Twenty-eight percent of the products given marketing authorisation between November 2010 and October 2011 in the US and one-third of all the new drugs in the EU have biotechnological origins. And experts unanimously agree that the market share of biotechnology products will continue to grow in the future. While the small-molecule drug market is predicted to expand by 3.9% annually between now and 2015, the market for biopharma products is expected to grow by more than 10% a year.

What is the Human Toxome Project? It’s a wide-reaching programme aimed at helping us to reconsider how hazard/risk assessment has been performed over the last 50 years on marketed substances like chemicals, cosmetic products, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, biocides and feedstuffs.

In the last 30 years, biotechnology has become a major source of innovation in combating untreated diseases and improving current treatments. A better understanding of the human genome rests at the heart of this incredible technological progress. With the dawn of personal medicine, we are also witnessing the dawn of a new era in medicine.

If Jane Austen was writing in the early 21st century in Europe, she could well have begun one of her novels with: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a country in possession of a biotech sector, must be in want of a pharma company.

In February, I heard of a slightly mad and very worrying trend in decisions handed down by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) with regard to IP issues handed up from the national level for clarification. IP is not very exciting to start with, but the more you understand about the situation developing, the more you see Europe backing itself into a corner about something that could have major ramifications for commercialisation of technologies.