This Week’s Biotech Highlights

This past week was fantastic for Toronto biotech. We hosted the 50th Anniversary of the Gairdner Awards, the OGI-IDT Synthetic Biology Symposium and Canada’s first Science Policy Conference. These events provided the opportunity to hear some big names do some big thinking… and the opportunity to reduce all those big thoughts to 140-character tweets @crossborderbio. Here are a few items from the Cross-Border Biotech Blog that got in on the fun as well:

• Bruce Alberts, the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Science, served for 12 years as the head of the U.S. National Academy for Science, an independent voice for science in policy decision-making. Dr. Alberts is actually in favour of a voice for science in everything, and he advocates for placing scientists into every career and country. He strongly recommends a National Academies-type science fellowship program for Canada.
• David Baltimore, Phillip Sharp and Corey Goodman have three Gairdner awards and two Nobel prizes among them in addition to truly impressive corporate expertise. They had a wide-ranging discussion about the biotech business model and pharma pipelines, and Corey Goodman suggested later that Canada needs to repatriate its expats gained VCs entrepreneurship experience in the U.S.

Also notable this week: the Cross-Border Biotech Blog’s science writer, Richard Chan, was thinking big in the Friday Science Review. It has all the usual coverage of cool Canadian publications, plus Richard has branched out into science reporting, noting a Canada-California research collaboration and an international ranking of the best places to work in academia that includes Dalhousie and the University of Toronto.