Patent Baristas

Health and Human Services today announced steps HHS can take to advance medical innovations and move products more quickly from the lab bench to the bedside.  The recommendations were outlined in a new report: "Moving Medical Innovations Forward — New Initiatives from HHS." The HHS task force examined internal procedures at agencies across the department, […]

Girindus America is hosting an Oligonucleotide Technical Symposium being held in conjunction with the inauguration of their new commercial scale oligonucleotide facility. This symposium is co-sponsored by the Genomics Research Institute and the Cincinnati chapter of the American Chemical Society. The Symposium will be March 9, 2005, at the Genomics Research Institute Auditorium in Cincinnati, […]

The New York Times ran an article promoting the idea of a risk-based protocol for safety evaluation that would greatly reduce the time and costs involved in developing most new gene-spliced crops. The author warns that alarmist warnings about the possible hazards of gene splicing have made the public extremely wary of this selective form […]

An article by SiliconVally.com entitled "Loophole boosts biotech profits" describes the extension of patent term Amgen received for applications filed prior to June 8, 1995, the date that patent term was changed from 17 years after issuance to 20 years from the date of filing an application. The key patent covering the drug Epogen expired […]

Carnegie Mellon University scientists have developed a new way to introduce peptide nucleic acid (PNA) directly into live mammalian cells, including human embryonic stem (ES) cells. The work, published online December 2 in Chemical Communications, holds considerable promise in genetic engineering, diagnostics and therapeutics. Until now, getting PNAs into living cells has been difficult. While […]

The Food and Drug Administration will publish draft guidelines today that would encourage companies to submit voluntary safety evaluations of bioengineered food crops that sometimes drift and cross-pollinate withplants in nearby fields. The biotech industry welcomed the new approach, but environmental and food-safety advocates called it a poor substitute for the rigorous testing they have […]

Now that we’re all stuffed with turkey, I thought it was timely to note an AP article on the research into perfecting the turkey.  Most turkeys have been selectively bred for their white meat for so long that even walking can be a problem for many of the big-breasted birds and sex is no longer […]

Some news I always like to hear (being in the wet, allergy-prone Midwest), a new research from the University College London branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR), published in this week’s Nature, detail how inactivating a key signalling molecule called p110delta reduced the effect of allergies on mice. In mice lacking the […]