This Week’s Biotech Highlights

This week in biotech, everyone was taking up a challenge.

• Grand Challenges Canada was launched this week to spend $225 million of the Canadian government’s money on 5 “grand challenges” over a 5-year period. The first task — a grand challenge indeed — is to create a new class of point-of-care (POC) diagnostics. Along with the X-Prize’s ventures into healthcare, we are seeing an interesting experiment in the ability of prizes to drive innovation.
• In a sign of progress being made globally against basic health challenges, this week with fewer children are dying as malnutrition, HIV and TB all fall.
• In North America, the challenges were different: Pathway Genetics faced a challenge from the FDA when it tried to sell its genetic testing kit on the shelves at Walgreens’ drug stores in the U.S., and in British Columbia, a parent complained to the province’s privacy commission about the practice of retaining heel-prick blood samples from newborns, challenging the data collection as a breach of privacy.

Obviously, no-one here at Slaw is afraid of a challenge. Congratulations to Simon and the rest of the crew on the 5th anniversary and a brand new redesign. Back next week with more from The Cross-Border Biotech Blog and @crossborderbio.