The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

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

Tag Archives: University of British Columbia

Monday Biotech Deal Review: April 4, 2011

Welcome to your Monday Biotech Deal Review for April 4, 2011.  Valeant was a major headline last week with its hostile $5.7 billion leveraged-buyout offer for Cephalon, Inc., which some are suggesting may herald a new era of M&A activity in the biotech sector (you’ll recall that Valeant itself is the product of the recent [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: March 21, 2011

Welcome to your Monday Biotech Deal Review for March 21, 2011.  There was some interesting investment and commercial transactions announced and closed last week, including the $15M private placement announced by Novadaq, the $4M bond financing closed by SemBioSys and Pacgen’s announcement of a corporate makeover to accommodate its recent investments in the products of [...]

Friday Science Review: March 11, 2011

Insulin + Pancreatic Stem Cells, Proof of Life University of Toronto ♦ Published in Cell Stem Cell, Mar. 4, 2011 The origin of insulin-producing pancreatic β-cells has been a matter of contentious debate. Some research groups have produced findings that would suggest β-cells duplicate themselves and that new β-cells do not arise from the differentiation [...]

Friday Science Review: March 4, 2011

The Origin of Meier-Gorlin Syndrome Dalhousie University ♦ University of Montreal ♦ University of British Columbia Published in Nature Genetics, Feb. 27, 2011 Researchers have mapped a locus for Meier-Gorlin syndrome (MGS), a rare genetic condition characterized by short stature, small ears, and reduced or absent kneecaps. A mutation in the ORC4 gene seems to be at [...]

Friday Science Review: February 4, 2011

Precious GEMMs: Mouse Models Simulate Metastatic Disease for Tomorrow’s Cancer Therapeutics Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre ♦ Published in Nature Reviews Cancer, Feb., 2011 Before cancer therapeutics are moved to the clinic for testing in humans, they must first be assessed in laboratory animals for both safety and efficacy. Developing efficacious therapeutics for cancer treatment is [...]

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 [...]

Friday Science Review: December 17, 2010

I’ll begin the FSR this week with a few comments regarding some investigational work coming from the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health.   Professors Dr. Peter Singer and Dr. Abdallah Daar, and PhD student Ken Simiyu, traveled to Africa to better understand why commercialization in the biotechnology and healthcare industry has been so poor of late. [...]

Monday Biotech Deal Review: November 29, 2010

 Welcome to your Monday Biotech Deal Review.  I hope our American readers had a very happy thanksgiving weekend, but hopefully there’s still some room left for your weekly digest of biotech deals.  This week witnessed the closing of the US$52M IMRIS financing [Ed. -- as well as a rafter of other deals].  Read on to learn more about these and [...]

Friday Science Review: November 26, 2010

Ivermectin Nails Neurotransmission in Brugia malayi McGill University Published in PNAS, November 16, 2010 Well over 100 million people are currently infected with Brugia malayi, a microscopic nematode that causes lymphatic filariasis. Infection can eventually lead to the chronic inflammatory disease known as elephantiasis. In an effort to better understand this parasitic creature Dr. Timothy [...]

Friday Science Review: November 19, 2010

Mobile Phones Increase Patient Adherence in HIV Clinical Study University of Nairobi ♦ University of Manitoba ♦ University of British Columbia Published in Lancet, November 9, 2010 Researchers recently demonstrated the effectiveness of mobile phones as a tool to bolster patient adherence to an HIV treatment regime. Better adherence to treatment reduced HIV-1 RNA load [...]

Friday Science Review: November 12, 2010

Although I already commented on the stem cell discovery that came out of McMaster earlier this week, I felt that a more detailed look at the methods section would be needed to do justice to the science. After all, the true value of this discovery is in the protocol utilized to make it. On Fibroblasts [...]

Technology Transfer at Canadian Universities

The technology transfer office (TTO) lies at the interface between university researchers and the university’s external environment, including industry and government. The presumed role of the TTO has been to mobilize knowledge and foster research relationships between academia and industry, and in doing so support the commercialization agenda of the university by monetizing its innovations [...]

Canada — and MaRS — Draw Notice on List of Biotechnology Clusters

A report at Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, picked up today by FierceBiotech, discusses emerging biotechnology clusters.  It’s worth excerpting the whole bit on Canada: Both Toronto and Vancouver have good, small companies, but they’re struggling for capital. They have the benefit of government support and strong universities, particularly the University of Toronto, the University [...]

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