The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

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

Monthly Archives: September 2009

In Praise of Universal Coverage From a Genomics Perspective

This could be the last chance in the U.S. to make good decisions about health care.  Why? Because now, before genome sequencing is fast and cheap and universal, we are in a political position rarely experienced outside philosophy books: we are still in the “original position,” behind the “veil of ignorance.”  I’ll try to make this [...]

Biotech Trends in 2010: Crowdsourced Edition

We’ve been running with a number of trends since the blog started early in 2009, and though many of them will continue to be critical stories in 2010, I’ve been turning my thoughts lately to possible additions for next year: Synthetic biology (this article at the Economist got a good bit of coverage); and The [...]

Jeremy Grushcow Discusses Comparative Effectiveness and Personalized Medicine in Counsel to Counsel Magazine’s Life Sciences Feature

Check out Jeremy’s blurb on the intersection of comparative effectiveness and personalized medicine in the September/October issue of Counsel to Counsel Magazine. For more on these subjects, visit this blog’s Trends in 2009 page.

Trends Update — IP Constituencies: India M&A Spurs Pricing Concerns

We’ve been following the trend of increased innovative activity in developing countries, and have noted its likely effect on IP protection in those jurisdictions. In a variation on that theme, an article last Thursday in DNA suggests that “Indian companies, which have been actively pursuing pre-grant and post-grant oppositions against the patents of MNCs, would [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: September 28, 2009

Lots of deal news this week, including the Canadian action noted at the time: the iCo-CPDD deal and ethica’s in-license transaction.  Plus there was plenty of international excitement today (repentance notwithstanding) with Abbott’s $6.6 billion Solvay play and J&J’s new 18% stake in Crucell.  Keep reading for a securities-palooza and plenty more

Next Steps for Cardiome: activated Protein C Program will Seek Other Funding

Update: Cardiome extended its tender offer to allow time to digest the announcement below. Expiry is now October 13th. When Cardiome (NASDAQ: CRME) (TSX: COM) announced its $27.5 million share buy-back program, the In Vivo Blog noted an earlier comment from its CEO, Doug Janzen, saying that Cardiome doesn’t “believe in the risks of building [...]

Friday Science Review: September 25, 2009

A quiet week for journal publications but there were a few significant research related activities… Canadian Stem Cell Charter: At the recent World Stem Cell Summit in Baltimore, Canada stepped up and demonstrated why we are one of the leaders in stem cell research.  This time it was not a lab discovery but the Canadian [...]

Trends Update — Commercialization by Nonprofit Foundations: iCo-CPDD Deal, plus MJFF Comes to Canada

One of the trends we’ve been keeping an eye on this year is the increasing willingness of nonprofit foundations to fund and support commercial product development.  Two updates today: iCo Therapeutics Inc. (TSX-V: ICO) is collaborating with the Consortium for Parasitic Drug Development (CPDD) to optimize one of iCo’s products for tropical conditions.  (That’s CPDD as [...]

Trends Update — Personalized Medicine: Montreal CRO ethica Licenses Artificial Intelligence Data Analysis Product for Stratification

ethica Clinical Research acquired a worldwide exclusive license to Matrix Pharma’s  artificial intelligence (AI) data analysis platform.  Neither the form of consideration nor payment structure (up-front vs royalty etc.) was disclosed, but the deal is “valued at CAD1.25 Million.”  The companies say the AI can: “extract interdependencies, correlations, and predictive models from complex data sets that conventional [...]

MDS Files Proxy Circular for Sale of Analytical Technologies Business to Danaher

If you wanted more details of MDS’ deal to sell its analytical technologies business to Danaher, today is your lucky day.  The management proxy circular for the shareholders’ meeting to vote on the deal was filed on EDGAR and SEDAR.  Here’s a direct link to the EDGAR filing.

Trends Update — Personalized Medicine: Merck Strategy Head Skeptical

As I’ve been following personalized medicine on this blog, I have become almost convinced that recent advances in genomics technology put us at the brink of an era of personalized diagnosis and treatment.  Not everyone agrees. Chris Morrison, reporting from the Pharmaceutical Strategic Alliances meeting, quotes Merv Turner (the head of strategy at Merck) as follows: [...]

Dani Peters Featured in California Healthcare Institute Podcast on Strategies for Government Funding

The California Healthcare Institute has a new podcast up that features Dani Peters (this blog’s government relations expert) talking about “opportunities that now exist to find alternative forms of funding from government sources and tips for navigating the complexities of Washington and the new political landscape to help entrepreneurs find funding sources that were not [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: September 21, 2009

It was a somewhat quiet week this week (all over the place, apparently) but keep reading for the goods on a cross-border acquisition and a $176 million Canadian offering

This Week in the Twitterverse

Here’s what I was Tweeting this week @crossborderbio: RT: @srinaldi Canadian Open Source EMR http://bit.ly/3y1tKM available for download at SourceForge. RT @CVCACanada: New Funds: The $100M Alberta Enterprise Corp. – Fund of Funds – is launched, Rod Charko joins as CEO RT @GenomeWeb_News: OGI Launches Genomics Platform Affiliates Program http://bit.ly/RJOkF Ontario gov’t puts $13.6m in [...]

Friday Science Review: September 18, 2009

Some “brainy” research this week… Curiosity Driven <=> Intelligence: There is new evidence that “fostering curiosity should also foster intelligence and vice versa.“  Researchers have discovered what they believe is the region of the brain, the dentate gyrus in the hippocampus, that is responsible for generating curiosity.  They also identified that the interaction between the [...]

