I'll be posting more later today on some regulatory/legal developments in the bioscience world, but wanted to pass along this article from Wired online. This could be a great development in treatment for various diseases - using nifty little nanoscale molecules that have tiny tendrils on them to administer vaccines and other medicines. Cheery news like this is always necessary to counter so much of the negative results and news we get inundated with these days.
One tidbit from the BIO 2005 sessions that really stuck in my mind - the PTO now faces a backlog of 500,000 patent applications. With the rate of growth in patent filings, they foresee having a backlog of a million applications within the next 10 years. The speaker, Dr. Jasemine Chambers, Director of Technology Center 1600 at the PTO, said that despite the increased filing fees, there has been little to no slowdown in the filings.
The PTO is hoping that some of the patent reform initiative and changes to restriction practice will help stem the tide and assist the PTO in digging out of the backlog and providing faster, quicker service for inventors out there.
I'm now at the BIO 2005 Conference and will be posting a series of thoughts over the next few days about what has been discussed here. First, on a non-biotech-related note, I need to give a round of applause to the event planner who put on the reception on Sunday night. It was a fantastic party and all attendees seemed to thoroughly enjoy him/herself.
There have been a number of sessions devoted to the latest topics that bioscience companies face, and one of the better ones was last night that presented some of the more recently proposed legislative changes that could affect bioscience companies. One thing that would have added more value to the session would have been to include non-patent laws to the session and also to talk more about the affect that the proposed changes to the laws may have on bioscience companies. But it's easy to be a Tuesday-morning quarterback. I'll be adding more later on this ...