Israel is eighth in the number of patents granted in the life-sciences industry, which may be the most amazing statistic of all, given the amount of time and money companies must invest in getting a product or technology tested and patented.

This week, the Israeli biotech industry was having its annual conference, the Biomed Israel 2011 show, sponsored by the Life Sciences Industries Association in Israel (ILSI), a nonprofit organization founded to serve and promote the goals of the Israeli life-sciences industry in the international arena. The show, which is taking place in Tel Aviv and is celebrating its tenth anniversary, has become a can’t-miss affair for top executives of pharmaceutical and medical-technology giants around the world.

So how successful has the Israeli life sciences industry been? Check out the stats: There are currently about 700 active life-sciences companies in Israel; 56 percent of them (396) of them were founded in the last decade.

A quarter of them, 173, were founded only five years ago. Of the rest, 306 were founded before 2001, with the oldest, Teva Pharmaceuticals, founded in 1901 (amazing but true). Out of the 700, 401 (56%) are in the medicaldevices business.

From 2001 to 2005 the industry’s annual growth was 12%. Even though things have slowed a bit over the past three years, Biomed organizing committee chairperson Ruti Alon says growth has returned to the sector.

More than 100 of the companies established over the last decade are making money, she says, and “the most impressive fact is that 25 companies, about 8% of all companies that produce income, were founded only five years ago.”

Some testimonials as for ILSI- Biomed Israel 2011:

“Back to Paris I would like to thank you for the excellence of the organization and the quality of the Company we have met. We learned a lot and see several opportunities to partner with Israeli Biotech Companies”

- Philippe Goupit, Sanofi-Aventis, Business Development Corporate Licenses

“I would like to thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to talk about EU reimbursement during ILSI Biomed in Tel Aviv. I was impressed by the fantastic organization of the program and the conference itself.
It would be a very great pleasure for me to participate again next year”

- Dr. Hubertus Rosery MPH (CEO), AiM GmbH, Assessment in Medicine Research and Consulting

“Thanks for the nice introduction; I had a number of meetings and feel that I am slowly getting to know the needs and interests of the many wonderful technology companies born in Israel. Congratulations on a very successful conference!”

- Dan Mendelson, CEO, Avalere Health LLC

Really excellent. Well planned. Very nice atmosphere.
Key-note speakers were the best. Cocktail party was a delight.
Kenes did a great job. Kol Hakavod to ILSI & Ruti.

- David Blum

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Hong Kong and the US tied for first place in global competitiveness this year, taking over from Singapore, which fell to third place.

The Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce represents IMD in Israel. Chambers of Commerce president Uriel Lynn said, “The Israeli economy continues to demonstrate robustness and stability compared with the world’s leading economies. The survey puts Israel among the top 20 countries, economically speaking, despite the challenges facing Israel over the coming year, such as reducing the public sector and spending, cutting bureaucracy, and the burden on the business sector, investment in infrastructure in the periphery, including in education, and boosting exports.”

srael is ranked 54th out of the 59 countries in participation in the labor force, the same as in 2010. Israel’s ranking for cost of living fell to 49th place from 47th place, and its ranking for persons dependent on the government was the penultimate 58th place.
Israel’s ranking for technology infrastructure rose to 4th place in 2011 from 5th place in 2010; science infrastructure rose to 4th place from 6th place; but its ranking for basic infrastructure (roads, railways, energy sources, etc.) was unchanged in 47th place. Israel’s ranking on environmental legislation fell to 21st place this year from 19th place last year, and its ranking on education fell to 14th place from 13th place.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news – www.globes-online.com – on May 18, 2011

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Appetite for Israeli initial public offerings of life-science companies is booming, writes the WSJ, but critics say the sector is immature and lacks the transparency for investors to make informed decisions.

Over the last few years the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange loosened up on its rules for tech companies looking to go public. At the same time, American biotech companies have been finding it extremely difficult to launch an IPO in the U.S. The result is that new life science companies from around the world are knocking on TASE doors as they hunt out fresh capital at a time venture funding has shriveled.

The first three months of 2011 have brought four life-sciences IPOs, and several more are planned for the first half of the year. The rate so far has been far ahead of that of the past three years, with only four IPOs in all of 2010, one in 2009 and none in 2008.

As the WSJ points out, Israel already has a reputation as the home for a large number of up-and-coming biotech companies.

