The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

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

Monthly Archives: July 2009

Ontario’s $250 million Emerging Technology Fund Launches!

The $250 million Emerging Technolgies Fund announced by Ontario as part of the Budget in March and recently the subject of an RFP process to find a fund administrator launched today! Details are on the OETF homepage, including: Fund Guidelines [PDF 2.7 MB] FAQs [PDF 673 KB] Application to seek qualification as a Venture Capital or [...]

Friday Science Review: July 31, 2009

My first post… a two week round-up. New direction for treating obesity:  A study headed by Dr. Hans-Michael Dosch’s group at The Hostpital for Sick Children in Toronto demonstrated that killer T cells in visceral fat are activated to destroy fat cells and control insulin resistance.  With increasing weight gain, however, the killer T cells [...]

Welcome to Richard Chan!

The Cross-Border Biotech Blog welcomes Richard Chan as a regular contributor and our new Science Writer.  Richard has a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biotechnology and has done postdoctoral research on cancer signaling and proteomics at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School in Boston and at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto.  He currently [...]

Globe and Mail Story on Patheon-JLL Battle

Boyd Erman at the Globe and Mail wrote about JLL’s long battle for Patheon in this morning’s paper, following yesterday’s dueling press releases (which I tweeted about @crossborderbio, also appearing to your right on this blog).  Particularly if you’re new to this saga, I encourage you to read the whole article; but for those who [...]

UPDATED Merial in Canada: Sanofi-Aventis to Buy Merck Out for $4 Billion, May (Re)Combine with Intervet Post-Merger

The New York Times’ DealBook blog reports that regulatory concerns about Merck’s purchase of Schering-Plough, presumably Schering’s Intervet animal health subsidiary, required Merck to divest its stake in Merial – its animal health JV with sanofi-aventis.  Sanofi is kindly obliging, for $4 billion. Interestingly (given DealBook’s reporting that the JV divestiture is antitrust-driven), Merck, sanofi and [...]

Trends in 2009: Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Tests Come to Canada

This week saw the introduction of what I believe is Canada’s first personal genomics service offering.  Toronto’s Medcan Clinic paired up with California-based Navigenics to scan individuals’ genomes for a variety of disease markers. Personal genomics is a burgeoning trend this year, which according to a special report in April’s Economist, will only be further boosted by [...]

StartupNorth’s Series on Startup Funding Sources in Canada

Jonas Brandon and Jevon MacDonald’s blog, StartupNorth, is running a series of posts by Craig Hayashi, a board member of Maple Leaf Angels on various funding sources for Canadian startups.  The first post is on Maple Leaf Angels itself, and the other options that have been covered so far are: Ontario’s Investment Accelerator Fund; and The [...]

Monday Deal Review: July 27, 2009

Well, July is wrapping up with no sign of summer, or of the summer doldrums.  Read on for all the rainy-day deals we found this week

Toronto-Based PE Fund Imperial Capital Raises $126 million, Invests in IRB Company Schulman

Imperial Capital, a private equity fund in Toronto, Canada, closed its fourth fund yesterday with $126 million.  Interestingly, they kicked off Fund IV with an investment in Schulman Associates, an independent Institutional Review Board (IRB) company based in Cincinnati, Ohio, that provides: “IRB services for a variety of study types (primarily Phase II and III [...]

Bristol-Myers Squibb Strikes $2.1 billion Deal for Medarex

Great news for Medarex shareholders from BMS’ $16/share offer yesterday, which clocks in at a 90% premium over Wednesday’s close.  Reports cite the value of ipilimumab, a late-stage cancer therapy being advanced as a new treatment for metastatic melanoma, as well as the value of Medarex’s transgenic mouse platform to make human antibodies. However, the [...]

Do the Q2 Venture Capital Numbers plus the HGS Success Indicate a Light at the End of the Tunnel for Biotech Funding?

