The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

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

Category Archives: Wednesday Brain Dump

Wednesday Brain Dump: Plant Matter Edition

Some stories from the world of plant biotech: Ben-Gurion University is collaborating with Bayer BioScience NV to fund work at Simon Barak’s lab investigating genes to help plants cope with heat, salinity and drought.   Nature has a story about regulatory difficulties being faced in the EU by a pharming consortium.  Pharming is the production of drugs [...]

Wednesday Brain Dump: Two of Everything! Edition

Two Camels!  Dolly the cloned sheep, meet Injaz the cloned camel. Two R&D Heads!  The combined Pfizer-Wyeth will have Mikael Dolsten heading up the newly created BioTherapeutics Research Group and Martin Mackay heading up the small molecule PharmaTherapeutics Research Group.  (Two CapitalLetters!)  The In Vivo Blog has a podcast interviewing both. Two VA Initiatives!  In addition to the electronic [...]

Wednesday Brain Dump: Things that Might Surprise You Edition

Things that surprised me this week: AstraZeneca’s CEO David Brennan, elected PhRMA’s new chairman, spoke in favour of comparative effectiveness research, calling it “a market requirement.” PolyCap, a combination of five off-patent cardiac and cholesterol drugs that costs $17 combined per month showed promising results in a 2000-person study in The Lancet. The Ebola researcher [...]

Wednesday Brain Dump: Deal-O-Rama Edition

There’s still plenty of deal activity in the pharma and biotech sector this week, even outside Canada, so here’s a roundup of what’s done, what’s pending and what’s in the rumor mill:

Wednesday Brain Dump: Around the World Edition

Click on the map points for each story, or just read on

Wednesday Brain Dump: Food Edition

Here’s a food edition of the Wednesday Brain Dump, but it’s all about limits: Limiting Salt Intake:  A new epidemiological model predicts major benefits from minor reductions in salt intake. Limiting Antibiotic Use: Some possibility that a bill, introduced in the House by Louise Slaughter (yep.), could pass, banning the use of antibiotics important to human [...]

Wednesday Brain Dump: March 11, 2009

Regulatory Brain Dump… Regulating Nanotech:  The FDA is collaborating with the Houston-based Alliance for NanoHealth (ANH) and its eight member institutions to expand knowledge of how nanoparticles behave and affect biologic systems.  Results will be placed in the public domain. Regulating Natural Health Products: Health Canada launched the first phase of Online Solution, a secure [...]

Wednesday Brain Dump: March 4, 2009

Monkey Business: glycerol monolaurate (GML), a well-known microbicide, may protect macaques against SIV; but future experiments may need to use a modified HIV strain instead; meanwhile, who will protect them from the University of Louisiana?  Smoky Business: the tobacco industry is facing new litigation in Ontario, and FDA regulation in the U.S. Actual, Honest-to-Goodness* Profitable [...]

Wednesday Brain Dump: February 25, 2009

The question this week: a shot in the arm or a kick in the teeth? A shot in the arm for: Fewer shots in the arm! (har)  British Columbia is the first jurisdiction in North America to offer a children’s vaccine called Infanrix-hexa™, which contains six immunizations in one, resulting in three fewer needles in [...]

Wednesday Brain Dump: February 18, 2009

Good thing I waited until evening, because this week’s post is mammoth.  Funny, right?  So funny, this post may go viral… The Nipah virus may be stopped more easily than expected and a vaccine for Dengue may be at hand. MRSA infections are on the decline and a vaccine for Clostridium difficile may be on the way. [...]

Wednesday Brain Dump: February 11, 2009

Deep Appreciation:for Phillip Terrence Ragon, founder and sole proprietor of database-software provider InterSystems who donated $100 million to establish a research institute that focuses on expediting the development of an AIDS vaccine, and to Pfizer Canada which contributed a further $2 million to British Columbia’s Center for Drug Research and Development (CDRD); and The State [...]

Wednesday Brain Dump: February 4, 2009

Some good news on the gene therapy front in adenosine deaminase-deficient SCID patients and in rheumatoid arthritis. But mostly bad news on the job front at GSK, AstraZeneca,  Abbott,  GenVec, Patheon, and others. Other good news on the approvals front for Parusgel (despite process concerns), Kapidex, Lamictal, Gelnique and Taxus Liberte. Really small news: Nanomaterials may be heading for [...]

Wendesday Brain Dump: January 28

Things that caught my eye this week: The FDA made Geron very happy; Sarkozy made French scientists very unhappy. Here at home, some regulatory milestones for Oncolytics, Welichem and Pfizer Canada. Europe’s R&D intensity (spending as a percentage of GDP) was stagnant overall from 2000 to 2006, but at least a few detractors are out of [...]

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