The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

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

Monthly Archives: July 2009

Trends Update — Shifting IP Constituencies: Perkin Elmer and Mylan in India, Branded Generics Everywhere and China’s R&D Budget all Point to Change

In our continuing Trends in 2009 series on shifting IP constituencies, we’ve been following increasing innovative activity in the developing world, and innovator pharma’s increasing moves towards generics and biosimilars.  This week saw updates on both fronts: PerkinElmer announced plans to open a Bio-pharma Center of Excellence in Hyderabad, India, later this year, citing “growth [...]

Francis Collins Nominated to be NIH’s Next Director

Over to you, White House press release: “President Obama said, ‘The National Institutes of Health stands as a model when it comes to science and research. My administration is committed to promoting scientific integrity and pioneering scientific research and I am confident that Dr. Francis Collins will lead the NIH to achieve these goals. Dr. [...]

Allostera’s $17m Deal Shows Canadian Venture Capital Funding is Available, Even as LPs Hold Back in the U.S.

Allostera Pharma Inc. anounced today that it closed a $17 million Series A round today, funded by four Canadian VCs: iNovia Capital, Genesys Capital, BDC Venture Capital with GO Capital, and Fonds Bio-Innovation s.e.c. The company is a spin-out of a University of Montreal-affiliated hospital and it has a platform to make peptide drugs that [...]

Trends Update — Comparative Effectiveness and Personalized Medicine: Study by CAMH in Toronto will Integrate Genetics, PET Brain Imaging and Pharmacology

Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) will use a $2.8 million grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, along with expected Ontario matching funds, for their ambitious neuroIMAGENE initiative.  The neuroIMAGENE program aims “to combine the power of genetics and sophisticated brain imaging to personalize treatment … for common psychiatric conditions like major [...]

I-131! Getchyer Rrrred Hot I-131 Here! Health Canada Approves Alternate Source for Thryoid Cancer Treatment

Draximage has been approved by Health Canada to supply I-131 from South Africa’s Safari reactor to treat Canadian thyroid cancer patients. As the Health Canada press release points out, “[p]roduction of I-131 in Canada was interrupted by the unplanned shutdown of the Chalk River National Research Universal reactor (NRU) in May 2009.” Draximage is a [...]

PubMed Central Comes to Canada (or vice-versa?)

If you ever read scientific publications, but you don’t have institutional journal subscriptions, you definitely know and love PubMed Central, the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) online repository of free-access full-text papers. Well, get ready for So You Think You Can Publish Canada PubMed Central Canada! CIHR and the NRC’s Canada Institute for Scientific [...]

Monday Deal Review: July 6, 2009

Learn more about Neuromed’s deal with CombinatoRx, check out what MedMira’s been doing with all the cash from its equity line, and find out who’s closed deals and who’s just closing doors in this week’s Monday Deal Review

Trends Update — Commercialization by Nonprofit Foundations: Not All Coming Up Roses

An article in Mass High Tech yesterday points to the trend we’ve been following of increasing commercialization activity by non-profits, but looks at things from the foundations’ point of view. While the economic crisis is, as expected, causing companies to seek out more foundation funding, those collaborations are having as much trouble as the rest [...]

Trends Update — Biosimilars: Obama Administration Supports 7-Year Exclusivity Period

The Obama administration offered up a 7-year data exclusivity period for biologics, calling it a “generous compromise” in a letter to Rep. Waxman from Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the Office of Health Reform, and Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, picked up by Bloomberg this week. I’ve had my money on an [...]

Post-Vacation Brain Dump: VC and Business News

Some suggestions for things to do: The WSJ’s VC Blog airs an interesting suggestion: VCs should package (and possibly securitize) promising drugs from multiple start-ups to create an attractive vehicle for additional funding and/or for risk-mitigating diversification. The Canadian Coalition for Good Governance released draft corporate governance guidelines for “High Performance” boards and is soliciting comments [...]

Post-Vacation Brain Dump: Deal Developments

Some exciting deal news from the week: Neuromed, which licensed U.S. rights to its lead candidate Exalgo to Mallinckrodt after Merck dropped out, entered into an interesting stock-for-stock merger deal with Cambridge, MA-based CombinatoRx that we’ll discuss further in this coming Monday’s deal review. Paladin Labs made a deal with Wyeth for a bundle of products that [...]

Post-Vacation Brain Dump: Canadian Developments

Here’s a bit of Canadiana to start off the catching up: MRI Minister Wilkinson gave a speech teeing up the Ontario government’s plan to revamp the Ontario Commercialization Network into a more integrated “Ontario Network of Excellence,” reorganizing twelve core programs into four.  This is presumably the first stage of follow-up from the Steering Committee report in [...]

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