Today’s News Net brings you required weekend reading for bioentrepreneurs. This week: Australian biotechs under the microscope; New Jersey failing to foster growth; and good news (finally) on the venture front.
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Monthly Archives: September 2012
The Gene Revolution is in Africa
Those who went to the splendid seminar organized by Roberto Tuberosa in Bologna in May of 2003 – titled In the Wake of the Double Helix, From the Double Helix to the Green Revolution – heard that the world’s poorest regions are the ones that could gain the most from the gene revolution, and also are the ones excluded from it. During the seminar, the predominant voice was that the gene revolution had excluded the poor because no staple crops were on the agenda of the large corporations. In fact, most work by the large corporations is directed to soybean, cotton, canola and corn.
Plant genetic engineering in Europe today, for political reasons, is a shadow compared to what it was during the ’80s, when Marc van Montagu and the late Jeff Schell set the basis for genetic engineering in plants. So it won’t be Europe that establishes a strategy to bring the benefits of the gene revolution to the poor. Still, the current state of agriculture in Brazil was built by just a dozen excellent geneticists, and I remember saying that all that Africa needed was 10 of their own to affect change.
The soybean revolution in Brazil was done by Romeu Kihl, and aluminum-resistant corn for the acid cerrado soil was done by Ricardo Magnavacca. The foundations of maize breeding had been previously done by the late Ernesto Paterniani. Eleuzio Curvello did cotton, Alcides Carvalho did coffee, during 52 years of his life. Dalmo Giacometti and Silvio Moreira tackled citrus. Marcilio Dias and Hiroshi Ikuta are the fathers of vegetable genetics. Raul Moreira, banana; Ady Raul da Silva, wheat; Frederico Menezes Veiga, sugarcane.
Entrepreneurial Events
List of events in the coming weeks, for those interested.
- BioJapan 2012: New Era of Open Innovation inAsia
October 10–12, Pacifico Yokohama,Yokohama, Japan. More here.
- Playground
October 18, The Brewery, London. Information.
- Second Central European Life Science Investment Conference
October 18–19, Hotel Stary, Krakow, Poland. For more, click here.
- AusBiotech 2012
October 30–November 2, Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre, Melbourne,Victoria, Australia. More info.
- BayBio Pantheon Ceremony 2012: Presenting DiNA Awards
November 1, San Francisco Marriot Marquis. Details.
- Disruptors: Revolutionizing Drug/Dx Reimbursement
November 1–2, Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia. Details here.
Lithuania: The Next Start-Up Nation?
Lithuania could become a new hotbed of biotech activity, with job opportunities and fresh domains for outsourcing and clinical trials, if the country is able to maintain the momentum it set into motion during the first Life Sciences Baltics Conference held in Vilnius in mid-September.
Lithuaniais hoping to jump-start the country’s nascent biotech industry. Lithuania’s leaders, having singled out Israel as a small country that has developed a successful biotech industry in a way that they would like to emulate, invited a 120-member Israeli delegation to help provide content for the meeting.
The keynote speaker was Nobel-prize winner Prof. Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute. She was followed by Israeli researchers and business people who led sessions on everything from the latest in stem cell technologies to different entrepreneurial models.
Will the Lithuanians succeed? Could they become the next ‘Start-up Nation’?
The News Net
The Net returns from an extended summer vacation, bringing news and opinion of interest to bioentrepreneurs around the world. This week, things are looking up in Taipei and San Antonio; the FDA gets tough; and is this biotech Big Pharma’s next big buy?
- Frank Glatz, managing director of Melbourne-based Cardia Bioplastics, tells the Australian small business site StartupSmart that biotech start-ups looking to go stateside should prepare for a long approval process. “It takes much longer [to receive FDA approval than it used to] and therefore you need a very good kind of offering,” Glatz says. Anything that used to take a year to get approved could now take two years or longer, and the FDA is “an important part of that process.” Read more here.
- Forbes profiles rumored takeover target Spectrum Pharmaceuticals. With two cancer drug approvals already under its belt, Spectrum’s market cap has risen from $2 million at start-up 10 years ago to $900 million in 2012.Read the full article.
- San Antonio, Texas is the latest US city to pin its hopes on biotech. In 2010, it invested $6 million in California-based InCube Labs’ incubator, which expanded to San Antonio with three early-stage biotech companies. And last year, City Council approved a $3.3 million investment the University of Texas Health Science Center’s South Texas Research Facility. More details here.
- Taipei leads South Korea and Singapore in the Asian biotech boom, according to legislative speaker Wang Jin-pyng. Around eight new drugs developed in Taiwan will be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in two or three years, surpassing its neighbors’ output. Read the article in Focus Taiwan.
- Finally, OneMedPlace’s handy blogpost lists the most “distinguished, pointed, successful (and oftentimes hilarious) biotech investors” on Twitter, based on their life science focus and tweet frequency. Quite an impressive group, we say.
Monthly Map
Map of worldly biotech news, from September issue of Nature Biotechnology. Embargo on issue has lifted. (Click to enlarge.)
Genes are Flowing
The strategy adopted before the commercial release of genetically modified organisms in the United States, and in many other countries, requires that risk assessment and risk management programs are done on a case-by-case basis.
There has been a continuous release of GM plants since 1986. Hundreds of GM varieties are cultivated today in millions of hectares in a number of countries. It has never been assumed that genes would not flow as they normally do – from GM to non-target populations, such as non-GM-cultivated species and wild relatives. Genes are certainly flowing from GM corn, cotton and canola, to the non-GM cultivated varieties of these species, and to the wild relatives in the case of canola and cotton.
Recently, Yang, et al, verified that GM genes flow from to rice wild relatives. But the researchers concluded that the rapid spread of insect-resistance transgenes in weedy population in commercial GE crop fields may be not likely to happen.
In Brazil, we’ve dealt with gene flow from wild rice to cultivated rice for decades. It is quite a problem to find areas that are red rice free, so that rice seed can be produced without being contaminated with red rice. The methodology exercised by the Yang group is too limited to make a long-term statement. It is often questioned whether small plots are sufficient to accurately predict how GM plants will behave in large-scale commercial fields. This of course is hardly possible; reliable methodologies are needed to work with large-scale monitoring of GM plants.