This Week’s Biotech Highlights

Last week Canada was all about new funding for VCs; but this week in the U.S. saw Essex Woodland Health Ventures close a new(-ish) $900 million bio fund , and even Google will apparently put some of its new $100 million venture fund into bio investments.

This week also saw one of my personal annual Canadian highlights: the 2009 Gairdner Award winners were announced. Here’s one area where we don’t need to trumpet anything to be world-class. 73 Gairdner winners in the last 50 years have also become Nobel laureates. Keep an eye out for the 50th anniversary tour starting in May at York University and ending in November in Montreal.

In Israel, the entire biotech and medical device industry has been buoyed by the J&J’s deal for Omrix and the hope of more to come.

The U.S. Senate had an interesting week: Kathleen Sibelius testified twice as HHS secretary-elect, but probably won’t be confirmed for a few more weeks; and Senator Kyl failed to take the “comparative” out of “comparative effectiveness” but succeded in shedding some light on the overlap of comparative effectiveness with personalized medicine.

And, very locally: I let my IT flag fly a little bit while responding to a Capital Rants post about physical headquarters versus virtual operations, a question biotech and pharma companies actually deal with a lot, given the incredible range of service providers to the industry; and I went to a planning meeting for Ontario’s presence at BIO2009 in Atlanta (hint: cool pavilion, free coffee). If you’re going, let me know.

Still hungry? Over at the Cross-Border Biotech Blog, you can check out the Monday Deal Review for a round-up of Canadian deal activity; this week’s Wednesday Brain Dump: Deal-O-Rama Edition; and the Friday Science Review: Good News, Bad News Edition.