Patent Baristas

Somewhere around the world, likely around Sunday, May 8 or Monday, May 9, 2005, the one billionth cumulative acre of biotech crops was planted, as reported by the policy analysts for Truth About Trade and Technology (TATT). Just how big is a billion acres? It’s really big. A billion square acres would cover the entire […]

At the WIPO General Assembly meetings from September 27 to October 5, 2004 the governments of Argentina and Brazil submitted a proposal for “the Establishment of a Development Agenda for WIPO”. The proposal was co-sponsored by Bolivia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Kenya, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania and Venezuela. The Development Agenda […]

The National Academies’ National Research Council has come out encouraging the National Institutes of Health to foster independence among postdoctoral scholars, entry-level faculty, staff scientists, and other new investigators in biomedical research by improving their training and giving them more resources to pursue their own projects. In case you think this is not a problem, […]

In the collaboration which was initiated only about two years ago in 2003, Pharmacopeia scientists identified lead compounds – from Pharmacopeia’s proprietary collection of 7.5 million drug-like small-molecules – acting at Celgene’s inflammation-related kinase target. The optimization of the potent and selective lead compounds to a pre-clinical development compound took little more than a year, […]

If you can’t beat them, buy them…………… Novartis AG announced today (Feb. 21, 2005) that it will buy generic drugmakers Eon Labs of the United States and Hexal AG of Germany for $8.3 billion, creating the world’s largest generic drug company. Novartis Chief Executive Daniel Vasella has made no secret of his desire to build […]

Stephen and I attended a breakfast meeting on Wednesday morning. It started at 8:00 A.M. He was there on time. He is very good at that. I, of course, was late as usual. BT (before toddlers), I was either early or on time. AT (you can figure out what it stands for), I feel like […]

The new biotechnology open-source group, called the Biological Innovation for Open Society ("BIOS"), announced that researchers from Australia published a paper in Nature describing a method of creating genetically modified crops that does not infringe on patents held by big biotechnology companies. Like open-source software, they said the technique, and a related one already used […]

Monsanto Co. has resolved a patent dispute with Bayer CropScience and a German non-profit research organization in a worldwide cross-license deal. This ends a long-standing rift over Agrobacterium technology, a transformation technology used to transfer a gene into a host plant’s DNA with more precision and efficiency than other available methods. Scientists at Monsanto and […]