“The market here in Tel Aviv is ripe,” says Dror Ben-Asher, CEO of RedHill, which raised a little under $15 million from its offering. “There is a lot of growing interest here in biotech.”

The last Biotech IPO boom on TASE, though milder and still local, took place on the first quarter of 2010 – From January till April 2010, five Israeli biotech companies have gone public and another 12 have registered to do so. Two initial public offerings of BioMed companies have taken place since the beginning of 2010. Apart from those, 7 more Secondary offerings were made. Together, all these have raised 181.3 million NIS from investors.

For the full WSJ story (subscribers only):

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703806304576232560144660964.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

See also: Biotech IPOs on the Mend (April 2010)

http://www.ilsi.org.il/industry_analysis_item.asp?ID=84

by Aviva Mishmari

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If you are a representative of an biomed start-up company, you have the invitation to participate in ILSI-Biomed 2011 Conference to be held May 23-25, 2010 in Tel-Aviv. The conference is a meeting place for industry and academia from Israel and abroad. Exuberance is felt everywhere: lectures and exhibition halls and partnership meetings. International visitors come to hear about and witness the various innovations, and experience first hand the entrepreneurial spirit so strongly exhibited within the vibrant Israeli life science community.

ILSI-Biomed 2011 follows the success of previous annual conferences: last year’s event drew 6,000 industry players, engineers and scientists, with 1,000 participants from 42 countries and in excess of 2,500 one-on-one meetings.
Following the positive reaction from ILSI-BioMed 2010, we are delighted to incorporate the ‘Start Ups Pavilion’ into this year’s conference once again, giving Start-Ups the opportunity to showcase their technology/product.

In addition, all Start-Up exhibitors will be entitled to a short limited elevator speech, which will be part of the ILSI-Biomed 2011 Conference program. This session will be held at the David InterContinental Hotel. Presenting authors must hold one of the following positions: Chairman of the BOD, CEO, CFO, COO, CSO, VP of Business Development, VP of R&D, General Manager. At the end of the presentations an interactive round of voting will be done by the audience for the best companies. Prizes will be awarded to winning presentations! An added unique opportunity for participating Start-Ups, as venture capitalists and angel investors are very much present at the event.

The ‘Start Ups Pavilion’ will be set side by side with the ‘Networking Pavilion’ located at the Dan Panorama Hotel, where the executive meetings will take place, and will be presented as one of the main ILSI-Biomed 2011 attractions.

Definition of Start-Up companies:

- Limited operating history / generally newly created
- In a phase of development and research for market
- Annual revenue cycle should be below 500,000 USD.

What will the “Start Up” participants get?

An international encounter with team players, maximum exposure, creating new business opportunities with representatives of technology industries.
Interacting with international delegations and thousands of visitors from Israel & abroad.
Pre-set private one on one meetings scheduled via the Networking engine; providing the opportunity of creating new partnerships with potential clients/investors.
Targeted exposure of Start-Ups presenting at the ‘Start Ups Pavilion’ on the official ILSI-Biomed 2011 website and in publications.

Please note:
Space (exhibition and presentations) is limited and will be allotted on a ‘first come first serve’ basis.
Only exhibiting start-ups are permitted the elevator speech.

For further in formation please visit the official site.

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PwC says in its “Race for Global Leadership: Medical Technology Innovation Scorecard” that start-up activity in Israel’s medical devices sector is less than in countries such as India, China, and Brazil. PwC measures level of activity according to the following variables: the number of new companies; the amount of money raised in the companies’ early stages; the number of collaborations with universities and corporations; and the extent to which companies in each country adopt the companies’ innovations.

Israel remains the leader in one key variable: venture capital investment as a percentage of GDP with 1.2%, compared with 0.3% for second place Brazil, and 0.2% for the US.

pwc Israel partner and life sciences leader Claudio Yarza said, “While this figure is ostensibly encouraging, there is little financing. Although 2010 was in the end not a bad year, 2011 is shaping up to be worse. 2011 will be a critical year for the future for Israel’s venture capital industry, and only when it’s over will the picture be clarified.”

PwC examined nine countries, which lead innovation in the medical devices industry, and compared their competitiveness with each other. The review was by categories, including financial incentives, sources of innovation, a supportive regulatory structure, and a supporting investing community.

Yarza said, “Israel’s inclusion in the report is very flattering in itself. When examining Israel’s achievements on a per capita basis, there is no question that it’s the leader. When we examine ourselves on an absolute scale, obviously we cannot compete with the other countries in the report because of their size.”

