This Week’s Biotech Highlights

This week was the BIO international convention. 15,000 screaming fans biotech nerds converged on Chicago for a week of … well… I wrote a song about it.

Highlights were:

• Consulting company Battelle collaborated with BIO to release a report on biotech employment and government initiativeson a state-by-state level across the U.S. The data covers an interesting time period (2001-2008) and showed flat job numbers in pharma even before the 2008 recession and industry consolidation;
• A session on partnering with nonprofits was full of insight on why these collaborations are good for companies, nonprofits and patients; and
• A session on comparative effectiveness research ended up boosting personalized medicine and social media.

Presidents Clinton and Bush and Vice President Gore also spoke, but except for the first 5 minutes of Gore’s speech, all media was banned from the addresses. Alas, I was forced to attend productive meetings instead.

Stay tuned to The Cross-Border Biotech Blog and on Twitter @crossborderbio as coverage returns to Canada this week.