The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

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

Monthly Archives: May 2010

Monday Biotech Deal Review: May 31, 2010

Things are picking up a bit this week, with a few new financings, some collaboration agreements and a deal in the venture capital community that coincided with the CVCA’s annual meeting.

This Week in the Twitterverse

Here’s some reading for the weekend from our Twitter stream on @crossborderbio: Patrick Draper named new CEO at Toronto Region Research Alliance (TRRA). Welcome! http://bit.ly/aUnu6y RT @FierceBiotech: RT @pharmagossip: RT @matthewherper: My take on Pfizer, AstraZeneca shuffle. http://ow.ly/1Qeje “Rhabbits”? RT @reutersBenHir: Dutch biotech Pharming plans.. financing to back Rhucin drug made from milk of genetically modified [...]

Friday Science Review: May 28, 2010

A Map to Better Beer? The key signaling protein-protein interactions in yeast have been mapped.  Mass spectrometry was used to discover the global network between protein kinases and phosphatases to generate the “kinome” map, which contains 1844 interactions.  Since yeasts are model organisms with similar signaling pathways as in human cells, this information is relevant [...]

Patent Cliff Will Not Save Biotech: Abbott Buys Indian Generics Company Piramal Healthcare

I often hear how the upcoming loss of patent protection for current blockbusters creates an insatiable demand at pharma companies for new pipeline products from biotechs. Here’s an example from 2007. Here’s one from last week. This is not true. Upcoming loss of patent protection creates a insatiable demand for revenue, but new products are not [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: May 24, 2010

The lead up to the long weekend here in Canada (Victoria Day, in case you’re wondering where we all went) saw only one new financing and two new commercial deals. A few more deals that were launched earlier closed this week, including MethylGene’s SR&ED financing; but stay tuned for an uptick next week as we [...]

This Week in the Twitterverse

Here’s some reading for the weekend from our Twitter stream on @crossborderbio: RT @GenomeWeb_News: U of Toronto Spinout [w OICR funding] Rolls Out New Biomarker System with Eye on Bead Array Market http://bit.ly/coey4n 23 hours ago RT @PharmProEditor: #Abbott buys unit of Piramal Healthcare for $3.7B http://bit.ly/bUa9TS 1 day ago British Columbia adds Prevnar 13 to routine vaccination schedule http://bit.ly/cuJlLn [...]

Friday Science Review: May 21, 2010

A slightly different FSR this week with a spotlight on Global Health, right on the heels of the recent Grand Challenges Canada announcement.  An interesting report in Nature Biotechnology, led by Drs. Abdallah Daar and Peter Singer at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, mapped the collaborations between health biotech companies in developing countries.  The [...]

Trends Update — Synthetic Biology: JCVI’s First Synthetic Cell (or, A Goat Walked Into a Lab)

World, meet "Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0", 1.08-Mbps of synthetic life. Today’s issue of Science contains an article by scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute, who have synthesized a Mycoplasma genome from scratch and transplanted it to a recipient cell. Those recipients have since reproduced using entirely the synthetic DNA. In the quest to create novel [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: May 17, 2010

Lots of quarterly earnings announcements this week means a dip in deal activity. Still plenty of interesting stuff, though, including a new partnership and new listing plans for Tekmira. Meanwhile, for Medicago it’s graduation day, with a $10m present standby deal from Mom and Dad Yorkville Advisors on offer as it takes its symbol to the [...]

This Week in the Twitterverse

Here’s some reading for the weekend from our Twitter stream on @crossborderbio: Legal deets RT @dgmacarthur @genomicslawyer FDA Puts the Brakes on Pathway-Walgreens Pairing; What’s Next for DTC? http://bit.ly/curxtZ RT @scotthensley: No Gene Test At Walgreens Just Yet. http://n.pr/aoOxf0 RT @jonmrich: In case you missed it: 2010 Dose of Digital Dosie Award Winners…best in pharma & [...]

Friday Science Review: May 14, 2010

A Cure for Brain Cancer: An aggressive type of brain cancer called glioblastoma may be cured using the small molecule dichloracetate (DCA), a cheap and safe generic compound.  The drug works by altering the metabolism of the cancer cells, which is an emerging concept that exploits the different (higher) energy demand of cancer cells.  DCA’s [...]

