Its getting a little boring listening to conversations about the 2014-2020 budget. As citizens, were subjected to endless national bickering and point-scoring as national leaders look to secure their own positions through sounding tough on Europe, as if the EU was a strange alien beast designed to steal their money and straighten all their bananas.
Partnering and even open innovation is becoming increasingly important for our industry in a world where health systems are undergoing profound transformations.
We all read with dismay but not a huge amount of surprise the October paper from French researchers led by Gilles-Eric Séralini on the two-year rat-feeding study looking at the effects of glyphosate-treated GM maize.
Since the beginning of the year, there have been numerous government initiatives in the most advanced countries to implement and strengthen policies to support biotechnology.
Hello readers! You know, when you view the biotechnology landscape from a Brussels perspective, you can very easily get stuck looking at the bad bits meddling politicians, poor science reporting, insane funding decisions. Goodness knows I have had to solve the euro crisis already this year, and most months I have something or other to moan about.
During the last thirty years, healthcare expenditure has been growing much more rapidly than GDP in OECD countries, causing increasing concerns about the long-term sustainability of current trends. As we have seen with the global impact of the financial crisis, economic realities are moving faster than political ones.
Well ladies and gentlemen of the biotechnology community, welcome back after the silly season. I hope you had a nice one, whether it was in the sunny bit, the rainy bit or the bits that were on fire. As usual, summer in Europe was quiet. I see we still have a Eurozone, which is nice, and shows that the revolutionary, biotech-driven solution I came up with earlier in the year is still working.
Bioeconomy is the new health, and that is official. You only have to look at all the planning for Horizon 2020 and all the big words coming out of politicians at national and European levels to see that. But is Europe really ready or willing to embrace what it will take to replace existing technologies with new, bio-driven ones?
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.
Good news! After some thinking, Ive solved the eurocrisis and saved national investment in biotechnology! As with most people who champion a single Europe, what is going to happen in the eurozone weighs heavily on my mind. Not just because of the surreal and seemingly uncontrollable debt crisis, but also because investment in growth in most European countries has stalled.