Wellcome Trust, Marina Abramovic, Hans Wyss and biotech industry AND THAT PODESTA HANDKERCHIEF EMAIL

The Wyss Center is a not-for-profit neurotechnology research foundation in Geneva, Switzerland.[2]

The Center is part of the Campus Biotech (in the former Merck Serono building) located in Geneva, Switzerland. The Director of the Wyss Center, neuroscientist Professor John P. Donoghue, is best known for his work on human brain computer interfaces and brain function and plasticity.

In Geneva, the Capital of Peace, 10 Biotechs are putting up a Fight

Geneva rose to recognition as a biotech hub in 2006, when Serono sealed its acquisition by Merck in the city’s biggest-ever licensing plan.

DO YOU KNOW TONY PODESTA?

Making the circuit with Podesta, you can see how the game operates - and occasionally doesn't - on behalf of technology companies. Case in point: Genentech. The biotech giant was Podesta Associates' first client a decade ago, when Podesta's lobbying style tended toward the splashy, media-directed side of the game. (When the California Poultry Industry Federation asked him to fight legislation that allowed its competitors' frozen chickens to be labeled "fresh," Podesta carried a crate of the icy birds to Congress and set up a bowling tournament with them in the halls.) His work for Genentech began conventionally enough, as he guided the company through hearings on human growth hormone or numbingly dull negotiations about R&D tax credits. But it was Podesta's more out-of-the-box tactics that paid off for Genentech in 1997, after nearly three years of dogged lobbying for a pharmaceutical coalition, when he won sweeping changes in the operations of the Food and Drug Administration. "The opportunity to do this kind of stuff comes along once in a generation," says Walter Moore, Genentech's vice president for government affairs. "And Tony provided the bipartisan glue that made FDA reform happen."

"Reform" of the FDA had been on Genentech's agenda from the beginning of the first Clinton administration. The company felt crippled by the agency's arduous drug testing and approval process, its labeling and advertising regulations, and its restrictions on the experimental uses of approved medicines. Podesta knew that Genentech could not get new legislation written through traditional insider negotiating alone, so he launched a brash public-relations campaign that took the fight into the open. "The FDA was well thought of," he says. "We didn't need to bash [then FDA head David] Kessler. We just needed to be more energetic and compelling with our message than the agency was."

And biotech's message was loud and clear: deregulate. By the mid-'90s, a rift had opened between older pharmaceutical companies - large, diversified, heavily invested in infrastructure - and the newer, more audacious start-ups churning out not just new drugs but new processes for making drugs. The older companies, fed by a steady stream of profits from existing "classic" drugs and thus able to devote years and years to research, wanted a strong FDA to help them keep tight control of their patent. The younger companies, surviving on venture capital, needed to slash through regulations and get their innovative products to market as quickly as possible.

Podesta, CIRM and the Biotech Industry http://californiastemcellreport.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/podesta-cirm-and-biotech-industry.html

"Trouble is, biotech has become a synonym for exorbitant. For example, Herceptin, a biotech breast cancer treatment introduced 11 years ago by Genentech Inc, costs $40,000 for one year of treatment.