The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

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

Monthly Archives: May 2009

Trends Update — Personalized Medicine: DxS’ Latest Companion Diagnostics Deal

As personalized medicine inches toward becoming the standard of care for cancer, the question of who pays for the genotyping becomes more important.  A deal announced Friday between DxS, a molecular diagnostics company, and Boehringer Ingelheim suggests that pharma companies will end up footing at least part of the bill by paying for the development (and marketing?) [...]

Trends Update — IP Constituencies: Rumors about GSK-Shantha Biotech

Since we’ve been following innovative activity in India and China as part of our Trends in 2009 series, we had noted a report at the end of March that GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis were each in talks to buy a majority stake in the Indian company Shantha Biotech from France’s Merieux Alliance, which owns 80 percent of the company. [...]

Flow-Through Shares for Cleantech and Biotech in Canada

Rick Sutin, a partner at Ogilvy Renault (my home-away-from-home), has a post up at Cleantech in Canada singing the praises of flow-through shares. So far, the flow-through program in Canada has been available (mainly) to resource exploration and development companies, but we have been arguing for a while that the program would be ideal for Cleantech and [...]

IVB’s Great Take on the GSK-Pfizer HIV Joint Venture

The In Vivo Blog has a really interesting post by Roger Longman discussing what they view as the groundbreaking and innovative aspects of GSK and Pfizer’s HIV joint venture, announced just over a month ago.  The gist is: The venture allows flexibility and accountability in an R&D operation with pharma-scale resources; and The JV has its [...]

IIROC and FINRA Sitting in a Tree, W-h-i-s-t-l-e-b-l-o-w-i-n-g!

The Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) established a new Whistleblower Service that was open for business as of yesterday.  According to IIROC President and CEO Susan Wolburgh Jenah: “This service will ensure that individuals who believe that they have significant information to convey deal directly with IIROC senior staff who will ensure that [...]

Genome BC and PROOF Launch Phase Two of Biomarkers in Transplantation

Genome British Columbia and the Prevention of Organ Failure (PROOF) Centre of Excellence at UBC announced the launch of the second phase of the “Biomarkers in Transplantation” project, which aims to use a simple blood test to identify patients who are rejecting a transplanted organ. The current test for rejection is a biopsy — which costs somewhere between [...]

Patheon and JLL Head (Back) to Court

If you’ve been following the Canadian takeover saga that is JLL Partners’ bid for Patheon, you’ll be not at all surprised to learn that litigation is now pending.  Read all the gory details from today’s announcement by Patheon’s Special Committee of Independent Directors

Ontario Swine Flu Update May 26: First Death, 352 Total Cases

Ontario reported yesterday that: A 44-year old Toronto man with a chronic pre-existing medical condition passed away on May 23rd. On May 24th laboratory testing confirmed a positive test for H1N1 in this individual. It is not clear what role the H1N1 virus played in the fatality which is now under investigation by the Office [...]

More New Canadian Tech VC Funding

The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) is putting $75 million, allocated in the Federal 2008 budget, into the new Tandem Expansion Fund. The Fund expects a first close of $300 million this summer, and will invest in ”Canadian technology growth companies.” At the helm are Charles Sirois and Brent Belzberg.  More details about the team and [...]

Opposites Are Majorly (Histo) Compatible

Notch another study backing up the old adage. Opposites do attract. Work by Maria da Graca Bicalho and her colleagues at the University of Parana in Brazil compared major histocompatibility complex (MHC) sequences in 90 married couples and found significantly more divergence than among 152 randomly-generated pairs. Congratulations to them for: Showing that the initial [...]

Monday Deal Review: May 25, 2009

This week’s deal review has a couple of new placements, a couple of new plants, a very interesting claim asserted in Boston, and many, many updates on deals we have previously covered.  Check out the full review

Friday Science Review: Timing Is Everything Edition

Some interesting clinical studies in the New England Journal and in JAMA this week from Canadian researchers show the importance of timing interventions and medications properly. Read on

Data.gov — Empiricists, Start Your Engines

Notwithstanding BIO 2009, and apparently easily outshining Wolfram Alpha, this has got to be the coolest thing I’ve seen all week since sliced bread — data.gov.  According to OMB Director Peter Orszag’s post on the White House Blog: Data.gov will open up the workings of government by making economic, healthcare, environmental, and other government information available on [...]

Scientific American and BIO worldVIEW Scorecard: A Global Biotechnology Ranking

Scientific American gathered and crunched a large amount of data to try to generate an objective, empirical ranking of 36 different countries’ biotechnology output and potential. Here’s the special issue homepage, and here’s the scorecard page; but there are several interesting accompanying articles, particularly for those who have been following our Trends in 2009. See [...]

BIO 2009: Wednesday Keynote Lunch Panel on Health Reform Live-ish Blog Part 2

More from panelists Tom Daschle, Bill Frist, Karl Rove and Howard Dean, and moderator health journalist Susan Dentzer (Editor-in-Chief, Health Affairs). Click here for part 1. Next topic: process. Regular legislative process or reconciliation? TD – No reconciliation needed as long as current process (esp. Senate Finance Committee) continues to work well in a bipartisan [...]