In the category of medical innovation in general, PwC ranks Israel 6th in the world, behind the US, Germany, the UK, France, and Japan. Israel is still ahead of emerging economies, but PwC warns that, by 2020, China will likely surpass the European countries, and pass Israel.

Yarza said that Israel leads in relative variables, such as the number of researchers and R&D investment per capita, but that in the absolute variables, such as the number of patents and researchers, Israel slides to toward the bottom to join Brazil and India.

Gali Weinreb, Globes.

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Dr. Chris Wasden
Dr. Christopher Wasden is a managing director leading PwC’s strategy and innovation practice focused on the healthcare industry. He is a named inventor on 20 issued and pending patents. He has been a leader of nine separate startups both venture and corporate backed. He has over 20 years of executive leadership experience in public and private companies across several industries: banking (JP Morgan), energy (Koch), utilities (Azurix), and healthcare and technology startups. He advises private equity and venture capital firms, governments, and corporate clients on strategic and commercial risks, uncertainties and opportunities associated with their growth and innovation strategies including: mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, corporate venturing, entrepreneurial ventures, and new product and business development. He holds a doctorate from George Washington University, and MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA, and a BS in Accounting and BA in Asian Studies from Brigham Young University.

Medical Technology Innovation scorecard: The race for global leadership
New dynamic redefines medical technology innovation
The way we assess value in medical technology is changing radically. The old dynamic of the physician as arbiter of value is giving way to a new one: government and private insurers and “self-pay” consumers increasingly determine what sells and at what price. They refuse to pay for incremental innovations that add bells and whistles but do not significantly improve health or reduce cost. The faster, better, smaller, cheaper advances so common in consumer electronics portend the future of medical technology.
Emerging-market countries such as China, India, and Brazil, despite comparatively weak healthcare system infrastructure, are quickly taking the lead in developing lean, frugal, and reverse innovation. This type of innovation simplifies devices and processes, retaining essential functions, while applying newer technologies that are more mobile, customized to consumers’ needs, and less costly.
The PwC Medical Technology Innovation Scorecard shows that the innovation leaders of today among the nine leading countries may find their position slipping during the next decade. Three trends are evident:
• The innovation ecosystem for medical device technology, long centered in the United States, is moving offshore. Increasingly, medical technology innovators are going outside the United States to seek clinical data, new-product registration, and first revenue.
• US consumers are not always the first to benefit from advances in medical technology and could eventually be last in line. Innovators already are going first to market in Europe and, by 2020, likely will move into emerging countries next before entering the United States.
• The nature of innovation is changing as developing nations become the leading markets for smaller, faster, more affordable devices that enable delivery of care anywhere and help bend the healthcare cost curve downward. However, the difficulty of doing business in emerging countries and poor intellectual property protection could make these markets less attractive to multinational companies, despite their size, and could hinder these nations’ innovation leadership.

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This article discribes how it should be and raises some interesting questions.

And here is the comics describing how it is, at least somewhere, sometimes…

So what do you think? What is the meaning of academic integrity for you personally?

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by GERSON PANITCH, FINNEGAN

June 14, 2010

Patent professionals and U.S. Supreme Court watchers alike on high alert as a Bilski decision is expected before the Court’s 2009 term comes to an end this month.  Perhaps no case is more anticipated than the decision in Bilski v. Doll, especially for those in high-tech fields such as telecom, software, and professional services.  Over a year has passed since the Supreme Court agreed to hear Bilski’s appeal (June 1, 2009), and more than seven months since hearing oral arguments (Nov. 9, 2009).  Bilski, which deals with the types of processes that are patentable in the U.S., is one of the oldest pending cases on the Supreme Court’s docket.  If no decision is reached by the end of this month, the Court must either dismiss the appeal or reset the case for a new argument in next year’s term. 

Until the Bilksi case, the U.S. was a place where it was possible to patent almost “anything under the sun that is made by man.”  Only such things as abstract ideas (e.g., mathematical algorithms); natural phenomena; and laws of nature were considered unpatentable in the U.S.  And even inventions in these areas were still patentable if expressed in a practical application.  As a result, throughout the Internet boom and to the present, the U.S. became a haven for protecting methods of doing business, even though business methods remained unpatentable in most other countries of the world.

