News & Comment

The Obama administration's $1 billion tax program at the very least signals a continued commitment to innovative biotech. The same cannot be said of plans afoot by the French government.

Claims of conflicts of interest concerning authorship of a scientific paper highlight the difficulties facing regulators participating in collaborations with industry.

The US Congress must authorize federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research.

High-throughput technologies are enabling epigenetic modifications to be mapped on a genome-wide scale, but whether such knowledge can be rapidly translated into biomedical applications remains unclear.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decision to approve a generic heparin derivative without clinical safety or efficacy data raises the possibility that clinical trials might not always be required for the approval of follow-on biologics.

With biotech infiltrating multiple industries and fewer life science ventures listing on stock exchanges, what do we really learn from surveying the set of public biotech companies?

The MAQC consortium's latest study suggests that human error in handling DNA microarray data analysis software could delay the technology's wider adoption in the clinic.

The rise of open source drug R&D in consortia involving big pharma should prompt some biotech companies to re-examine their businesses.

Provenge already looks like the product of a bygone era.

The sheer pace of discovery in genetics is placing companies that pursue an aggressive infringement strategy for gene patents increasingly at odds with innovation.

A consortium of industry, nonprofit institutions and regulators outlines a rolling biomarker qualification process, providing the first clear path for translation of such markers from discovery to preclinical and clinical practice.

Healthcare reform will not only boost biotech investment by massively expanding the US drug market, but also change the dynamics of biotech innovation in the longer term.

To remain competitive in biotech, policymakers should pay more attention to retaining skilled foreign workers than to fixating on illegal immigration.

Criticisms of the response of governments and of the pharmaceutical industry to the threat of the H1N1 epidemic are wide of the mark.

Impractical solutions to European biotech financing don't help anyone.

The biotech brand is in danger of being sullied by the blurring of pharma and biotech boundaries.

Why cloud computing could broaden community access to next-generation sequencing.