A week full of money: the Ontario Budget was announced Thursday [1], and it contained about $700 million of spending on innovation [2], including $300 million for research infrastructure and $250 million for the previously-announced Emerging Technologies Fund [3]. Reactions were pretty positive, but badly in need of a thesaurus [4]. The proof of the pudding is in the allocation though — in terms of benefits for biotech — the first commitment from the $205 million Ontario Venture Capital Fund turns out to be to a new VC that is more interested in software than soft tissue [5].
Here’s $100 million that is definitely going to biotechnology: Texas announced $50 million of funding for a National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing, but can’t shake anti-stem cell legislators or a creationist curriculum [6], and Merck KGaA is starting a biotechnology venture capital fund that will invest €40 million in emerging biotech companies during the next five years [7].
In other non-local news, I had tons of fun playing with Google custom maps to do an “around the world” edition of the Wednesday Brain Dump [8], collecting and mapping some interesting stories from Montréal to Moscow to Montana.
Two things that are coming to Canada:
- Takeda Pharmaceuticals is coming to Canada [9]. Takeda Canada will be headquartered in Mississauga and will register and commercialize medicines from Takeda’s portfolio.
- Google Streetview is coming to Canada [10], so don’t do anything in public [11] you wouldn’t want… well, basically everyone to see.
Did that seem off-topic? Well, it turns out privacy and secrecy were highly relevant to biotech this week, with the fairly stunning accumulation of disclosure failures in the pharma industry lately [12].
That’s it for the highlights this week, but there’s plenty more where that came from: The Cross-Border Biotech Blog [13].