PHOSITA® : Oklahoma Technology News 11-17-04

November 17, 2004

The Oklahoma Technology News for Nov. 17, 2004:

The Women in Science Conference is scheduled for Friday November 19, 2004 at Langston University in Langston, Oklahoma. The seminar is sponsored by EPSCoR, the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education and the National Science Foundation. The conference is free to all college faculty, post-doctoral researchers and students. More information is available by calling 405-225-9287.

Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) was presented an Annual Achievement Award on November 16, 2004 by the Washington Coal Club for leadership in the coal industry. The award was presented at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

According to an October report from the Mlken Institute, an independent economic think tank, that since 1983, the West Southcentral region (which is dominated primarily by Texas but also includes, Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma) has seen biopharmaceutical employment climb by 130 percent, "outpacing industry growth in the nation as a whole." The study put Oklahoma's biotech employment growth from 1993-2003 at 16.7 percent, compared with minus 30.6 percent in Louisiana and minus 2.4 percent in Arkansas over the same time period. Only Texas at 27.2 percent outranked Oklahoma in the "West South Central" region.

Medical technologies company Medtronic Inc. acquired the intellectual property of CellPlant(TM)Aqueous Stent from Wound Healing of Oklahoma Inc. The CellPlant technology provides Medtronic an opportunity to evaluate a new generation of devices for the treatment of glaucoma, the second-leading cause of blindness in the U.S.

In an article in the Manchester, New Hampshire Union Leader entitled "NH faces competition for biotech jobs," Oklahoma's Yamanouchi Pharma Technologies was cited as an example, of biotech companies who have moved from high cost cities to lower cost cities. Yamanouchi, for example, moved from San Francisco, one of the costliest U.S. sites to operate a biomedical facility -- at $11,223,242 per year -- to Norman, Oklahoma, one of the least costly at $8,704,721 per year.