Editorials in 2012

There was a time when flagship biotech companies looked very different from pharma.

High-throughput sequencing for clinical purposes faces technical and quality challenges, but it's worth it.

The biotech investment community needs to look beyond the existing pools of funding and talent to galvanize biomedical innovation.

In a matter of days, a momentous event will occur: a gene therapy will, for the first time anywhere in the Western hemisphere, be available commercially with full marketing approval.

A new mechanism for independently replicating research findings is one of several changes required to improve the quality of the biomedical literature.

Wanted: faster, more effective ways of testing experimental cancer drugs for both single-agent and combination treatments.

A new type of patient consent promises to galvanize how personal genomic and medical data are shared in open research environments.

Controversies surrounding government walk-in rights or patent eligibility that grabbed headlines in recent weeks presage broader changes in biomarker patenting.

The European Medicines Agency's request to make all clinical trial data available is key to countering bias in publication, drug prescription practice and health policy.

Proposed US legislation aiming to expand and expedite patient access to novel drugs represents a good start, but is unlikely to strongly boost approval numbers.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has raised the bar very high for those who seek to make a business out of biosimilars.

Averting a global food crisis will require the deconstruction of several hurdles to the deployment of new strategies in plant breeding.

Thwarting bioterror by restricting the publication of research on a deadly avian flu virus, or any other potential biothreat for that matter, is doomed to fail.

Personalized medicine falls a long way short of the predictive and preventative healthcare paradigm it once promised.