Further evidence that the post-Facebook initial public offering (IPO) jitters seem to have dissipated, and that the environment for biotech IPOs continues to improve comes with Thursday's debut of venture-backed Durata Therapeutics Inc., of Morristown, N.J. The company priced its initial public offering of 7.5 million shares of common stock at a price of $9 per share.

With the stroke of a pen, the prospects of millions of people suffering from rare diseases has improved dramatically.

The "blockbuster" drug model may still have some life in it yet. That's what a number of big pharma and "blue chip" biotechs are hoping anyway as they invest millions of research dollars in their quests to develop the next generation of hepatitis C virus (HCV) drugs. The potential market for HCV drugs is predicted to grow rapidly in the next five years and could get even get bigger following recent draft guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) proposing that all U.S. baby boomers get a one-time test for the hepatitis C virus.

With the stroke of a pen the prospects of millions of people suffering from rare diseases has improved dramatically. The signing of the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA) by President Obama now gives the FDA the provision to work on speeding up the development of "breakthrough therapies" that demonstrate early promise and faster patient access to new medical treatments.

There is no doubt that 2011 was a hot financing year for biotech and it was always going to be a tough act to follow. Well the industry followed the script to the letter. According to a BioWorld Insight analysis, the amount of capital generated by private and public biotech companies slowed dramatically in the first half of 2012, with $7.9 billion raised, down 40 percent from the same period in 2011. We found that it was a particularly tough second quarter with biotech companies collectively raising $2.76 billion, 46.4 percent less than the $5.15 billion raised in the first...

After coming off a hot 2011 financing year it appears that the biotech sector must be flush with cash because the amount of capital generated by private and public biotech companies slowed considerably in the first half of 2012. According to statistics compiled by BioWorld Insight drawn from BioWorld Snapshots, in the first-half of 2012 biotech fundraising generated just $7.9 billion, down 40 percent from the same period in 2011 when biotech companies raised a total of $13.3 billion.

No prizes for guessing which company topped the list in recording the largest increase in its share price in the second quarter of 2012. Arena Pharmaceuticals Inc. won going away, thanks to the FDA's approval of Belviq (lorcaserin) the first new weight-loss drug for more than 13 years.

There is no doubt that the biotechnology industry is now truly global. Approximately one-third of the delegates at the recent BIO 2012 International Convention in Boston came from countries outside of the U.S. A stroll through the convention's exhibition floor provided further evidence to the fact that emerging countries are placing their strategic bets on biotechnology to boost their economies.

The fact that oncology-focused biopharmaceutical company Tesaro Inc., of Waltham, Mass., completed a successful and oversubscribed initial public offering (IPO) that was within its expected price range could be a sign of better things to come in the second half of the year for biotech companies now positioned on the IPO runway.