Legal Research

This Week?s Biotech Highlights

By Jeremy Grushcow

Spring was still in the air this week as Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation sought a special someone to help it evaluate co-investors and investment applications for its Emerging Technologies Fund.

MaRS Innovation and its new CEO Rafi Hofstein were a match, with Hofstein bringing expertise from his previous gigs as President and CEO of Hadasit Ltd., the technology transfer company of the Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem, Chair of Hadasit BioHolding Ltd., and Vice President Business Development for Ecogen, Inc., among other accomplishments.

Birds do it, bees do it, and now companies are doing it in all sorts of new and interesting ways.  venture capital fund formed a joint venture with a biotech company hoping to quickly advance three of the biotech’s drug candidates through Phase I.  And AstraZeneca and Merck are each contributing an experimental cancer drug candidate for a novel early-stage clinical program.

It turned out that in the battle of the sexes, men and women are equals in the math and technology game.  A PNAS paper showed that gender differences in top-performing mathematicians is far from universal.  And an article about Dame Wendy Hall provided a perfect example of a top-performing woman in the technology world.

Two cases in which love did not conquer all should be noted, one dealing with the doctrine of patent exhaustion and one dealing with contract ambiguity.

Now that I’ve patently exhausted this week’s highlights, please stay tuned for more biotech drama at the Cross-Border Biotech Blog.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 08, 2009 (boomark / email).