While You Were Watching Hoops

The West is where things got particularly ugly this weekend for anybody who took this advice about Cornell, but with zero surprises among the top 12 tournament seeds it's likely that most of you are still alive in your office pools. Unless you took our other advice about the Big East being overrated.

So what else happened this weekend, while you were developing a strong dislike for Coke Zero based solely on its NCAA ad blitz ...

• You got your vacation in my surgery! You got your surgery in my vacation! NYT on medical tourism.
  
• Clinical trials increasingly are conducted globally as companies hunt for treatment-naive patients and less expensive studies. The WSJ discusses some of the drawbacks and difficulties.
  
• Is it splitsville for FDA's food and drugs arms? AP reporting in the Boston Globe and elsewhere that pharma industry advocates are pushing for such reform.
  
• Will there be new life for the blockbuster in 2009? The Pink Sheet examines the 2009 user fee calendar at FDA and makes some interesting predictions and observations ($).
• Merck-Serono is launching a strategic venture capital fund. News of which would have come in handy when a colleague asked us last Friday, "does Merck-Serono have a strategic venture capital fund?" The group will invest up to Eur 40mm over the next five years. Interested? Click here.
  

ugly bracket image by invivoblog