I’m an American baby boomer. For me – and I suspect many others of my generation – China’s image has not been the best. In my mental collage, fascination with Chinese culture and invention is offset by wariness of China’s political system and potential power. Some parts of the collage: as a boy, listening to stories told by a Korean War vet uncle and neighbors about hand-to-hand fighting with young Chinese soldiers wearing tennis shoes on their frozen feet at Chosin Reservoir; as a teen, accounts of Mao Zedong’s chaotic Cultural Revolution, its purges and Red Guards; in middle age,...

Despite the fact that private biotechs raised just $1.76 billion in the first five months of 2011 – putting this year on pace to be not only worse than last year, but worse than the dreaded low of 2008 – Seed and Series A funding accounts for a bigger piece of the pie. You heard that right. According to data from BioWorld Insight and BioWorld Snapshots, Seed and Series A rounds accounted for a healthy 27.5 percent of private biotech funding so far in 2011, up from just 17.7 percent in 2010. Here’s the catch. The biggest start-up round this...

Disclosure and transparency. They’re recurring themes often sung by lawmakers and critics who would have us believe that even the gift of a drug-labeled pen will put doctors and medical students under the influence of biopharma. You’ve heard the refrain. Calls for disclosure on journal articles and citizen petitions. Reminders to disclose drug ties when testifying before Congress or an advisory committee. Requirements for doctors and researchers to disclose personal or family ties with industry when serving on an FDA advisory committee. What you haven’t heard are demands that biopharma critics disclose where they get their funding. And when’s the...

Biopharma CEOs sometimes pay for the sins of their companies. But is it fair to single out just one person when the failure of the company, or the unethical behavior of the company, is the result of many people's actions? Oddly, on the same day as I pondered this question, I read about Jim Tressel, the Ohio State University head football coach who resigned because of the violations of some of his players. Like cases involving biopharma CEOs, it leaves many questions unanswered, such as how much Tressel knew, whether he reported things...

CHICAGO ‑ As a scientist by training, I tend to look with unbridled optimism at technological advances. So it was striking to me to see how those that are expected to do something useful with such advances sometimes have a more nuanced take on them. Genomic technologies have led to a “tsunami of information,” outgoing ASCO president George Sledge told the audience in his plenary lecture. And it is a tsunami that the current clinical trials system, let alone the practicing oncologist, is in many ways unprepared for. Sledge is no Luddite. In fact, he spent much of his talk...

S. 990 was signed into law last week. At first glance, it looks like it extends the life of Small Business Administration programs that are near and dear to the bottom line of many small biotechs. But somewhere along its pat through the Senate, the bill was stripped of the language that would have extended the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program through Sept. 30, 2012. In its place are a few short paragraphs renewing the Patriot Act. But the title of the bill remains “To provide for an additional temporary extension of programs under the Small Business Act and...

What are the hot jobs in the life sciences during the next decade? According to Bernhard Palsson, of the University of California, San Diego, there is "unprecedented opportunity" in systems biology and bioinformatics, which seek not only biologists, but also engineers, chemists, mathematicians and computer programmers. "New systems biology centers are being established worldwide," added Lynn Hlatky, director of the center of cancer systems biology at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center at Tufts University in Boston. "To get a life science job in 10 or 20 years, you will simply be expected to have competency in these areas," said Jens Nielsen,...

While attending the China track at this year’s J.P. Morgan conference in January I sat next to a gentleman who was smiling as he scanned the jam-packed penthouse meeting room. Shooting him a questioning glance, he responded with “last year I attended there were five people here.” While I find it hard to believe a session on China was poorly attended, even a year ago, biotech and pharma executives were noticeably shoulder to shoulder, jockeying for position just a few months ago. Intensity over the Chinese market has certainly ramped up, to say the least. As company after Chinese company...

It looked Monday as if two of biotech’s long-suffering names might finally be biting the dust. Genta Inc. threw in the towel on beleaguered antisense drug Genasense (oblimersen sodium), after a final analysis of a Phase III melanoma trial – and a previous Phase III melanoma trial, and a Phase III chronic lymphocytic leukemia trial, and a Phase III multiple myeloma trial, and a melanoma approval bid, and a CLL approval bid, and a second CLL approval bid – failed. Meanwhile La Jolla Pharmaceutical Co., which already abandoned lupus drug Riquent (abetimus sodium) after years of mixed data and failed...

Racial profiling – long in the realm of bad law enforcement – was criticized as bad medicine, too, in a recent paper by scientists from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The reason? As the authors put it, “cosmopolitan cities now include many individuals whose genetic heritage is drawn from multiple continental origins.” In other words, there’s no such thing as racial purity. In their paper, which was published in PLoS ONE and which you can find here (http://ow.ly/4YxK6) the team genotyped nearly 1,000 participants of Biobank, a program that collects DNA and plasma samples to aid in genomic and...