By Alfred Romann
The backlash against global trade and the resurgence of protectionism is increasingly evident, mostly out of the U.S. This push flies in the face of decades of increasingly fluent globalization.
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R&D spend driving China pharma co’s
Alfred Romann 17 September 2015Companies are narrowing the gap
China is not a powerhouse of innovation, yet, but it is certainly trying to pay its way into that particular status. This willingness to spend in R&D – to pay to talent, buy innovative companies and seek out new technologies – is particularly visible in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology space. And it is working.
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Australia’s largest life science fund
Cornelia Zou 13 May 2015Australia’s life science sector outperforms in research… falls short on commercialisation.
It is no surprise that the life science sector including pharmaceutical, medical devices etc. is one of the hottest investment destinations. Last month, Australian investment company Brandon Capital closed the largest life science fund to date in Australia after raising A$200 million (US$155 million). The fund is set to fill the funding gap of the country’s medical technology commercialisation.
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Asian cities need sustainability
Alfred Romann 7 April 2015Environment, productivity and work hours are all big issues
Asia is home to some of the largest urban centres in the world.
Jakarta, in Indonesia, is home to some 25 million people. Manila is huge. Tokyo and Seoul are both large. Smaller Hong Kong and Singapore are large by any standard. High urbanisation rates are making these cities even larger, but not necessarily more sustainable.
As Cornelia Zou reports in China Daily Asia Pacific last week the challenges are quite significant, but so are the opportunities for Asian cities to start taking issues of sustainability seriously and make significant leapfrogs in terms of the environments, quality of life, education, even work hours and governance.
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Vaccines are good
Alfred Romann 28 August 2014Vaccines are great. They are arguably one of the most important public health tools of the last century.
About 1,000 years ago, the Chinese came up with the first early inoculation process. Six centuries later, Europeans tried to develop one against smallpox. Today, they are in widespread use. Measles, mumps, chickenpox, yellow fever, typhoid fever and many other once crippling diseases are virtually non-issues in much of the developed world.
The value of vaccination, as a concept, is impossible to ignore.
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