After forced sale, PatientsLikeMe founder frets that U.S. policy could chill collaboration in biotech
PatientsLikeMe founder speaks publicly for the first time about the U.S. order that the company must find a new buyer.
Jamie Heywood is a live wire of a man, a thin, energetic mechanical engineer who entered the biotech world after his brother was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1998. Seeing the state of basic science around the disease, he started the world’s first nonprofit biotechnology company, ALS TDI, with his family. From that moment, he was never one to mince words.
So he made his frustration clear when he spoke for the first time publicly about what has been happening to his second company, PatientsLikeMe, which is being an investment by China-based iCarbonX. At the conference where Heywood appeared recently, the Convergence Forum on Cape Cod, the room took on the tenor of a wake as he spoke about the