Many of the articles and talks on biotech funding over the past year or so have lamented that public markets are closed to biotechs, and that the absence of a public exit, coupled with the preference for licensing over M&A by big pharma, would seriously dis-incentivize venture funding for biotech startups.  Two data points this [...]

Canada’s Data Protection Regulations Upheld Against Court Challenge

Last Friday* the Federal Court of Canada upheld the constitutional validity of Canada’s Data Protection Regulations, dismissing the applications of the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association and Apotex Inc. Canada’s data protection regime provides innovative drugs with: a six-year data exclusivity period; an eight-year market exclusivity period; and an additional six-month period of market exclusivity in some cases [...]

Interesting Data on the Value of Patent Examiner Interviews

Dennis has a post up at PatentlyO this week that attempts to assess the benefit to patent applicants of “interviews” — when your patent attorney discusses a filing directly with the USPTO examiner to address the examiner’s rejections.  The study looks at over 17,000 applications between 2000 and 2005, 18% of which involved interviews.  Dennis [...]

Trends Update — Comparative Effectiveness and Personalized Medicine: Genetic Test Identifies Patient Subpopulation for Benefit, Avoids Wasted Money and Time for Others on Erbitux, Vectibix

This is exactly how personalized medicine and comparative effectiveness can interact to benefit patients, pharma companies and payors: data shows that patients with KRAS mutations don’t benefit from anti-EGFR antibody meds Erbitux or Vectibix; the FDA approves a labeling change identifying the patients who won’t benefit; payors see costs savings from eliminating pointless prescriptions; patients [...]

Monday Deal Review: July 20, 2009

This week’s deal review has some more info about Ambrilia’s deal with Kotinos that I tweeted about at the time (my Twitter stream shows up in the sidebar on the right here), as well as an update on JLL-Patheon and a raft of securities deals, including an issuer bid

New Tennessee State Tax Credits Incentivize Venture Fund Investments

The Tennessee legislature passed a bill earlier this month that indirectly creates $120 million of venture funding.  It gives tax deductions to insurance companies that invest in qualified entities called “TN Investcos” which are in turn instructed to make “focused investments of capital in early or seed stage companies with high growth potential.”  Firms that [...]

White House Weekly Address: The Pitch for Health Reform

With the critical Senate Finance bill still pending, here’s the pitch from the White House: The only two things I heard Obama describe as requirements for a bill he would sign: No addition to the deficit over 10 years; and Insurance exchange: one-stop shop to compare prices, coverage and, interestingly, track record. He definitely advocated [...]

No Company is an Island: More Pharma and Biotech Collaboration

Two deals this week showcase collaborative efforts between major pharma players:     Gilead Sciences Inc. entered a partnership with Tibotec Pharmaceuticals, a unit of J&J, to develop a single daily antiretroviral HIV pill combining Gilead’s Truvada with a drug Tibotec is developing called TMC278.  Gilead will take the lead in manufacturing and testing the combined drug, [...]

New Data Shows 70% of Canada’s Biotech Companies Have Under 12 Months’ Cash. BIOTECanada’s New Ask: Government Loans.

A Canwest story today highlights new BIOTECanada data showing 70% of survey respondents have under 1 year of cash, up from 50% in January.  FierceBiotech picked it up as well, guaranteeing a full dose of international attention.   Even though the remaining 30% of respondents likely include some with big recent successes — Bioniche, Allostera and Zymeworks – and some with creative [...]

Pfizer and Ontario BIP Program Funding New $6.9 million “POP-CURE” Project for Colorectal Cancer Genomics

Pfizer Global Research and Development is contributing $6 million and the Ontario government is contributing $900,000, through the Biopharmaceutical Investment Program (BIP), for a new project “to discover and validate new targets for the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of colorectal cancer.”  Brad Wouters, a Senior Scientist with the Ontario Cancer Institute (OCI) and a Senior Investigator [...]

