Archive by category | Regional Initiatives

Biotech Envy Revs Regional Sense of Rivalry

Biotech Envy Revs Regional Sense of Rivalry

The Maryland-District of Columbia-Virginia region (MD-DC-VA) – home to federal agencies that underwrite publicly funded research and regulate the biomedical and biotechnology industries—is beset with biotech envy. Leaders from local universities and companies want it to become an entrepreneurial powerhouse within the industry, more on a par with Cambridge, Mass., San Francisco or San Diego, and they are taking steps to implement those hopes.  Read more

The Future of Sustainable Use Biodiversity in Brazil

The Future of Sustainable Use Biodiversity in Brazil

Brazil tried to lead the world in sustainable use of biodiversity over the last decades. It attracted the whole world for the RIO 92 summit and Eco 92. The most prominent authorities worldwide came to Rio and a host of countries signed the Biological Diversity Convention (BDC). The goal of the convention is the sustainable use of biological diversity and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits derived from the use of genetic resources, through the appropriate access to genetic resources and transfer of relevant technologies, taking into account all rights over these resources and technologies, and by means of appropriate funding – this is all in the first article of BDC.  Read more

Biotech for the poor

Biotech for the poor

Genetic engineering started in the early seventies. It was called then Recombinant DNA Technology. The first successful experiment in genetic engineering was performed by Herbert Boyer, who expressed the insulin gene in Escherichia coli. Over the last four decades, the pharmaceutical industry has grown into a multi-billion-dollar sector, and in agriculture, more than 170 million hectares have been cultivated with genetically modified plants.  Read more

University Life Science Patent Transactions

University Life Science Patent Transactions

We asked Relecura, which has a web-based IP analytics platform for analyzing and commercializing patents and patent portfolios, to examine patent information on life sciences in 2013, using keywords and patent classification codes. The result: Relecura found 265 life science patent transactions from universities to corporate entities.* Click on the LS data2 link below to see Relecura’s list of the universities most active at assigning patents to corporate entities (Table 1), and the corporations that acquired the most life science patents (Table 2). Relecura also broke out the results by country (Fig. 1)  … Read more

A Canadian (un)Curriculum

A Canadian (un)Curriculum

Canada is known for its hockey, maple syrup, the beaver, Canadian goose and apologetic nature (sorry). But our list of accomplishments doesn’t end there. Canadians are also tenacious innovators in the fields of biomedical science and biotechnology. Trailblazing Nobel Prize winners like Michael Smith (Site Directed Mutagenesis) and Sir Banting and Best (insulin) paved the way for our current luminaries like Tak Mak (T-cell receptor), Eric Brown and Gerry Wright (antibiotic discovery). These avant-gardists have two characteristics in common: creativity and acumen.  Read more

The E is silent

The E is silent

I’ve already mentioned Wake Forest and tech transfer, but the picture above was shot on the University of South Dakota campus here in the US. The university, which has the state’s only medical school and an overall enrollment of more than 10,000, is located in Vermillion, SD. The official mascot is a coyote — though pronounciation of the word in South Dakota drops the long “E” at the end, so it rhymes with “oat.” This is common in western parts of the US, and thus, when rooting on the local team in The Dakota Dome, the correct phrase is “Go Yotes.”  … Read more

Changes in University Tech Transfer

Changes in University Tech Transfer

The December issue of Nature Biotechnology will include a BioE feature article investigating changes in university tech transfer in the US. We started thinking about this topic early in 2014 and spent about six months reporting on it, before taking all that information and trying to mold it into publishable form. The result is that we have more than we were able to fit into the article, and I wanted to pass along some tidbits on Trade Secrets.  Read more