The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

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

Tag Archives: Stimulus

U.S. Therapeutic Discovery Stimulus Reaches Biotechs in Canada, Israel, Germany

As part of the health reform bill, the U.S. launched a $1 billion Therapeutic Discovery Project tax credit/grant stimulus program. The program announced grant recipients this week, deploying $1 billion just over 7 months after the law was passed, and 5 months after the IRS guidelines were released implementing the project. A full list of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

What is the State of Canada’s Biotechnology Industry?

There have been a lot of opinions over the last couple of weeks, with little consensus. On the pessimistic side: E&Y’s annual biotechnology report was released a week ago, and the reported taglines ranged from “time of reckoning” to “biotech business model crumbles“.  The first report from Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Research Council said that Canadian businesses [...]

Obama Budget 2010: HHS Highlights

The Obama Administration delivered its FY2010 Budget to Congress yesterday. Among the highlights of the Department of Health and Human Services Budget: $511,000,000 increase to FDA’s budget with $259 million for food safety inspections, surveillance etc. $584,000,000 for influenza preparedness, including purchase and development of vaccines, antivirals, diagnostics and supplies $275,000,000 for advanced development of biodefense [...]

Trend Update — Electronic Medical Records: View From HIMSS

The 2009 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference was in Chicago this week, and was obviously energized by the stimulus money in the U.S. and the budget allocation in Canada, which have greatly increased the available funding for Electronic Medical Records. There’s a great overview of trends at HIMSS from Dr. John D. [...]

Electronic Medical Records Update: Walmart Solution, Google Problem

When we identified electronic medical records as a trend in 2009, it was before $19 billion of the stimulus was allocated to implementing EMR.  With that money on the table, the movement toward wide scale implementation has only accelerated: This week, Walmart announced that it will be offering  an EMR solution through Sam’s Club, using Dell [...]

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 [...]

Harold Varmus on The Daily Show

Harold Varmus (former NIH head, Nobel Prize winner, co-chair of Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, etc.) was on the Daily Show last night. He put in a good pitch for: Democratic administrations Basic research Stimulus job creation through research funding His new book The Walrus Click here to watch in Canada. Click [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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: Maryland Ask

At a news conference yesterday reported in the Washington Business Journal and picked up by BIO SmartBrief, a group in Maryland expressed their hope that Maryland’s biotech tax credit program, under which investors receive a tax credit equal to 50 percent of the money they spend would get the $6 million boost to $12 million initially [...]

Comparative Effectiveness Stimulus Stimulates Reactions

The $1.1 billion in the stimulus bill for comparative effectiveness research has, not surprisingly, generated a good deal of public attention.  Friday’s Washington Post and the front page of today’s New York Times both have stories covering the political jockeying. Although both pieces focus on potential problems from the lack of individualization, either from libertarian or [...]

Stimulus Bill Originalism

Here’s where you can get the text of the conference report, if you’re in the mood.  At over $1 billion per page (780 pages, $789 billion), it should be good reading. We compiled information on allocations to science in the stimulus bill earlier in the week.

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 [...]

Money = Jobs

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

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 84 other followers