Bailout Update: New UK Life Sciences Blueprint Aims to Promote Innovation

The UK has a new Life Sciences Blueprint that sets as a goal the creation of an internationally-recognized life sciences cluster.  Here’s the press release and here’s the full report (pdf).  Innovation Pass and Changes at NICE: The Blueprint kicks off an “Innovation Pass” program under which certain novel medicines (criteria TBD) will be available for a 3-year period [...]

Corporate Liability Journal Article on Wyeth v. Levine, Reigel v. Medtronic and Medtronic v. Lohr

Check out Jeremy’s latest article, published in the current issue of Corporate Liability Journal. In The Changing Landscape of U.S. State Tort Liability for FDA-Approved Drugs and Medical Devices (pdf), Jeremy and his co-author, Alison Varga, take a more detailed look at this year’s U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Wyeth v. Levine and Reigel v. Medtronic, which Jeremy [...]

Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2009 to Open with “Creation,” a Darwin Biography

Just announced (thanks @ABWeir!) — the opening night film for TIFF 2009 will be “Creation.” Here’s the film’s blurb: “Randal Hume Keynes OBE is a British conservationist and author and a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. He is the author of the intimate exploration of his famous ancestry, Annie’s Box, subtitled Darwin, His Daughter, and Human [...]

Trends Update — Biosimilars: Sen. Kennedy, Gov. Dean and NVCA Study all Support 12+ Years of Exclusivity

The debate over the proper data exclusivity period for innovator biologics (as protection against biosimilars/follow-on biologics/subsequent-entry biologics) had a busy week last week. On Wednesday, two Democrats told the Obama administration where to stick its 7-year “generous compromise”:  Howard Dean published an op-ed supporting a 12-year exclusivity period and Bloomberg wrote up a renewed effort [...]

Senate Action on Small Business Innovation This Week?

The Senate schedule for today does not include consideration of The Small Business Innovation and Research Act of 2009. Late last week there were rumors the House version of legislation, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on July 8, would receive expedited consideration on the Senate floor as early as today, using the unanimous consent Senate measure. The [...]

Monday Deal Review: July 12, 2009

The highlights of this week were definitely the Bioniche-Endo deal and Allostera’s $17 million raise, but that was just the tip of the iceberg as Canadian deal activity heated up along with the weather.  A novel deal with an income trust swapping cash for a biotech’s public shell starts things off

Bioniche Signs Urocidin Deal with Endo Pharmaceuticals: $20 Million Up Front, $110 Million plus Supply to Follow

Exciting deal! Since Rick and I worked on this one, let me just turn it over to the press release: Bioniche Life Sciences Inc. (TSX: BNC) and Endo Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: ENDP) jointly announced today that Endo has licensed from Bioniche the exclusive rights to develop and market Urocidin™ in the U.S. with an option for [...]

Trends Update — Electronic Medical Records: Ottawa Telehealth Success, Privacy Fiasco in Alberta, Beta Test in Montreal

New data yesterday from a home telehealth monitoring program developed by the University of Ottawa Heart Institute claims a whopping 54% cut in hospital readmission for heart failure patients.  Readmission rates dropped to under 15% for patients on the program, which includes daily vitals monitoring and immediate contact if anything seems amiss. UOHI says they realize [...]

$700 Million Close Opens the Doors at Teralys Capital

Teralys Capital, the fund-of-funds announced in Quebec’s budget in March, actually closed on its $700 million today and “is now ready to move ahead with its mandate to finance private venture capital funds that invest in technology companies in the life sciences, information technology and clean technology sectors.”  (I guess the extra $125 million they were [...]

Two Initiatives in Canada Aim to Grow Fresh Crops of Entrepreneurs

Chris Arsenault at iNovia has had an interesting series of tweets recently — two noting Canadian programs for young entrepreneurs: Sir Terry Williams’ program to recruit, train and employ recent graduates in a sort of entrepreneur boot camp in Ottawa (here he is talking about it on BNN); and  Impact Ventures‘ pilot program based on [...]

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