串行企业家和马萨诸塞州理工学院罗伯特兰德教授是一个生物技术传说，其半场波士顿地区的初创公司缺乏投资者。所以Langer在去年年底宣布他宣布最新的合作伙伴：俄罗斯政府。不是克里姆林宫，究竟。国家支持的投资公司Rusnano筹集了一半的融资，将9450万美元倒入两个船员是核心投资者：Selecta Biosciences，它正在开发一种转基因药物，阻止尼古丁的上瘾作用，并结合生物科学，致力于潜在的大片癌症药物。Rusnano还同意在与克利夫兰Biolabs的合资企业中投入2600万美元，另一个美国启动，该公司正在寻求工程师肿瘤治疗。The U.S. investments were a first for Rusnano, founded in 2007 to seed tech companies within Russia, but they were far from its biggest international collaborations of 2011. Last May, Rusnano announced a $300 million joint venture with Crocus Technology, a French-founded pioneer of the magnetic random access memory technology that may push coming generations of microchips. And in December it joined Japan’s Nippon Sheet Glass Co. and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in a €295 million ($373 million) project to produce energy-saving glass. The Russians have plenty of rubles to shower on promising scientific outfits abroad. Vladimir Putin and company have staked Rusnano, run by onetime privatization czar Anatoly Chubais, to $9 billion in capital and state-guaranteed debt. About $3 billion of that is committed, says Dmitriy Lisenkov, the St. Petersburg–born, U.S.-educated managing director who has overseen most of the foreign investments. The firm offers terms that private equity investors without state backing can’t usually match, Lisenkov, 45, says. “Strategic investors coming in with our level of funding will generally want control of the company, or at least the [intellectual property].” By contrast, Rusnano sets up joint ventures or takes a minority equity stake as long as beneficiaries agree to move some operations to Russia. That’s a win-win for Scott Minick, president and CEO of BIND, who is scouting locations for a Russian R&D center. “Expanding into Russia wasn’t something I was actively thinking about,” Minick recalls. “But they have some of the best polymer chemists in the world.” All three of Rusnano’s new U.S. biotech partners plan to use their Russian foothold to expand and accelerate clinical trials of experimental medicines. Winning approval of a new product from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration can be a 15-year slog that young companies can scarcely afford, explains Michael Fonstein, a Russian émigré chemist who is president and CEO of Cleveland BioLabs. In Russia the drug can go to market in three years, then garner performance data that might shorten the FDA marathon. Rusnano’s market-savvy investment team confounds expectations of a clunky post-Communist bureaucracy, Fonstein observes. “When we first encountered them a few years ago, they were a very rigid partner,” he says. “But they learned to be more flexible quickly.” Chubais has always been a maverick in Russia’s public sector. He was at the center of the 1990s’ shock economic reforms, first as director of state property, then as finance minister and chief of staff to president Boris Yeltsin. In 1998 he became CEO of national utility Unified Energy System, pushing through changes that led to the privatization of most power generation. Chubais’s zeal and track record have lured internationally experienced financiers like Lisenkov, who earned an MBA at Baruch College in New York, then worked as a broker at UBS before returning home in 2003 to head business development and exit strategies at Russian Technology Fund, a venture capital group in St. Petersburg. Lisenkov joined Rusnano in 2008.
俄罗斯对西方科技企业家来说有几个吸引力，他们在国内正疲于应对风险偏好下降。其中一个较大的项目是斯科尔科沃创新中心(Skolkovo Innovation Center)，政府的任务是在莫斯科城外现在是一片草地的地方，从零开始建设一个斯拉夫式的硅谷。斯科尔科沃为愿意在那里扎根的公司提供了12亿美元的研究经费。它的顾问委员会成员之一:麻省理工学院的兰格。••