But the Bilski case signaled that a change might be on the horizon.  Bilski tried to patent a method for managing commodity trading risk.  The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected Bilski’s patent claim because it could have been performed without the use of a machine.  The appeals court affirmed the rejection, stating that a process is patentable in the United States only if:

(1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or

(2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing.

On Bilski’s behalf, lawyers from the Finnegan law firm argued to the U.S. Supreme Court that such a narrow interpretation traps U.S. patent law in the 19^th century by limiting patentable processes to traditional manufacturing methods, and excluding modern business practices.  Moreover, the Federal Circuit’s test effectively draws a distinction between technological fields; something the U.S. patent law has never done.  Business methods, financial services, software, and medical diagnostic inventions are now in an unacceptable state of uncertainty as they await the Supreme Court’s decision. 

The U.S. Supreme Court rarely decides patent law cases, and the decision in Bilski is sure to have far-reaching implications for patenting in the U.S.

About Finnegan 
With more than 375 intellectual property lawyers, Finnegan is one of the largest IP law firms in the world.  From offices in Washington, DC; Atlanta, Georgia; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Palo Alto, California; Reston, Virginia; Brussels, Belgium; Shanghai, China; Taipei, Taiwan; and Tokyo, Japan, the firm practices all aspects of patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secret law, including counseling, prosecution, licensing, and litigation.  The firm represents clients on IP issues related to international trade, portfolio management, the Internet, e-commerce, government contracts, antitrust, and unfair competition.  For additional information on the firm, please visit www.finnegan.com.

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Following the opening words of the event’s organizers, ILSI and Kenes, the president of Israel Shimon Peres came up to the stage and surveyed the future of Israel, which will be based on advanced technologies and serve as an example to the entire world. In his own words, “Israel should become an international lab.” Amen to that.

Neither did the following opening keynote lecture disappoint. Sanofi-Aventis, the multinational pharmaceutical company and the world’s fourth-largest by prescription sales, has presented its new view of developing new products. The lecturer divided the pharmaceutical market into two distinct sections: the small biotechnology companies, and the large business companies. The first kind is usually headed by innovative and creative scientists whose expertise is thinking outside the box. They have good ideas, but they lack the experience needed to break through in the market. That’s what the big pharma companies do exceptionally well: they have all the experience and knowledge needed to succeed in the market, but they lack the ground-breaking minds that can be found in the smaller companies.

The solution, according to Sanofi-Aventis, lies in collaboration. Well, that didn’t require a genius to figure out. Then again, such a collaboration is not easily brought about. On the one hand, the employees of the large companies view themselves as superior to those from the smaller companies. On the other hand, the scientists in the small companies treat their projects as their own personal babies, and refuse to accept criticism and ideas for change. All the same, Sanofi-Aventis is determined to bring about fruitful collaborations between the Davids and the Goliaths of the world. To that purpose, they have cut down their portfolio by 40%, and rewired all the human resources and money that became available into new projects, with a core of efficient and competent employees who collaborate with a variety of other companies.

The end result: since 2010, sixty percent of the compounds in Sanofi-Aventis’ portfolio are developed via collaborations. Such collaborations can also promote projects that integrate knowledge and expertise from different fields, such as glucose sensors connected directly to an insulin pump, or robotic hands that connect to the nervous system.

Let us all hope that this trend – collaboration in place of a take-over – will become more common, and will bring about the development of novel technologies and products more efficiently and in a shorter amount of time.

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The management of medical device holding company D Medical Industries Ltd. (TASE:DMDC) are not deterred by the falls on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) and on Wall Street over the past few weeks. The company today announced that it has filed a draft prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a public offering and requested a listing on Nasdaq.

D Medical plans to raise $20-25 million. The company’s opening market cap today was NIS 157 million, about $42 million. If the offering is successful, it will greatly dilute the holdings of its current shareholders.

Its ticker on Nasdaq will be “DMED”.

The company said that underwriters Rodman & Renshaw and ThinkEquity will lead the offering.

In the prospectus, D Medical said that its strategy in the coming years will be to first penetrate Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC countries), as well as Mexico, and Europe, where it can exploit the relative advantage in low production costs of the products of its subsidiaires. The company plans to sign distribution agreements in these countries.

D Medical added that it intends to rebrand the insulin pump developed by subsidiary Nilimedix Ltd. under the “Spring” label. The new name emphasizes the core technology of its insulin pump which uses a spring-based delivery system instead of the conventional motor-driven delivery system of current products.

Taken from ILSI’s website

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