With the official start of summer just around the corner, BioWorld again polled industry execs and our own indefatigable staff to construct a diverse list of titles for your reading pleasure. Whether the summer solstice takes you to a deck chair on your back porch or to commanding views on a foreign shore, you’ll find something of interest to savor from our 7th Annual Biotech Summer Reading List. Fiction: Cromwell’s England to Galactic Intrigue BioWorld staff writer Sharon Kingman suggested the “cracking novel” Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth, that features an underlying science theme on the discovery of the circulation...

So urgently did I think I wanted to read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma, that I ordered it from Amazon’s UK site last November, unwilling to wait for U.S. publication – which happened just as I reached the end, polishing off the book’s afterword, called “Better Data.” Goldacre, it turns out, is as much bothered by the secrecy of data as by its quality, and he has also set up an activist website, where the public can petition for “all [clinical] trials to be registered, for all summary results to be reported, and for full clinical study reports [CSRs] to be...

Patients getting their four minutes to say how an experimental drug changed their life or gave them hope have become a routine part of nearly every FDA advisory committee meeting – as routine as the call to order or the conflict of interest statement. And as routine as the adcom moving on with little regard for what they’ve said. The public hearing speakers, along with the usually silent patient member of the panel, seem to have one function – to let the FDA check off the box for patient involvement. But patients with orphan diseases and their families deserve more...

It’s been 16 years since I first reported in BioWorld Today that David Blech was charged with securities fraud. In April 1997, I reached him at his New York office a few days after his arraignment in a U.S. District Court. Though he wouldn’t comment on the case, he chided me repeatedly for using the word “arrested,” insisting that I tell our readers he “appeared voluntarily” for the arraignment, still worried about his reputation ‑ as if it wasn’t already rubbish. Frankly, I’m satisfied he’s going to serve time. Angry that our judicial system can’t penalize him with a longer...

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s . . . another superbug. The invasion of the multidrug-resistant superbugs is not a nightmare in the making. It’s already here. And it could be years before a new superhero lands in Metropolis to knock out the worst of the worst of these villains that are set on world domination. In a twist on the usual comic book tale, the super-resistant strains of CRE, malaria and tuberculosis threatening the world today are not the work of a mad scientist scheming away in a remote underground lab. They are...

Partnering, networking and making new friends are all top-of-the-agenda for the biopharma industry’s largest U.S. gathering. As you’re preparing to join 16,500+ of your colleagues at the 2013 BIO International Convention in Chicago, we’d like to introduce you to a few standouts featured in the stories below. Also, come meet the BioWorld people, who are pretty interesting, too, at booth 1573. Plus, you can collect BioWorld’s giveaway, which is both practical and sentimental. For 15 years, Publisher Donald R. Johnston has masterminded the creation of our lids. It’s a hotly sought after gift, so come early before we run out....

If you’re looking for a plenary speaker, pick a Pulitzer Prize winner. That was one of the corollary lessons to be had from the talk of Columbia University’s Siddhartha Mukherjee at the American Association for Cancer Research’s Annual Meeting on Sunday, which was somewhat like a Cliff Notes version of his Pulitzer-Prize winning epic on cancer, “The Emperor of all Maladies.” Mukherjee regaled the audience with an apocryphal tale of a historian who was asked to predict the future of the Soviet Union and answered that “in the Soviet Union, the future is quite easy to predict. The problem is...

We at BioWorld actually contemplated putting out a zany blog about biotech to commemorate April Fools’ Day – i.e. biotech firm develops drug for childhood cooties, or something equally ridiculous – but, in the end, we decided to pass. And a good thing, too, because we never would have been able to top a spoof press release sent out by antibody firm ImaginAb. The Ingelwood, Calif.-based firm said it was changing its name to “AmaginAb,” because most of the successful firms in biotech have names that start with the letter ‘A” and “we were forced to acknowledge that we might...

If you believe in evolution at all, you probably think of it as a good thing for the evolving organism, enabling it to keep up with its environment as that environment changes. I sure do. Of course, we realize that bad mutations can happen to good cells. The idea that most mutations are actually bad for an organism is a basic tenet of evolutionary theory. But then, the theory goes, the bad mutations get weeded out because their owners are now at a disadvantage. By and large, of course, the reason we think of evolution like that is because it’s...

In the days before the sequester tightened Washington’s belt, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and several other federal agencies sent up warning shots of just what was at stake. Under the automatic budget cuts intended to put the national deficit on a strict diet, the NIH expected to lose $1.6 billion from its 2013 fiscal budget. If the sequester stayed in place, NIH Director Francis Collins said the agency would give "hundreds and hundreds" fewer grants than it would have awarded otherwise, slowing down important research. Speaking at a news conference, Collins said the NIH was trying to avoid...