Canada plays a significant role in the global advancement of scientific discoveries and their translation into commercial opportunities, but is viewed as not fully realizing its commercial potential. A significant problem has been a lack of sufficient venture capital to take early-stage companies to the next level. Several recent developments may signal the arrival of a more positive venture-funding environment for life sciences and health technology enterprises, including the development of the Canadian government’s C$400 million Venture Capital Action Plan; pharmaceutical companies electing to establish or investing in venture funds and providing strategic support to early-stage ventures, including through the creation of research centres; and recent successful liquidity events for venture investors.

In recent years, the major research-intensive biopharmaceutical companies (big pharma) have come face to face with a perfect storm of eroding profit margins from blockbuster expiration and generic competition coupled with growing R&D expenses and d…

Ihave had the pleasure of participating in national forums on biotechnology development in diverse countries. A common theme I see is that emerging economies wish to develop ‘a biotechnology industry like the United States.’ I generally temper these ambitions by explaining that the United States does not have a biotechnology industry per se, but rather a handful of states have very strong biotechnology concentrations and many other states are still trying to build their domestic biotechnology industries. So the lesson for many emerging economies is to set ambitions at the US-state level rather than the US-national level. Furthermore, I also caution against aiming for drug development. Drug development is extremely expensive and risky—focusing on domestic agricultural or industrial biotechnology opportunities may be a better option.

Industrial biotechnology is the commercial application of biotechnology using cells or components of cells, like enzymes, for industrial production processes including consumer goods, bioenergy and biomaterials. In the last years this area has gone thr…

If you walk into most private biotech company boardrooms today, it is likely that you will hear a discussion about whether to go public. Companies at every stage of development are either getting ready to file for an initial public offering or thinking…

The FTC is reportedly seeking $1 billion from pharmaceutical companies for the role in paying generic companies not to challenge

This paper is part of the free Open Access archive of the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology
A maturing industry: Strategic patenting trends, US and academic dominance, and the global biotechnology landscape
Go to paperABSTRACT: Patent analytical da…

For those who missed the live presentation, here is the discussion of the 2014 Scientific American Worldview scorecard, featuring myself,

Join me on Tuesday March 25th at 11am EST for a discussion of global biotechnology. I will be discussing the

2013 and 2014 have been very good for biotechnology public markets. 35 biotechnology companies went public in 2013, and well