If you can’t see the wood for the trees the common sense response is to do a little thinning and let the light shine through. But for the bogged-down-in-bureaucracy European Medicines Agency (EMA), the response last week to the need to increase transparency and streamline its procedures was to set up an expert committee to investigate the activities and operations of its expert committees. I don’t imagine this is a cynical move by the recently installed head of EMA, Guido Rasi, to kick complaints about a lack of transparency and failure to listen to the needs of patients into the...

It wasn’t exactly love at first sight back in 1976 when Genentech Inc. became of legal age to go forth and incorporate, but the platonic relationship between biotech and pharma has increasingly mellowed over the ensuing 36 years into an intimate affair. The recent blood transfusion/exit strategy weddings that are rejuvenating the bones of the old molecule money pharmas and fulfilling the dreams of enterprising young biotechs seeking to become the nouveau riche certainly represent something more than just a passing fling. That became patently observable when Roche Inc. finally put a ring on it and took Genentech off the...

Editor’s note: Since Dr. Breindl first wrote about vaccines and autism in 2008, the paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism has been retracted by the journal that published it, and its author Andrew Wakefield has lost his medical license. But vaccine skepticism is alive and well – and so, during this World Immunization Week, the question remains as pressing as ever: How do you have a productive discussion on policy with people who disagree with you on the facts? I am not a vaccine skeptic. My children have all their required vaccines and some optional ones as well. We...

Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s board dodged a dissident shareholder bullet three years ago, but the San Diego-based biotech is back in the crosshairs of billionaire investor and activist shareholder Carl Icahn, who again is seeking to nominate a new slate of board members to pull the trigger on a company sale. Given Icahn’s personal track record in the sector over the past few years – ImClone Systems Inc., MedImmune Inc. and Genzyme Corp. all landed acquisitions, though he was unsuccessful in facilitating a sale of Biogen Idec Inc. – Amylin’s days as an independent firm could be numbered. Certainly there are...

I’m seeing lots of references to BioWorld’s recent analysis by Cynthia Robbins-Roth showing that U.S.-based, VC-backed biotechs raised $391 million in the first quarter, a 34 percent increase compared to the same period last year. That’s good news, especially given the recent debates about the health of biotech venture and funding for innovation. But it’s interesting to note that if you broaden your view to include not just U.S., but global biotech fundraising, and not just venture-backed deals but all non-partnering money raised by private companies – you see that the $774 million raised in Q1 2012 represents a slight...

The contenders for becoming the April Fool in Life Sciences for 2012 came down to three candidates, but two of them have persisted past the April 1 deadline, thereby removing themselves from consideration. President Barack Obama still has a glimmer of hope for preserving his Affordable Health Care for Americans Act and even if that is struck down, he can still overcome his supreme pranking with a wily November trick-up-his-sleeve snappy comeback. And Illumina Inc.’s stockholders continue to resist drinking Roche’s undervalued Kool-Aid unless they add more sugar to sweeten to Illumina’s taste. So, to the would-be biosimilars drugmakers –...

This week, researchers are presenting their latest and greatest at the annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research. The excitement of all those novel findings, though, received something of an advance puncturing last week by a commentary in Nature that reported a successful replication rate of just over 10 percent for roughly 50 landmark studies in cancer research. From my perspective, the study makes it even more difficult to figure out which of the many research findings that (briefly) come to my attention every day to write about, and which to ignore. Is this study more interesting, or...

The article I wrote last week for FierceBiotech on the relationship between Series A funding and innovation led to an interesting discussion with Bruce Booth, partner at Atlas Venture and biotech blogger extraordinaire. The crux of my article was this: We (as an industry) obsess over funding for innovative start-ups because we worry that one day, big pharma will look around and realize they’ve run out of assets to in-license. So we need to look not only at the amount of Series A funding biotech raise, but at which biotechs are raising it, and whether they are really doing innovative...

What a difference two weeks makes. When I was researching last week’s BioWorld Insight cover – about how emerging biotech Verastem Inc., mature biotech Ironwood Pharmaceuticals Inc. and specialty pharma firm Clovis Oncology Inc. shared some surprising similarities in how they approached their initial public offerings – I put together a chart that showed aftermarket performance for the entire 2010-2012 biotech IPO class was about flat. I was all ready to blog about how that’s better than I would have guessed, given the negative press we tend to hear about IPOs and the market in general. Then Monday morning brought...

Reading last weekend’s Wall Street Journal review of “The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It” I was struck by an anecdote. It’s about an interview the reviewer did with a scientist who works in the field of neuroprostheses, and that scientist’s refusal to talk about the possible practical applications of his work, because, he said, “false hope is a sinful thing.” Really? To me, it seems like an inevitable part of hope is that it might be false. To illustrate, I don’t hope that my neighbors will be nice to me, because it’s a sure thing....