Grand Challenges Canada to Mobilize $225 Million Over 5 Years For Global Health

A new nonprofit organization called Grand Challenges Canada has been formed to deploy the Canadian government’s $225 million Development Innovation Fund. In a fabulous marriage of theory and practice, Grand Challenges will be run by Peter Singer, who is also the Director of the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health. It also draws on an impressive [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: May 10, 2010

Some people were on the move this week — not only did Sanofi Canada announce 70 R&D job cuts, but BioMS took on a new banker and Labopharm, CardioComm and GeneNews all get new faces. Despite the fact that it seemed half of the country’s companies and deal-makers were at BIO in Chicago this week, there [...]

This Week in the Twitterverse

Here’s some reading for the weekend from our Twitter stream on @crossborderbio: RT @PharmProEditor: Intellipharmaceutics plans Effexor generic http://bit.ly/aKNOMp RT @CVCACanada: VC deals: Montreal based Enerkem announces funding from Alberta Energy http://bit.ly/aznzgC BELLUS Health ends NC-503 diabetes development program following Phase II results http://viigo.im/3q8b Aeterna Zentaris Receives Orphan-Drug Designation from the FDA for AEZS-108 in Ovarian [...]

Friday Science Review: May 7, 2010

Amazing!  Three Nature papers this week… Cracking the Code: The human body is much more complex than the 20,000 or so genes that are encoded in our DNA.  This multiplicity of genetic messages is enhanced by alternative gene splicing, a process where different segments of DNA exons are spliced together to create a different gene [...]

BIO 2010 Summarized In Song

To the tune of “It’s a Small World“… It’s a world of swag A world of beers It’s a world of sessions And a world of careers There’s so much that we share That the Fail Whale’s not rare It’s a small world after all There is just one room Where the keynote’s done BIO’s counter-programming [...]

BIO Panel on Comparative Effectiveness Research Notes “Silver Lining” of Personalized Medicine

Speakers Daniel Todd, from EMD Serono, and Steve LaPierre, from Boston Scientific, were led by Foley Hoag lawyer Jayson Slotnik in a discussion of the final CER legislation and predictions about implementation. The overall tone was skeptical — the panel noted the potential for CER data to ultimately contribute to CMS coverage decisions, and worried about [...]

Biotech Trends Update: Non-Dilutive Financing and Fundraising by Partnering with Nonprofits

As noted in the lead up to BIO, several of the conference sessions touch on industry trends we’ve been following here on the blog. One of these was today’s session entitled “A New Kind of Non-Dilutive Financing and Fundraising: Partnering With Not-for-Profits,” which we’ve been following as commercialization by non-profit foundations. Our coverage of that trend [...]

Battelle-BIO Data on Biotech Investment and Jobs

I just came from a breakfast meeting between Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation and the Governor of Victoria, Australia. Everyone agreed on the importance of quantitative assessment of the biotech industry, and everyone agreed that finding and measuring (and communicating) success is difficult. So I was glad to be able to head straight for [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: May 3, 2010

I guess the excitement of BIO was driving deals this week. To the delight of the economic development folks, government was in on the action — Ontario announced a BIP investment and announced a whole new strategy, and OICR funded three equity deals. The private sector was also out in force, with four new licensing deals [...]

PubMed Central Canada Opens for Business: Free Online Access to Life Sciences Journals

The PubMed Central Canada project (noted here last July) is now open for business at http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/ This collaboration — between the NRC’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the U.S. National Library of Medicine — “aims to provide a freely accessible, Canada-based archive of biomedical and health [...]

This Week in the Twitterverse

Here’s some reading for the weekend from our Twitter stream on @crossborderbio: RT @CVCACanada: Q1’10: venture-backed companies in Canada raised $166 million for 21 deals. $ 63M of that is in IT.Dow Jones via @startupcfo Friday Fun: check out this blog by the science advisor to The Big Bang Theory (best nerd sitcom ever)! http://bit.ly/bN25D7 RT [...]

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