What are the rules of investing in science-based innovation? How much long-term thinking does it take to get through tightened markets and economic downturns? These questions are at the core of Vicki L. Sato´s research, who is a Professor of Management Practice in the Technology and Operations Management unit at Harvard Business School. In addition, she is also an advisor to Atlas Venture´s life sciences team.  » Read more...

“Start-up Nation” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer addresses the trillion-dollar question: How is it that a country of a mere 7.1 million people has per capita venture capital investments 2.5 times greater than in the US (more than 30 times greater than in Europe), the highest density of high tech start-ups in the world (1 for every 1,844 inhabitant) and more companies listed at NASDAQ than all companies from the entire European continent?  » Read more...

If the story by a small, Philadelphia-based company called Avid Radiopharmaceuticals communicated earlier this month holds up, there will be a reliable diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease available in a few years.

Such a test not only would change diagnosis but also help develop novel Alzheimer treatments as it would enable clinical researchers to check whether a drug candidate is making a difference in terms of plaque formation or reduction. At present, the only definite diagnosis of Alzheimer is by brain autopsy.  » Read more...

On June 8, the Society of Investment Professionals in Germany (DVFA) and its Life Science Committee hosted its annual conference which this time focused on biosimilars. The event covered key scientific topics, regulatory pathways and commercial issues of the market.  » Read more...

In a recent article (“Simply Obscene”) the influential German news magazine “Der Spiegel” (20/2010, May 17, 2010) stated the pharma industry was using “with the unscrupulousness of a stock jobber” a loophole in Germany’s highly regulated health care system to charge extremely high prices for basically useless cancer medications. In particular, the article featured Yondelis by Pharma Mar, Nexavar by Bayer, Hycamtin and Tyverb by GlaxoSmithKline, Erbitux by Merck KGaA, Sutent by Pfizer, Iressa by AstraZeneca, Avastin, Xeloda, Mab-Thera and Herceptin by Roche and Alimta by Lilly as examples for cancer drugs providing only marginal survival benefits at enormous costs and stated this was “lawful looting of the health care system”.  The only exception according to the authors of the article was Novartis’ Gleevec.  » Read more...

Hundreds of clinical trials in oncology already use biomarkers to identify patients who have a higher or lower risk of disease progression, as well as help predict how patients will respond to different treatments. However, there has been no systematic overview on the landscape of biomarker use in oncology trials.

In this week’s Science Translational Medicine Robert Sikorski and Bin Yao present the results of their laudable and laborious task to analyse the public database ClinicalTrials.gov for this kind of information.  » Read more...

“We now have the technical ability to get the wrong answers with unprecedented speed.” Carolyn Compton, Director, Office of Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research  » Read more...

A lot has been written since last week’s publication of Craig Venter’s latest coup – the creation of the first cell controlled by a synthetic genome. While the reactions span from the  alarmist (“playing god”) to the dismissive (“nothing new”), most commentaries overlook that Venter has demonstrated that life – for now, bacteria – can be customized to an extend that by far exceeds conventional genetic technologies which merely introduce a few new genes into existing organisms.  » Read more...