This Week’s Biotech Highlights

Did you ever do these visual word puzzles in school? Well, here’s the style over substance edition of This Week’s Biotech Highlights:

Style:

• The Globe & Mail revealed a preference for Doom & Gloom over good news, giving Page 1 treatment to a southbound scientist, but short shrift to new Ontario genomics funding.
• In light of increasing evidence that this round of Human Swine Influenza is not that bad, interest has turned to deciding what to call it. Pork producers don’t like “swine flu,” Mexico is not a fan of “Mexico Flu” and “H1N1” is just plain dull. I’m partial to the French version that my firm’s translation department passed along — Grippe Porcine — but it’s probably not too late to coin something memorable and constituency-neutral if you’re so inclined.

Substance:

• Suzanne Strasberg is the incoming President of the Ontario Medical Association and she’s a fan of electronic medical records and so is GE, to the tune of $6 billion over 6 years.
• Two of our Trends in 2009 also saw significant developments this week, with personalized medicine dealt a setback by Medicare’s decision not to reimburse for Warfarin dose testing and innovative R&D in India getting a Jubilant boost from AstraZeneca.

Over at the Cross-Border Biotech Blog we added more style too, with fancy new images decorating most posts (thanks to Wikimedia Commons); and as always there’s plenty more substance, with new developments from Guelph to MaRS.