OETF Awards Service Provider Contracts to Northwater and Covington

The RFP process for the Ontario Emerging Technologies Fund administrator has ended, with Northwater Capital and Covington Capital having been selected. According to the news item from OETF, “Northwater Capital Management Inc. will review applications to become a qualified investor.  Covington Capital Corporation will review applications from qualified co-investors in relation to qualified investments and [...]

Has NRC-IRAP Run Out of 2009 Grant Money?

NRC-IRAP, which got $170 million in the 2009 Federal budget (spread over 2 years) for company funding, has been very active lately, including in biotech. Maybe too active?  I heard rumo(u)rs (plural!) this week that IRAP may be out of funds for this cycle.  Are they? Drop us a line.

OBIO Panel Presents OETF and BIP Information

The Ontario Bioscience Industry Organization (OBIO) and the Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRI) co-hosted an event a few days ago entitled: “Funding Opportunities in 2009-2010 for Bioscience Companies: What CEO’s Need to Know About Ontario’s ETF and BIP Programs.” The speakers were: Chair: Kevin French, Senior Act. Manager, RBC; Industry: Rocky Ganske (President & [...]

Update Released by Patheon’s Special Commmittee

Patheon’s Special Committee provided an update today: “The Special Committee of Independent Directors of Patheon Inc. … today provided an update on its discussions with Lonza Group AG … regarding Lonza’s previously announced non-binding proposal to acquire all of the outstanding restricted voting shares of the Company at a price of US$3.55 per share. The [...]

Is the IPO Window Open for Biotech and Pharma? Talecris and Anthera Aim to Find Out.

Biopharma IPOs come in pairs, apparently (a-pair-ently?).  A month ago, Cumberland and Emdeon created something that looked like an IPO window and now, Talecris Biotherapeutics and Anthera Pharmaceuticals have filed to go public: Talecris, whose merger with CSL was kiboshed by FTC opposition this summer, plans to sell 28.9 million shares at $18 to $20 per share [...]

Trends Update — Comparative Effectiveness and Personalized Medicine: Is Canada Ahead of the U.S. In the Use of HER2 Testing for Personalized Breast Cancer Treatment?

For the 20%-30% of breast cancer patients with tumors that overexpress HER2, treatment with Herceptin (an antibody drug from GenetechRoche) is highly effective.  That’s why this article in the journal Cancer is so shocking.  The authors gathered data from a variety of published sources and estimate that: “up to 66% of eligible patients had no documentation of testing [...]

Trends Update — IP Constituencies: Amylin Partners with Biocon, PerkinElmer Buys Access and Capacity in India and China

Following up on Sunday’s post noting the new survey of Canadian biotech collaborations with companies in the developing world, it’s worth paying attention to two U.S. deals from last week that emphasize the growing role of India and China in the drug development process: Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMLN) and Biocon Limited (NSE: BIOCON) agreed to jointly [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: September 14, 2009

The Monday Deal Review is back in full force this week following a Labo(u)r Day vacation last week and there’s plenty of news including more information on the MDS-Danaher transaction and plenty of other companies finding ways to raise money and keep the lights on.  Keep reading

This Week in the Twitterverse

Here’s what I was up to on Twitter this week @crossborderbio: NB bioinformatics & pharmacogenomics RT @ogilvyrenault: Repercussions of the Amazon Decision on BIO-IT Patents in Canada http://bit.ly/22QtSV2:25 PM Sep 11th Via @Stern IR calendar of key medical http://bit.ly/KNI9L and investor http://bit.ly/2oiV8m conferences 4Q09-1Q10.12:09 PM Sep 11th My firm @ogilvyrenault just added a feature to [...]

Trends Update — IP Constituencies: Rotman Article Explores Canadian Biotech Collaborations with Developing Countries

A very interesting article in Nature Biotechnology from a group at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health provides some empirical support for a trend we’ve been following of increased innovative activity in developing countries.  According to the article, over 25% of Canadian biotechs collaborate with developing countries.  Of these, however, the vast majority of companies do so alongside [...]

Friday Science Review: September 11, 2009

Two great medical discoveries… Stayin’ Alive:  During a stroke, for example, neurons deprived of oxygen undergo cell death.  In a recent discovery lead by Dr. Michael Tymianski’s team at the Krembil Neuroscience Centre at Toronto Western Hospital, the protein TRPM7 was found to play a critical role in mediating this detrimental effect.   After suppressing TRPM7 [...]

Revised FDA Warning Letters Webpage To Feature Close-Out Letters

Improvements to the FDA’s warning letters webpage were announced last night.  The most recent warning letters will be easier to find, and most notably, the warning letters table will now include “the Close Out Date … and detailed information about the Warning Letters Close Out Program.” Or at least it will for warning letters issued after [...]

U.S. Stimulus Stimulates Health Care and Academic Jobs

The NPR Health Blog reports that in the cloud of U.S. unemployment numbers (pdf) there is a high-tech silver lining: the health care and education sectors actually added about 52,000 jobs in August.  It cites examples from a Boston Globe article that highlights stimulus-stimulated activity in Massachusetts research labs. Also note this piece at GenomeWeb, which quotes [...]

I’ll Drink To That: Genome BC and Genome Canada Launch $3.4 million Grape and Wine Genomics Project

A team of researchers in British Columbia (UBC, SFU), Ontario (Guelph) and elsewhere (NRC, USDA) will be studying grapes and yeast to bring molecular techniques to bear on winemaking.  Ultimately, they aim to produce a hand-held device to “help growers monitor proteins in the vine or berry at any time” (a “vine-corder”?) that will be [...]

Labo(u)r Day — Monday Deal Review Returns With a Double Edition Next Week

Happy Long Weekend!

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