The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

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

Monthly Archives: January 2011

Monday Biotech Deal Review: January 31, 2011

Welcome to your Monday Biotech Deal Review for January 31, 2011.  Angiotech has voluntarily entered into CCAA proceedings and will continue its restructuring efforts there.  There was also some investment activity involving government agencies in Ontario, Quebec and Prince Edward Island.  Read on to learn more, as well as the usual assortment of biotech news [...]

Friday Science Review: January 28, 2011

Cancer’s Byzantine Architecture – The Plot Thickens Campbell Family Institute for Cancer Research ♦ Ontario Cancer Institute ♦ University of Toronto Published in Nature, 20 Jan., 2011 In the mid 90s one of Canada’s foremost stem cell researchers, John Dick, made the rather shocking discovery that not all cancer cells are equivalent. Based on his [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: January 24, 2010

Welcome to your Monday Biotech Deal Review for January 24, 2010.  Despite a slow financing week, there were a few operational announcements as well as awards granted to Canadian biotech companies by the NIH and the UK’s Medical Research Council.  Read on to learn more. 

Friday Science Review: January 21, 2011

How to Build a Retina — Hope for the Three Blind Mice Ottawa Hospital Research Institute ♦ Review Published in Stem Cells, Jan. 14, 2011 There have been waves of progress in the stem cell world and regenerative medicine is a field that continues to amaze. In a recently published review, Dr. Valerie Wallace underlines [...]

Biotech Trends in 2011: Biosimilars

In our original post on biosimilars, Lumira Capital’s Beni Rovinski set out the business opportunities, the technical challenges and the regulatory hurdles facing follow-on biologics in 2009. Since then, as Beni predicted, a series of pharma deals have followed Merck’s Insimed acquisition, and the regulatory framework in North America has been clarified substantially, with final Health Canada guidance having been [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: January 17, 2011

Welcome to your Monday Biotech Deal Review for January 17, 2011.  Among other things, the past week saw a third extension of deadlines for Angiotech’s debt restructuring efforts, a management-approved take-over bid of WEX Pharmaceuticals, and American DARPA money being spent on Medicago for the development of a H5N1 vaccine.  Read on to learn more. [...]

Weekend Reading: This Week in the Twitterverse

Catch up on the week’s biotech developments and news from our Twitter stream @crossborderbio: Congrats to Chris Arsenault, Announced as Co-Chair of the Canadian Innovation Exchange http://eqent.me/gkggtr RT @CVCACanada Evolution, Vaccination, and Prostate health examination, in this week’s Friday Science Review: http://ow.ly/1aRBr1  Endo chief looks to spend $500M on diagnostics acquisitions http://bit.ly/h0hRe3 RT @FierceBiotech UCSF now has [...]

Friday Science Review: January 14, 2011

The Eukaryotic Tree of Life Expands Dalhousie University ♦ Published in PNAS, Jan. 4, 2011 Photosynthetic marine organisms carry out roughly half of the primary production on the planet today. Tracing the lineages of these tiny creatures has helped us document eukaryotic evolution and draw conclusions on the events that led to their current distribution [...]

Biotech Trends in 2011: Transgenics

As our ability to manipulate the genomes of plants and animals grows, we can increase crop yields, reduce environmental impact, improve nutrition and turn barren land arable.  Canada, in particular, has been at the forefront of much of this technology: The Enviropig, developed in Guelph, Ontario, in 1999, produces phytase, an enzyme regular pigs lack, [...]

Biotech Trends in 2011: Commercialization by Non-Profit Foundations

Financing for biotech companies is a major part of my work at my real job, and the horrible financing environment in the wake of 2008′s financial crisis was one of the motivators for starting this blog. So, when nonprofit foundations started financing commercialization and product development in addition to their traditional role in financing research, it [...]

Biotech Financings: Preview of 2010 Data Shows Momentum for 2011

The ‘2010 Canadian Healthcare Review’, which I co-author with James Smith, Vice President Healthcare at The Equicom Group, will be published in about two weeks. One of the components of this review is a summary of the financings by public Canadian healthcare companies. Equity and convertible debt financings by public Canadian healthcare companies totaled $866.9 [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: January 10, 2011

Welcome to your Monday Biotech Deal Review.  2011 is off to a fast start in Canadian biotech!  Among other things, last week’s highlights included some interesting licensing activity, the completion by Bioniche of its A$12.5 million Australian offering, a $200k SEDA draw-down by Allon Therapeutics, Futuremed’s conversion to a corporation, and some regulatory and litigation [...]

Weekend Reading: This Week in the Twitterverse

Catch up on the week’s biotech developments and news from our Twitter stream @crossborderbio: Top 5 Cross-Border Biotech Blog topics of 2010 http://bit.ly/gocDJb via @slaw_dot_ca  The House is going to repeal Obamacare; other than that bicameral thing, that seems straightforward: http://goo.gl/0DiN RT @randypicker Stem cells that divide in two, Tobacco vaccine to stop the flu: This week’s [...]

Friday Science Review: January 7, 2011

Symmetry Saves the Day University of Toronto ♦ Published in Stem Cells, Dec. 29, 2010 One of the hallmarks of stem cells is their ability to maintain the stem cell pool indefinitely through the process of asymmetric division. When they divide they give rise to one slightly more differentiated cell and one daughter stem cell [...]

Biotech Trends in 2011: Comparative Effectiveness and Personalized Medicine

When this blog was launched in 2009, comparative effectiveness and personalized medicine were fairly new features in the North American landscape. Our initial argument that they were related topics — determining which treatment is best depends on which patient is being treated – was soon bolstered by the comparative effectiveness provisions in the U.S. stimulus bill and new personalized [...]

Biotech Trends in 2011: Social Media in Biotech and Healthcare

Use of social media by pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, and industry observers will continue to grow in scale, value and importance this year. The emergence of Twitter as a public health surveillance tool and the pending (still pending…) release of the FDA’s social media guidelines will contribute to this growth in the short term, and we’ll continue to [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: January 3, 2011

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first Monday Biotech Deal Review of 2011!  There were only a handful of items to report on from last week, as the holiday season brought the usual corporate slow-down.  Nevertheless, the week saw the completion of a couple of private placements (CardioComm and Ondine Biomedical), along with the [...]

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