NCTimes.com Blogs

For a quick overview of what California’s new water bill package means, I can do no better than point you to the blog post by Steve Doyle of Brookfield Homes.

There’s lots more devilishly intricate parts of this legislation, of course, but this overview lets you grok the purpose of each of the five bills.

Doyle helpfully included links to each bill, so you can read the full text. Would that I had found this post sooner! I just spent much of the morning tracking this down.

As universities go, The House That Roger Revelle Built is a puppy, founded just four decades ago. But it’s one of the top dogs in pulling in federal research dollars. And according to the National Science Foundation, UCSD has once again ranked 6th nationwide.

UCSD got $491 million in federal R&D money and spent a total of $842 million in total R&D activities for fiscal year 2008.
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(This is my early report from Biocom’s investor conference today and Tuesday).

By BRADLEY J. FIKES

SAN DIEGO —- Biotech’s golden allure is mostly tarnished for investors, who have crammed into the technology sector chasing after the Apples and Googles. But there’s some signs of a modest turnaround, experts said Monday at a life sciences investors forum.

Biotech companies will have to squeeze to make every dollar count, and more mergers and acquisitions will take place for lack of any alternative, said panelists during a morning discussion. The forum was sponsored by Biocom, the San Diego-based life sciences trade group.

However, federal stimulus money is at last flowing to the life sciences sector, providing some reason for optimism, said panelist Dan Owczarski, a senior health care analyst at Avondale Partners, LLC.

“We’re seeing big numbers coming out in grants being awarded,” Owczarski said. “Now the cash is going to start flowing down.”

The largest slice of the money so far appears to be going to the life science “tool companies,” which provide research products used by academic researchers, government agencies and other biotech companies, Owczarski said. These tool providers include companies such as Illumina Inc., based in San Diego, and Carlsbad’s Life Technologies.

Some smaller biotech companies are benefitting from federal grants for H1N1, or swine flu, and biodefense research, said Jason Kantor, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. However, Kantor described those as “niche” areas, not enough for an industrywide upswing.

The various federal grants are mostly going for early-stage research, the panelists said. That’s a good thing, they said, because investors aren’t willing to fund early-stage research anyway.

Panelists agreed that biotech as an investment sector is at the bottom of the cycle of investment popularity. Companies hoping to get funding over the near term will have to show results within about 18 months to get funding interest.

The forum takes place Monday and Tuesday at the Hyatt Regency in the UTC area.

bfikes@nctimes.com