The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

Biotechnology, Health and Business in Canada, the United States and Worldwide

Monthly Archives: April 2009

Health Care Reform: Party’s Over for Medical Imaging

Well…it could be worse, but one could argue it’s the beginning of a slow decline for the medical imaging market in the U.S.  On Tuesday, Senator Baucus (D-Montana) and Senator Grassley (R-Iowa), Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee, released a description of policy options for healthcare reform.  The options included “Transparency and Evidence-Based Decision-Making for Imaging Services,” proposing a [...]

A Familiar Refrain From the UK

This story in Nature about the UK budget may sound familiar to Canadians: “Britain’s government has unveiled an economic stimulus package designed to harness what it calls a ‘world-class science base’ — at the same time as it cuts funds for undirected basic research.”

BioFinance Lunch Keynote: U.S. Health Reform

Just finished listening to Scott Gottlieb at the BioFinance lunch keynote. Scott was Deputy Commissioner at the FDA in the Bush administration, and is now a Fellow at the American Enterpirse Institute. Here’s what he had to say. Stay tuned for questions from the audience, including Dani and I, at the end… Healthcare in the [...]

200th Post – State of the Blog

7 contributors, 106 days since launch, 200 posts, 1047 tags, 7604 hits. BioFinance tomorrow.  Over and out.

Monday Deal Review: April 27, 2009

Biotech deal activity in Canada was back on the upswing a bit this week, with some private placements, issuer bids, and an equity line of credit…

Where We Will Be This Week

Fun week ahead.  BioFinance runs from Tuesday through Thursday. Dani and I will both be there. I will be speaking on the Public Market Strategies for Cleantech Investing panel on Thursday, April 30 at 3pm.  Admission to the Cleantech day of BioFinance is free, and the whole conference is excellent, so come check it out [...]

Human Swine Influenza: Understaffed

The volume of Human Swine flu info has exceeded my ability to keep up.  I will try to post sporadically on interesting scientific, political or business implications. In the meantime, I have added two widgets on the right side of this page: Google news RSS for “swine” Twitter RSS for #swineflu That should help visitors keep up [...]

Human Swine Influenza Update: Canadian Cases Confirmed, Public Health Emergency Declared in U.S.

CDC transcript from today’s briefing. White House Press Briefing transcript. New York Times story: Mexico data: 1,300 infected, 80 dead. U.S. data: 20 infected, one temporarily hospitalized now recovered. Canada data: 6 infected, all linked to travel to Mexico. 2 in BC, 4 in Nova Scotia. No WHO decision on pandemic alert level until Tuesday.

Human Swine Influenza Update: World Health Organization (WHO) Resources

The World Health Organization has a new page up collecting resources and news related to the Human Swine Influenza outbreak, including: the transcript of yesterday’s call (pdf) (info on coordination, no new epidemiology or M&M data); a pdf with genetic sequences from the A(H1N1) strain to assist with updating disagnostic tools, and guidance for public health [...]

Human Swine Influenza Update: Saturday CDC Call

While I eat lunch, I’m keeping half an ear on the CDC conference call updating media on their investigation of the human cases of swine influenza.  Original post here with some background and previous call info. Speaking on the call: Anne Schuchat, M.D., Interim Deputy Director for Science and Public Health Program Daniel Jernigan, M.D., [...]

Friday Science Review: Walk Before You Run Edition

Puijila the Primitive Pinniped:  Vertebrate paleontologist Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and her team found the first skeleton of a land-dwelling relative of seals, sea lions, and walruses. The 20-million- to 24-million-year-old Arctic fossil has webbed feet — the first fossil found in that family that shows an intermediate step [...]

Updated: Swine Flu Outbreak

This is not good news.  FierceBiotech says at least 16 of 57 dead in Mexico have been confirmed killed by swine flu and hundreds more have taken sick, and that “there is abundant evidence that the flu is being spread from person to person.” The New York Times reports that the Mexico victims died from the same new [...]

Cow Genome Sequenced: Meet the Bovine J. Craig Venter

The genome of a Hereford cow, L1 Dominette 01449, was sequenced by the Bovine Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, less than two years after J. Craig Venter’s team reported the sequence of Dr. Venter’s genome in September 2007.  The Bovine sequencing papers are in this week’s issue of Science, along with a podcast interview with the lead P.I. [...]

Wednesday Brain Dump: Plant Matter Edition

Some stories from the world of plant biotech: Ben-Gurion University is collaborating with Bayer BioScience NV to fund work at Simon Barak’s lab investigating genes to help plants cope with heat, salinity and drought.   Nature has a story about regulatory difficulties being faced in the EU by a pharming consortium.  Pharming is the production of drugs [...]

Canada’s First Subsequent Entry Biologic!

Guest post from Jill Daley, part of our all-star life sciences team at Ogilvy: Today, Sandoz Canada announced that Health Canada has granted it a market authorization for Omnitrope™. This announcement marks the approval of the first subsequent entry biologic (SEB, also known as a “follow-on biologic” (FOB) in the U.S. or a “biosimilar” in the [...]

