Legal Research

This Week?s Biotech Highlights

By Jeremy Grushcow

About 82% of Canadians were already happy with Obama in February, but this week I suspect he converted a few of the holdouts with his call for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making.  All was subsequently peaceful and happy in the U.S. of A., leading to M&A rapprochement between Roche and Genentech and to Gilead Sciences riding to CV Therapeutics’ rescue. 

M&A developments were not so peaceful and happy in Canada, where the Special Committee formed by Patheon’s Board called a takeover bid by JLL Partners ”substantially undervalued, opportunistic and structurally coercive.”  Merck and Schering-Plough did a friendly deal this week, though, that will include their Canadian operations.

Across the pond, a proposal for a £1 billion fund for university spin-outs was not restricted to biotechnology; but that’s fine with me.  Any developments that emphasize common ground among biotech, cleantech and high-tech is a good thing in my bookon my blog.

Two of our trends in 2009 topics saw interesting action this week as well, with Walmart entering the electronic medical records game, and a follow-on biologics bill introduced in Congress.

Read more about these developments, as well as the Monday Deal Review, the Wednesday Brain Dump and the Friday Science Review at the Cross-Border Biotech Blog, which hit its 100th post and became 1/40th the size of Slaw this week.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on March 16, 2009 (boomark / email).