The Year’s Biotech Highlights 2009

Title etiology: I took a week off Slaw posting while on vacation, “This Fortnight’s Biotech Highlights” sounds lame, and I saw Avatar*, so I thought “go big, or go home.” Voilà. Plus, it was a week of retrospection at The Cross-Border Biotech Blog. So, if your New Year’s resolution is “learn more about biotech,” here’s the place to start:

Several trends were key to business planning in biotech in 2009, but four stood out as the highlights because of reader interest and news volume: follow-on biologics; comparative effectiveness and personalized medicine; shifting IP constituencies and electronic medical records.

Not all was sunshine and roses though. Some of the things I expected to be trendy were, shockingly, not trendy. Maybe they will be next year or ten years from now; but if you can’t wait that long, check out the year’s three biotech trends that weren’t.

However, if you’re an empiricist like me, feel free to ignore the subjective summaries above and head straight for the statistically valid and apparently obligatory top 10 posts post. The In Vivo Blog has a good top 10 list as well.

That’s all for now. Happy 2010!

*Avatar was cool, but a teeny bit less so if you’ve seen UP, which is also spectacular 3D and has a better plot.