This Week’s Biotech Highlights

This week in biotech was all about surveillance:

Two Toronto scientists studied over two million tweets to assess the social network’s value as a public health surveillance tool and came away impressed. Even though social networks open some completely new avenues to gathering data and interacting, for the most part they are just valuable tools for use in traditional processes according to a recent Deloitte report. and .

MaRS CEO Ilse Treurnicht, doing a bit of surveillance of her own on some publication surveillance data, noted that China is now second in publication of biomedical research articles globally, having recently surpassed Japan, the UK, Germany and Canada, among others. (a proxy for qualify or value), science in China still has a long way to go, though they have improved rapidly in “quality” as well.

At The Cross-Border Biotech Blog and @crossborderbio on Twitter we are surveilling some beaches this week and will return in full force around the New Year. Happy holidays, everyone!