Plan B OTC

The FDA’s press release on Plan B, which will soon be available OTC for women 17 and older.  The original FDA decision-making process for OTC Plan B was a multi-year ordeal.  This round was short and sweet: “On March 23, 2009, a federal court issued an order directing the FDA, within 30 days, to permit [...]

New OHA Site for Ontario Hospital Performance Data

The Ontario Hospital Association has put up a new website at myhospitalcare.ca that compiles some publicly available hospital data and puts it in a user-friendly, layman-accessible format. The OHA site can provide data sorted by type of care (Acute, Maternity/Pediatric, Emergency, Rehab, Chronic and Mental Health) or by indicator (Clinical Outcome, Family Satisfaction, Patient Safety, [...]

Editor

Audrey Fried-Grushcow (not no relation) is a U.S.-trained lawyer and mediator.  After law school, Audrey clerked for Judge William J. Bauer on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and practiced in the area of complex commercial litigation for several years at a large Chicago-based law firm before turning her attention to mediation and conflict resolution. She is [...]

Trends Update — Personalized Medicine: Clinical Data on Personalized Cancer Treatment

A study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting this week showed benefits to patients from using molecular profiling to customize chemotherapy regimens. The pilot study, with Daniel Von Hoff, M.D. as the senior investigator, used immunohistochemistry and microarray profiling to select treatment regimens for 66 patients who had ovarian, colorectal, breast and other cancers.   [...]

FTC Proposed Rule for Medical Record Privacy for Non-HIPAA Entities

One of the concerns about the privacy of electronic medical records is that many of the major providers — notably Google and Microsoft —  are not “covered entities” under HIPAA and are therefore not subject to its privacy provisions. The funding for Electronic Health Records in the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 comes with [...]

Monday Deal Review: April 20, 2009

A relatively quiet week for the deal review this week…

New Data in Canada: BIOTECanada-PwC 2009 Life Sciences Forecast

The BIOTECanada-PricewaterhouseCoopers 2009 Canadian Life Sciences Forecast was released today. The Forecast was produced from data gathered in October and November 2008, so is (unsurprisingly) a bit bleak, but there are a few bright spots to be found: Canadian companies are increasingly flexible about exit scenarios.  In the 2009 Forecast, 66% of firms looked to [...]

Canadian Science Funding Update — Open Letter From Canadian Scientists Generates Equal, Opposite Open Letter from Gary Goodyear

Canadian scientists, dismayed by cuts of $113 million to the three primary granting agencies in this year’s federal budget, sent an open letter of protest to PM Harper last week that collected 2,000 signatures. The response, from Minister of Industry Tony Clement, was certainly better pitched than the response at budget time from the government’s [...]

Friday Science Review: First Time for Everything Edition

First time for blood stem cell factors:  Dr. Guy Sauvageau of the University of Montreal produced a large number of blood stem cells in the lab from a smaller sample taken from bone marrow using a novel screening technique to identify mediators of the stem cell repopulating activity.  The study was published in this week’s [...]

Reactions to In re Kubin: DNA Patents and Obviousness

Earlier this month, the Federal Circuit decided In re Kubin (pdf), invalidating one of Amgen’s DNA patents.  Here’s the short version from ScienceInsider: “The court declared that an invention owned by Amgen Inc. … was so obvious as to be unpatentable. The invention … was the sequence of a gene for the protein NAIL, important in the human immune [...]

Wednesday Brain Dump: Two of Everything! Edition

Two Camels!  Dolly the cloned sheep, meet Injaz the cloned camel. Two R&D Heads!  The combined Pfizer-Wyeth will have Mikael Dolsten heading up the newly created BioTherapeutics Research Group and Martin Mackay heading up the small molecule PharmaTherapeutics Research Group.  (Two CapitalLetters!)  The In Vivo Blog has a podcast interviewing both. Two VA Initiatives!  In addition to the electronic [...]

GM Crops Report Aimed at a Straw Man Creates Kerfuffle*

Yesterday, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report on genetically-engineered crops called “Failure to Yeild“  that did yeild a fair amount of press coverage. However, the report’s focus on yeild is a bit of a … straw man … as UCS itself acknowledges in its FAQ: “GE crops have provided other benefits important to U.S. [...]

Some Good Clean Tech Synergy: Biotech + Cleantech + Nanotech = $

A story today at GenomeWeb shows a collaboration among biotech, cleantech and high-tech interest groups successfully generating government support: Illinois life-science industry advocates for the second straight year are urging state lawmakers to set aside $25 million in grants and tax credits to assist biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical-device startups commercialize new technologies. Unlike last year, when the [...]

Abbott’s ABT-888 Guinea Pig: First Phase 0 Clinical Trial Completed

A press release from the National Cancer Institute yesterday (picked up today by BIO SmartBrief and FierceBiotech) touts a successful first: The first phase 0 clinical trial of a drug in cancer treatment, involving 13 patients with advanced cancers, showed that the drug, ABT-888, affected its target and was well tolerated. Most importantly, this trial [...]

Monday Deal Review: April 13, 2009

M&A, scads of securities, and a real, live IPO in the Canadian deal news this week.

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