Category Archives: Biotech

Boston Leads the List of Top 25 U.S. Cities for NIH Funding

Posted on May 25, 2017 by Alexander Szewczak

Not surprisingly, the biotech hubs cluster at the top.  Boston leads at $1.9B, New York $1.4B, Seattle, Philadelphia and Baltimore all coming in around $900M each. Somewhat surprising is how high Boston ranks relative to San Francisco ($680M). Consolidating San Francisco, Stanford, … Continue reading →

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What’s Stored in DNA? An Old French Movie and a $50 Amazon Gift Card

Posted on March 2, 2017 by Alexander Szewczak

So many people are now tapping into the internet and social media that the torrent of data they’re creating is outstripping the storage capacity of traditional devices such as hard drives, optical discs, and magnetic tape. New research advances hope … Continue reading →

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Takeda Joins the R&D Migration to Boston

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Alexander Szewczak

From Fierce Biotech, news that the “unending game of global reorganization in biopharma R&D is continuing” with a new move by Takeda to close several vaccine operations around the U.S. in order to concentrate R&D in “the hot Boston/Cambridge, MA hub“

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Every Virus a Person Has Ever Been Exposed to Can be Detected in a Drop of Blood

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Alexander Szewczak

A team of scientists has developed a new blood test that simultaneously detects the presence of circulating antibodies to more than 1000 strains of 206 known human viruses.  In essence, the test profiles an individual’s lifetime history of viral infections. Published in Science, the … Continue reading →

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Dwarfed by Big Pharma, Biotech by the numbers

Posted on February 17, 2015 by Alexander Szewczak

From Bruce Booth’s blog, three charts that illustrate the extent to which large pharma companies dwarf small biotechs.  In total, small biotech firms only spend an estimated $6 billion a year on research and development, approximately equal to Pfizer’s annual R&D budget. From … Continue reading →

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CRISPR Genomic Editing Patent Disputes Heat Up

Posted on December 7, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

MIT Tech Review has a good article about the brewing intellectual property battle over CRISPR-Cas9 DNA editing.  The ease with which human DNA (or that of any eukaryotic organism) can be edited with the genetic engineering technique is astonishing, and will undoubtedly … Continue reading →

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Infographic: Total and per capita NIH award funding by state

Posted on August 3, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

Mid-way through 2014, California currently leads the nation with $2.1 billion in National Institutes of Health (NIH) award funding, while Massachusetts and New York are ranked 2nd and 3rd, with about $1.4B each.  Not surprisingly, Massachusetts — much smaller in … Continue reading →

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Why isn’t New York City a Biotech Hub?

Posted on August 3, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

An article in the Wall Street Journal says that high rents are the problem: It also underscores a wider problem for the city as it tries to attract biotech away from thriving centers like San Francisco and Boston—an inability to … Continue reading →

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Sam Altman of Y Combinator thinks biotech is one of the next hot areas for investing

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

In a recent interview Sam Altman (the current president of Y Combinator, the famous Silicon Valley startup incubator) was asked which areas of investing did he thing were really hot, yet under appreciated.  Altman immediately brought up biotech — an area that he … Continue reading →

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More Biotech Hub Rankings

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

GEN (Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News) has released their own, more comprehensive biotech hub rankings.  As expected, Boston-Cambridge and the Bay Area are at the top, with San Francisco edging out Boston in most criteria.  The GEN rankings include not only … Continue reading →

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