Legal Research

This Week?s Biotech Highlights

By Jeremy Grushcow

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 the WHO reported good progress on health-related Millennium Development Goals 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.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on May 18, 2010 (boomark / email).