The Nature offices in both the US and UK slow down as the year draws to a close, and holidays hit. There won’t be much activity on Trade Secrets until after the new year arrives. We’re looking forward to 2013 and hope you are, too. As always, please feel free to contact us with comments on Trade Secrets content, suggestions for posts, or questions you’d like answered. Also, if you are participating on the biotech sector in your area of the world and would like to pass along your experiences to the Trade Secrets readers, please let us know.

We can be reached via email at bioentrepreneur@us.nature.com and through Twitter at @naturebiotech.

I wanted to pass along a couple of articles from the mainstream media that should be of interest to the biotech industry. The first is in The Economist and covers cancer and epigenetics research; find it here.

The second article is longer and found in The New York Times.  The investigative piece looks at discord between the Food and Drug  Administration in the United States and the White House.  Of particular interest is the section on KV Pharmaceutical’s decision to increase price for its premature birth drug. Read it here.

We’re adding a new member to Trade Secrets’ author roll: Ian Scoones.  He’s been blogging on aspects of India’s biotech scene and is going to contribute new content for Trade Secrets going forward.

In the meantime, you’ll find links to some of his previous writing below.

• To read Seminar: What happened to biotech in Bangalore? go here.
• For Biotech business in Bangalore: a decade of hype and hope? visit this link here.
• And for Getting Hotter – Regulating Biotechnology, place your mouse (or finger, depending on how you are reading this) here.

You’ll find the blog rather quiet between December 26, 2011, and January 3, 2012.  Nature’s offices close for a few days during the holiday season, and many employees take additional time to visit family.  I’m one of those.  We’ll resume timely postings and publications in the New Year, tackling issues of global biotech entrepreneurship. In the meantime, peaceful thoughts to the Trade Secrets community, and beyond.

Brady Huggett

Our next article is live on the Bioentrepreneur website. Titled In vogue with venture, it was written by Gary Patou, managing director at MPM Capital. (You can find his bio page here.)

His piece details what MPM finds attractive today, and explains why. He also provides some insight into companies MPM has invested in recently, and discusses the reasoning for turning down an opportunity with a type 2 diabetes drug. You can read it here; for the PDF, go here.

We’ve also highlighted an article from the Bioentrepreneur archives. It investigates non-dilutive funding from foundations. Click on the link to read it.

Brady Huggett

I’ll be attending the annual Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) Convention next week in Washington, DC. For those readers not familiar, it’s biotech’s largest gathering of execs, insiders and supporters – in peak years, the convention drew more than 20,000 attendees. The total has dipped since then, but it’s expected that more than 15,000 will descend on the capital this year. That throng includes the media – there will be hundreds of members of the press there.

Although academics and researchers certainly attend, it’s more a business meeting than a research one, and it’s a great event for biotechs in search of business partners. Countless eventual deals spring from meetings at BIO, and at the BIO Business Forum – set up to help broker meetings – more than 190 company presentations will be given this year, and more than 20,000 meetings have already been scheduled.

Along those lines, if you’re headed to BIO and are not sure how to ready yourself, take a look at “Prepare to Meet your Partner,” a Bioentrepreneur article written by Cori Gorman, Cammie Edwards, and Robert Meister.

The supplementary information for that article offers a checklist of activities for before, during and after the conference, and also suggests a press release format if you’d like to alert the biotech community that your firm will be at the show. We published the article in advance of the BIO Convention in 2009, but it’s as useful now as ever.

Though the BIO convention is usually held in the US (the exceptions being Toronto in 1994 and 2002), it draws from all over the world. More than 5,000 attendees will be from outside the US this year, and there are representatives from 65 countries registered to attend. That provides a perfect opportunity for exploring the themes of this blog – entrepreneurism and biotech building, with a slant toward emerging economies. The days are very long at BIO – sessions start before 9 am and the evening receptions can run until…well, they can run late. But I’ll be passing along relevant material I uncover while there.

Brady Huggett