In a Forbes article, Matthew Herper lays out his ideas for five ways we could improve the FDA. Fix 1: Pay Up How do we expect to police a $216 billion industry on $300 million per year? FDA Fix 2: Power Up The FDA Give the FDA powerful sticks and carrots to compel drug companies […]

For those who always appreciate that "extra" day to get a filing in, the USPTO will be closed on Monday, 17 January (Martin Luther King Day) and again on Thursday, 20 January (Inaugural Day).

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, […]

This topic has been kicked around so long it seems like it, like trickle-down economics, is an ideal that is always just out of our grasp.  But, I will at least pass along that the "Committee Oversight Plan 108th Congress" website for the U.S. House of Representative’s Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property […]

The USPTO has released an interim rule of practice that implements provisions of the CREATE Act that amended 35 U.S.C. 103(c). (Published at 70 FR 1818). The purpose of the Act is to promote cooperative research, such as between a university and start-up company by excluding prior art from obviousness (103) consideration if the prior […]

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, […]

I thought I’d post an update since I was making a donation today and thinking about the victims of the tsunami. The American Red Cross today announced a massive relief plan for those affected by the tsunamis, requiring an estimated $400 million to respond to both immediate and long-term needs now and years into the […]

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 […]