This Week’s Biotech Highlights

Much excitement in the lead-up to BIO 2010, the international biotechnology convention being held this week in Chicago.

The Ministry of Research and Innovation released a new Life Sciences Commercialization Strategy, which explains where at least part of their recent budget increase will be going. We’ll see how it’s received at BIO over the next few days.

At least some of the biotech trends we’ve been following at the Cross-Border Biotech Blog will receive a warm reception at BIO this week: the conference features sessions on commercialization by non-profit foundations, comparative effectiveness and personalized medicine, follow-on biologics and IP constituencies and global innovation, among other topic that pass for fun in this crowd.

One new initiative that isn’t going to BIO, but that will receive a warm reception among Canadian attendees (and likely here at Slaw as well): PubMed Central Canada is now open for business, providing free online access to life sciences journals. All publications by CIHR-funded researchers should hit the site within 6 months after journal publication.

Stay tuned for updates from the conference at the Cross-Border Biotech Blog; but if you want to do what I do when I can’t make it to a conference but I wish I was there, click here to see the Twitter stream tagged #BIO2010.