This Week’s Biotech Highlights

Well, I can confirm that this past week conformed to my expectations for excitement, and not just because the Toronto garbage strike ended. In fact, confirmation was in the air:

• Most notably, the U.S. Senate confirmed three high-profile nominees: Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Francis Collins was confirmed as the director of NIH, and David Kappos was confirmed as the director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
• Two other U.S. developments confirmed the trend towards adoption of electronic medical records: 1) The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) was meeting on health IT, and 2) EMR was moving towards a cloud computing approach marked by Salesforce.com’s investment in Practice Fusion.
• The Dow Jones Q2 venture capital data confirmed that things aren’t going very well for Canadian biotech and that government-backed funds need to step it up to get the industry back on its feet.
• An NCET2 webinar about MIT’s success in the area of entrepreneurship confirmed that literal tech transfer is only a small part of the picture and made several suggestions for other institutions hoping to encourage entrepreneurship.

Finally, Richard Chan confirmed that he has the chops to be the Cross-Border Biotech Blog‘s new science writer. As I tweeted at the time, today’s Canadian science = tomorrow’s Canadian startups.