The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

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

Category Archives: Bailout

Anyone Else Short on Cash?

Yesterday, the WSJ Health Blog picked up on Burrill & Co.’s report, noting that one-third (120 out of 360) of publicly-traded U.S. biotech companies have under 6 months’ cash left, a figure that sounds depressingly familiar… In the UK, the BioIndustry Association put out a press release January 27 that said: The current situation is grave [...]

Bailout Update: UK and Canada

Two bailout developments to report yesterday: In the UK, the science minister Lord Drayson is championing a call by Imperial College London and the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh and Oxford to create a £1bn fund to finance the early stages of university spin-outs: Medical research was given as an example, but Drayson is said to be [...]

Stimulus Funding from NIH!

On Wednesday the National Institutes of Health published its Request for Applications (RFA), allocating $200 million provided in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  The deadline for submissions is April 27, and requests for funding cannot exceed $1 million over two years. Applications must come from U.S. institutions and organizations, but  there are no apparent restrictions [...]

Allocating Spending to Support R&D: UK, U.S. and Canadian Approaches

The U.S., Canada and the UK have all acknowledged the central importance of R&D even in these recessionary times.  However, the three national governments have decided to focus their spending on different steps of the R&D equation: Education: UK Takes the Long View British PM Gordon Brown, in a speech this week, identified three priorities: research, education and training, [...]

Bright Spot for Canada in NIH Gains?

You may not know this, but Canadian researchers can compete for NIH extramural funds, and they do so quite successfully.  I reviewed the 2008 data from the NIH budget site, which shows that Canadian researchers were awarded $47.4 million in 2008 (out of a total of $212.4 million total awarded outside the U.S.).  Hopefully this [...]

More Money: House of Representatives Release 2009 Spending Bill

The U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee unveiled its Omnibus spending bill for Fiscal Year 2009 yesterday (pdf). The House is expected to vote on the package this week. For Health and Human Services, the Ombnibus contains $30 billion for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This funding is in addition to the $10 billion [...]

NIH Stimulus Spending

Some good info from ScienceInsider about how NIH is planning to allocate the stimulus money.  It looks like the vast majority will go to existing grants and already-submitted applications.

Biotech Bailout: Texas Edition

Texas Governor Rick Perry keynoted a conference yesterday on “the challenges and the future of biotechnology in Texas” and “told the group that the biosciences are ‘the next big thing in the global economy.’” According to the article in today’s Star-Telegram, the Texas Healthcare and Bioscience Institute is encouraging a number of measures this legislative session for [...]

U.S. Stimulus Compromise (Updated)

Initial reporting (NYT, WSJ) on the bill coming out of the House-Senate conference committee this evening indicates that the $789 billion package will include most of the Bio-related provisions: It keeps the additional $6.5 billion for the NIH that was in the Senate version; The $1.1 billion for Comparative Effectiveness is also still in; and [...]

Biotech Bailout: France Edition

Unlike their research couterparts, who threw shoes in protest, France Biotech is taking a more traditional approach to their asks, starting with some grim statistics on private investment in French biotech in 2008:

Senate Stimulus: Good and Bad Outcomes for Funding Biotech

The latest Senate deal provides an extra $6.5 billion to NIH, amounting to $10 billion for biomedical research but also to improve research infrastructure in NIH facilities. According to Senator Arlen Specter, Ranking Republican on the Senate Health and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittee, the monies would be divvied up among NIH agencies in amounts proportional [...]

Biotech Bailout: Israel Edition

Israel’s Ministry of Finance announced a two-part stimulus for high-tech and biotech companies.  The first part is an additional infusion of NIS 150 million (US$37 million) for the Office of the Chief Scientist, which runs a variety of R&D and commercialization programs.  The second part is NIS 250 million (US$61 million) to set up a [...]

Dare We Compare?

A summary of the increases for research funding in the U.S. Stimulus.

Canada Budget Reax Update

Genome Canada is causing quite a stir this morning, picked up by ScienceInsider this afternoon.  That, plus more budget reaction from a Research Canada press release and a thumbs-down from the CVCA below… The CBC story on Genome Canada funding has some reaction from Tony Clement: Minister of Industry Tony Clement, speaking to CBC Newsworld on Thursday morning, [...]

Canada Budget Reax

A collection of reactions to yesterday’s budget

Canadian Budget

Watch Live at CTV Also see the Globe and Mail special coverage page.

Flu and Stimulus

With new reported cases of avian flu in Canada and China  it’s encouraging to see that the U.S. economic stimulus plan boosts funding for development of vaccines and antiviral treatments for pandemic influenza.

Trends, Trends Everywhere: Random Gloating II

Katie Hood, CEO of the Michael J. Fox Foundation, has an interesting piece up at Huffington Post that relates to our Trends post on foundation funding for commercialization.

Update on U.S. Biotech Bailout

Yesterday the U.S. House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee approved the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan,” (pdf) which did not include tax stimulus incentives proposed by the biotechnology industry (namely monetizing future Net Operating Losses and future R&D tax credits now in order to forgo those tax assets in the future). The U.S. House [...]

Bailout Bedfellows

A brief was released jointly last night (pdf) by 7 Canadian national organizations: Association of Canadian Academic Healthcare Organizations(ACAHO) Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada (AFMC)  BIOTECanada Canada’s Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (Rx&D) Health Charities Coalition of Canada (HCCC) MEDEC – Canada’s Medical Technology Companies Research Canada: An Alliance for Health Discovery Update: the Brief [...]

Trends in 2009: Random Gloating

Remember way back Monday when we identified Comparative Effectiveness as a trend to watch in 2009? Well, here it is, showing up as part of the bailout bill. More on the bailout bill’s Bio provisions to come. AAAS is running continually updated coverage of the bill and its R&D provisions here.

Money = Jobs

As various constituencies make their arguments for bailout funding, the supporting materials have a common, unsurprising, theme: Money = Jobs.  How many jobs? 

Bailout Bonanza!!

With every industry under the sun seeking bailout money, Biotech is not about to be left out. And with a record number of biotech companies with less than 6 months’ cash in the bank, there is good reason to fear that promising ideas could be lost before the credit markets thaw. There are, however, an [...]

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