agency the authority to speed its review of drugs to treat life-threatening ailments.

“The regulators, notably the F.D.A., have been particularly willing to come up with new strategies to enable the rapid development of drugs for which there is a dramatic effect in a defined patient population,” said Robert Tepper, a partner at Third Rock Ventures, an investor in both Bluebird and Agios. “If you can stratify the patient population you want to treat through genetic analysis, for example, you can move quite quickly through early-stage trials.”

Australians Surge in Quest to Build Quantum Computer

In an article that appeared on Thursday in the journal Nature, a team of Australian and British scientists, led from the University of New South Wales, reported that they had successfully constructed one of the basic building blocks of modern quantum computing by relying on manufacturing techniques now used by the modern semiconductor industry.

Quantum computing will potentially lead to a new generation of supercomputers that are not intended to replace today’s machines but will instead open new computing vistas, from drug and material design to code breaking, by offering speed to address a new class of problems.

“We are used to designing cars and airplanes with computers,” said Andrew Dzurak, a physicist who is director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility and lead researcher on the latest advance. “Imagine if you could start building your molecule or your material on a computer and then completely simulate its behavior.”

The basic building blocks of quantum computers are quantum bits, or “qubits.” Unlike today’s digital computers, which process information in a binary fashion based on logic states of “on” and “off,” a qubit can for brief periods represent multiple states simultaneously. Potentially, this means it is possible to tackle vast new problems by performing parallel computations using a relatively small set of qubits — perhaps as few as several hundred. The advance by Dr. Dzurak’s team involves placing a single electron — embedded in a silicon chip — in a “quantum state,” and then repeatedly measuring the state.

In February, a second group based at the University of New South Wales published an article in the journal Nature Nanotechnology reporting their advance: the construction of a single-atom transistor using a different but related design approach.

In both cases, the research teams are international. There is an increasing awareness, however, that Australian scientists have made significant advances this year toward this long-promised new type of computing.

While there is a growing consensus among scientists that working quantum computers will emerge during this decade, there is also a growing belief that they will not replace the conventional computers that are now carried in the pockets of more than half the world’s population. For one thing, most of the quantum computing approaches only worked when temperatures were cooled to near absolute zero.

Though there are only a handful of workable algorithms designed to run on quantum computers, scientists say their application may prove vastly more useful than today’s technology in simulating a wide variety of biological, chemical and physical systems. That means they could become the standard tool for a wide range of new industries, like drug and material design.

The achievements of the two teams is a payoff from an investment the Australian government began making in the 1990s.

“Both groups are highly competitive and leading in the world in what they do,” said Gerhard Klimeck, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, who has collaborated with both groups and was a co-author of the Nature Nanotechnology paper.

Dr. Dzurak’s group’s work contrasts with a research team led by Michelle Simmons, director of the ARC Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales. That group has taken an approach based on placing individual atoms using a scanning tunneling microscope, allowing great precision in building devices on an atomic scale.

The team led by Dr. Dzurak uses conventional semiconductor techniques to implant a phosphorus atom just 10 to 15 nanometers below the surface of a silicon chip. That approach has the twin advantages of using industry standards and potentially extending the individual electron’s duration in a quantum state.

The United States has federally financed, corporate and university research efforts under way to design usable quantum computers. I.B.M., for example, recently expanded its research at its Almaden laboratory in California.

Andreas Heinrich, a physicist who is a quantum researcher at I.B.M., pointed out that neither Australian group had shown the ability to interconnect multiple qubits. That capability is necessary for a quantum computer.

Dr. Dzurak said he believed that capability could be achieved as soon as a year from now.

Dead Space 3, Crysis 3, Madden 13 Pre-Orders Surge

EA has announced big pre-order numbers for Dead Space 3, Crysis 3 and Madden NFL 13. According to a first quarter earnings call today, pre-orders of Dead Space 3 “are tracking almost five-times higher than Dead Space 2 in the same timeframe in 2010.” Crysis 3 pre-orders, meanwhile, “are roughly three-times what they were for Crysis 2 at this time in 2010” and Madden NFL 13 pre-orders “are up 25% versus last year.”

Elsewhere in the call, EA reported continued success for Battlefield 3 Premium, which has boosted its financials in the wake of disappointing subscriber numbers for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Looking ahead, the publisher also commented that it’s keeping a close eye on Wii U.

Overall, EA lost $130 million this quarter, with revenue of $491 million that fell just short of its $500 million forecast. EA announced this morning that it will hire former Yahoo! exec Blake Jorgensen as its new executive vice president and chief financial officer. The publisher called the quarter “solid” overall and CEO John Riccitiello referred to the company’s plans as “a strategic balance that none of our peers can duplicate.”

EA also commented on the results of a recent lawsuit over sports exclusivity, noting that it’s “not out of the NCAA football business” but that it won’t hold the exclusive rights moving forward. “We’re very bullish on our NCAA product going forward and we welcome the competition,” Riccitiello said, in addition to discussing Star Wars: The Old Republic's recently-announced transition to free-to-play.

EA’s upcoming release slate includes NHL 13 in September in addition to Madden NFL 13 in August and both Medal of Honor Warfighter and  Need for Speed Most Wanted in October. Crysis 3 and Dead Space 3 will hit stores in early 2013, along with Sim City in February.