This Week’s Biotech Highlights

As everyone starts the year off with resolutions for self-improvement, I prefer to deflect by analyzing others’ flaws. This week provided several targets for deflection in the biotech world:

• New federal-level initiatives in the U.S. and China and state-level initiatives in North Carolina, Missouri, Arizona and Indiana (not to mention Québec’s new Biopharmaceutical Strategy) mean that Ontario has to up the ante if it wants to improve its ability to grow and attract top biotech talent.
• Policy makers and commenters need to look farther into the future to effectively regulate the coming revolution in reproductive genomics — “designer babies” are already possible and the technology will only become more sophisticated.
• The number of biotech drugs approved by the FDA increased to seven this year from four last year, but the available analysis needs to improve in order to tell whether this is a meaningful increase or a statistical blip.
• Personalized medicine, according to a PwC report, has the potential to be a huge market, but those who want to profit from it will have to make an unprecedented investment in educational and regulatory changes if they want doctors and patients to start using the technology.

Truth be told, there are plenty of things on my own list when I’m done deflecting; so I’ll head back to the Cross-Border Biotech Blog to see how I can top a pretty good 2009.