New national research institute to be established in Sweden in 2013 The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and AstraZeneca announced today that they will be making sizeable financial contributions to the new Swedish national research institute that is to be established in 2013 – Sweden Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab). The project is currently a partnership project between four universities (Uppsala University, Stockholm University, Karolinska Institutet and the Royal Institute of Technology). These four universities will be the main stakeholders in the new institute. The plan is for SciLifeLab to have sales of around SEK 1 billion per annum within a few years. From 2013, SciLifeLab will be developed into a national research institute for life science. “The research concerns our major future issues and crosses borders in many ways. It’s about diseases and health, the development of both healthcare and new pharmaceuticals, resistance to antibiotics, the environment and energy,” says Eva Åkesson, Vicechancellor of Uppsala University. See more at www.uu.se
Accelerace Bio is a success The Accelerace model proved its worth long ago as a good and efficient tool for helping to get entrepreneurs up and running. But the development of viable life science companies poses special demands, so when the COBIS science park launched the “Accelerace Bio” project with a number of players in 2010, success was by no means guaranteed. “These types of companies and projects make very special demands on the team, the technology and the road to commercialisation, so we were very excited to see if the model could also be applied to biotech,” says Morten Mølgaard Jensen, CEO at COBIS. Now, almost two years later, he can announce that the project has outperformed all expectations. Accelerace Bio has spread from the capital city and is now a national phenomenon, successfully helping to establish no fewer than eight new biotech companies. “Accelerace Bio offers a unique dash of specific operational experience combined with training in the entrepreneurial way where hands-on work is core, and where COBIS supports business development in a broad sense. And it seems to work,” says Morten Mølgaard Jensen. Read more at www.cobis.dk or www.acceleracebio.dk
Biotech director: Biotech companies need to focus more clearly The Nordic biotech industry needs to relinquish thoughts of taking a drug the whole way from concept to market, and instead focus on individual development phases. This announcement comes from Stig Jørgensen, CEO of the Medicon Valley Alliance life science cluster. He wants people to think about funding and development in a new way.
He believes the industry should be divided up into many smaller companies that can focus on different phases of development and work on several projects at a time, but over a shorter period. “The project might start in a company specialising in taking research from a very early stage to the point where it is clear that it has the potential to become a drug. When that has been achieved, it could be sold to another company with expertise in aspects related to the preclinical phase, and so on,” says Stig Jørgensen. This would make it easier for investors to see an exit date for their investments, which would attract more investors and thereby open up the opportunity for individual companies to work on several projects at the same time. Source: Medwatch
Patent case could spell disaster for tailor-made medicine The US Supreme Court has decided to overrule a patent granted to Prometheus Laboratories in 1998. As a consequence, Susanne Høiberg, CEO and partner at the Høiberg patent office, now fears it could be very difficult to obtain a patent for diagnostic methods in the vast American market. Many patent experts expected Prometheus to win the case or that the verdict would be formulated in such narrow terms that it could not be used for setting a precedence in other cases. But this was not the case. The US Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) is concerned about the verdict, and Susanne Høiberg believes, at worst, the decision could make it very difficult to obtain patents for diagnostic tools. The Prometheus patent claim for the diagnostic tool contains three premises: The first is that it is a drug, the second that it measures the level of metabolites, which are products that degrade in the body, and third that you mentally process the measured level and can then change your actions. “We have previously been informed that the claim would be considered as a whole. When you consider the Prometheus patent claim, it is right that one aspect can be said to be a natural phenomenon, but as it is incorporated in a context, it should be eligible for a patent. The Supreme Court believes the other part of the patent was known beforehand, and therefore the only new element is the natural phenomenon, and therefore Prometheus cannot patent it,” explains Susanne Høiberg. The problem for the biotech industry is that developing an understanding of these aspects is expensive and if it turns out that this type of processing is as a rule ultimately classified as a natural phenomenon, then diagnostic companies cannot patent their tools. “This will hit everyone because it will affect US patenting. It will also make the US a less interesting market,” she says. Source: Ingeniøren.dk Translation: CLS Communication A/S
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