Legal Research

This Week’s Biotech Highlights

Swine Flu, of course, dominated the weekend’s news. I have collected some info on reliable statistics, resources and updates, and have added a Google News RSS and a Twitter RSS to the front page of the Cross-Border Biotech Blog.

My own personal (non-medical) mini-faq:

1. coughing and fever seem to be diagnostic differentiators — if you don’t have those symptoms, you probably don’t have flu. Check WebMD if you want. Their guys have been asking a zillion sypmtoms questions on the CDC update calls; and
2. you can not get swine flu from eating pork, just from the guy who makes your pulled-pork sandwich, so cover your mouths when you cough and wash your hands a lot.

Overall, the response seems quite proactive and will probably work as intended.

Other things this week that worked as intended:

• Personalized medicine worked as intended to improve outcomes in cancer patients, according to data presented at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting.
• The Bovine Sequencing and Analysis Consortium worked as intended to sequence the genome of a cow, and you could be next.
• A letter from Gary Goodyear written to Nature worked as intended to counterbalance an open letter from scientists that garnered 2,000 signatures.
• The Ontario Hospital Association put up a new website ranking its members, which worked as intended to distract people from the fact that the hospitals refused to be identified in an earlier more comprehensive third-party effort. Some data is always better than no data, though.
• The U.S. stimulus act worked as intended (in one respect) to generate new guidance at the Federal Trade Commission on data privacy notification requirements for electronic medical records providers.

That, plus news of Canada’s first Subsequent Entry Biologic and a Wednesday Brain Dump about plants and crop science wraps up this week in biotech.

Finally, hope to see you at BioFinance this week, where I’ll be speaking on the Public Market Strategies for Cleantech Investing panel on Thursday, April 30 at 3pm. Admission to the Cleantech day of BioFinance is free, and the whole conference is excellent, so come check it out at the Toronto Marriott Eaton Centre.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on April 27, 2009 (boomark / email).