An April 16 article in Business New Haven describes the “rediscovery” of Connecticut by venture capitalists. CURE president Paul Pescatello says: “One of the real pockets of world-class expertise we've got is in the life sciences. Connecticut companies have really attracted significantly more than their share of venture and angel financing, which is probably the best test of how well the research is going in their labs. Venture capitalists are the best and most scrutinizing judges of what's going on – they vote with the pocketbook.”
In a companion article on the medical device industry in the same issue of Business New Haven, Pescatello adds, “Some Connecticut manufacturers specialize in producing ‘unique alloys’ for medical devices.”
An April 25 story in the New Haven Register notes that the BioBus has “gone green,” thanks to a partnership with Greenleaf Biofuels of Guilford. The BioBus arrived at the Capitol in Hartford that day for a ceremony at which vegetable oil was collected from Connecticut school children, for later conversion to biofuel.
A June 9 story in the New Haven Register reports on the funding raised by start-up BioRelix, Inc. The successful spin-out “shows what an intellectual-property engine Yale’s bioscience labs are,” Pescatello says. The new company’s research into “RiboSwitches”, Pescatello says, “is in great demand in the market given the troubling, ever-increasing numbers of microbes resistant to existing classes of antibiotics.”
A June 14 story in the Hartford Courant notes that Yale will acquire the Bayer property in West Haven. Pescatello praises the development, saying, “At the end of the day, what [drives] biotechnology economic development is what happens in the research universities. They spawn the research that causes companies to happen.”
In a June 25 story in Business New Haven on the same subject, Pescatello adds that he’s confident Yale's expansion will generate more biotech spin-offs and private-sector activity in the life sciences. “It's very good outcome,” Pescatello says. “Yale is our crown jewel in bioscience research.”
A July 30 article in the Hartford Courant reports that Connecticut’s stem cell peer review committee, which grades applications for stem cell grants from the state, may expand to as many as 15 members. Warren Wollschlager, chief of research and development for the Connecticut Department of Public Health, said the department sought the change because volunteers had each put in close to 100 hours of their own time — taken away from their own work — in support of the state. The expansion is a good idea, Pescatello says, adding that the initial round of reviews was “an amazng volunteer response.”
An Aug 8 article in the New Haven Register reports on the surge of venture capital into Connecticut in 2Q 2007. Pescatello says the surge shows that Connecticut’s biotechnology sector is going strong. “It's a modestly sized cluster but it's certainly able to garner a lot of support from venture capital firms,” he said of the state's biotech and high-tech industry. “There is a steady stream of new ventures coming out of Connecticut.” Pescatello also noted that the report shows the Connecticut biotech cluster is not dependent on any one area of development, but instead is involved in projects ranging from antibiotics to spinal cord devices.
An Aug 10 article in the New Haven Independent noted that more than 150 CURE members flocked to the CURE summer cookout in Branford, where Pescatello welcomed the guests, stating that he was delighted to be adding a summer networking event to the CURE calendar.
On Sept 2, the Hartford Courant ran a letter to the editor from Pescatello, calling attention to shortcomings in the federal Patent Reform Act of 2007. “In the bioscience industry it is not just established pharmaceutical companies that look to patents to support their research efforts,” Pescatello writes. “If anything, robust patent protection is even more important as a safeguard and incentive for up-and-coming biotechs and academic researchers considering whether to pursue the commercialization or promising new therapies.”
A sidebar in the Sept 18 issue of Connecticut Science Connection notes that the BioBus is gearing up for its seventh school year in 2007-08. Science teachers are invited to visit the BioBus Educational Programs website to request visits by the BioBus and classroom equipment lending via the BioConnection program.
In a Sept 20 article in the Hartford Courant, Pescatello says he finds the recent changes at Branford-based CuraGen encouraging. He mentions that proceeds from the sale of CuraGen’s subsidiary 454 Life Sciences were reinivested in the parent company. “It wasn't distributed out to investors. Most of us take that as a sign of the confidence that the investors, the board and the scientists at CuraGen have in the compounds.”
Commenting on Yale biotech spinoffs for an article in Yale Medicine, Pescatello says, “I travel to meetings around the world. My sense is that qualitatively Yale is regarded as highly as any academic medical center in the world” for developing biotechnology enterprises. But quantitatively the region lags, he said, behind Cambridge, South San Francisco, San Diego and other areas with more prominent biotechnology sectors. Those areas, he says, have “other engines” to generate new ventures, while New Haven relies almost solely on Yale.
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