BIO 2009: Wednesday Keynote Lunch Panel on Health Reform Live-ish Blog

The panelists today are Tom Daschle, Bill Frist, Karl Rove and Howard Dean, and the moderator is health journalist Susan Dentzer (Editor-in-Chief, Health Affairs). First topic: Harry and Louise (Susan calls them The Two Horsepeople of the Healthcare Apocalypse). Where are they today? TD – Want to get something done, concerned about costs of healthcare. [...]

Canada’s Clean Energy Fund Gets Some Details Detailed

The new Canadian federal $1-billion Clean Energy Fund announced in January’s budget will be spent over five years, according to Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt who spoke about the Fund on Tuesday: $650 million will be for carbon capture and storage projects; $200 million will be for smaller renewable and alternative energy demonstration projects; and [...]

Medical Isotope Shortage Looms as Canada’s Chalk River Reactor Shuts Down

According to a CBC News report today, Canada’s Chalk River nuclear reactor was shut down for a power outage last Thursday, and Friday inspectors noticed a heavy water leak at the base of the reactor.  The month-long shut down that will be needed for repairs means that only one reactor in the world, the HSR reactor in [...]

Trends Update — Electronic Medical Records: Your eHealth Future from CNET News

CNET News has been taking a look at electronic medical records over the last few days in a feature called “Your eHealth Future” (hat tip to the WSJ Health Blog).  They are covering health care reform from the IT side, presented in six articles, all accessible through this link: 1.   Dragging health records into the Digital Age; Microsoft, [...]

BIO 2009: Ontario Premier’s Breakfast

The speeches (s-peach-es?) just finished this morning at the Ontario Premier’s breakfast. Minister of Research and Innovation John Wilkinson announced that Ontario has recently completed 2 new BIP investments: a Pfizer collaboration with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR); and GSK Canada for manufacturing in Mississauga. Ontario’s Premier — Dalton McGuinty, winner of BIO’s [...]

BIO 2009: Monday Technology Transfer Breakfast

I was at breakfast yesterday morning with university and company members of the BIO Technology Transfer Committee.  Some interesting tidbits, colo(u)red by my preception and commentary and not to be attributed to any other attendees: A lot of the stated support for the Senate patent reform bill is soft and is based on the assumption/condition that [...]

Monday Deal Review: May 18, 2009

A fairly quiet week on the deal front, but if Becton Dickinson can sell $750 million of 10- and 30-year notes just for the heck of it, things in the market can’t be too bad, right?  Here’s what I saw on the wires this week…

The Cross-Border Biotech Blog at BIO 2009

I have arrived in Atlanta for BIO 2009! Stay tuned for updates on Ontario, Canadian and international developments. Tonight’s developments: the Canada reception was at Dailey’s, in the cigar bar, and was very smoky. Canada’s Minister of Industry, Tony Clement spoke, but no-one I met heard a word he said (bad sound system). I’m sure [...]

Friday Science Review: Sunday Edition

Hello, loyal readers.  Welcome to the Sunday Edition of the Friday Science Review.  Sorry for the delay … turns out my day job is sometimes a day and night and next day and next night job.  Anyway, this one’s worth the wait.  Lots of cool science on a cool Spring weekend here in Canada

Hearings on the Medical Device Safety Act of 2009

Reps. Waxman and Pallone introduced legislation in March, with a parallel effort by Sens. Kennedy and Leahy, to moot the Supreme Court’s decision in Reigel v. Medtronic and reinstate (har) state tort liability for PMA-approved medical devices. This week, they held a hearing on the bill – H.R. 1346, the Medical Device Safety Act of 2009.  The witnesses were (click [...]

Human Swine Flu Ontario Update May 14: Tracking the Ontario Numbers Plus Vaccine Updates

Ontario reported 36 new cases of Swine Flu today.  All cases are still considered mild, although one patient was hospitalized for unrelated reasons.  I thought this would be a good time to look back at the Ontario press releases and plot the number of new cases reported since Ontario started releasing numbers on April 28th.  [...]

Trends Update — IP Constituencies: China Moves to Boost Biotechnology

An announcement by the State Council in China that was picked up by Fierce Biotech yesterday touted $9.2 billion in technology spending that will include biotech and genetically modified products (as well as large-scale aircraft, broadband wireless technology and new oil, gas and coalbed methane exploration).  The cabinet also reportedly approved new policies with the goal of creating large internationally [...]

FDA Has It In for Double Vowels: Cheerios, Google Ads Targeted

The FDA, you may have heard, has told General Mills that the statement “clinically proven to help reduce cholesterol” on Cheerios boxes “cause[s] it to be a drug” and, therefore, that Cheerios “may not be legally marketed with the above claims in the United States without an approved new drug application.”  Ouch. This follows a crackdown [...]

What is the State of Canada’s Biotechnology Industry?

There have been a lot of opinions over the last couple of weeks, with little consensus. On the pessimistic side: E&Y’s annual biotechnology report was released a week ago, and the reported taglines ranged from “time of reckoning” to “biotech business model crumbles“.  The first report from Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Research Council said that Canadian businesses [...]

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