Bioscience.

• Position: TRENDS IN TECH

Holli Baumunk, president and CEO of the Colorado BioScience Association (CBSA) in Denver, is bullish, and she has the numbers to back it up. "Bioscience is one of the few sectors that's been growing in the past two years," Baumunk says. From 2005 to 2010, the biotech and pharmaceutical industries in Colorado grew by about 3 percent, while the larger industry suffered through a 4 percent contraction over the same period nationally. And Colorado's medical device industry outdid biotech and pharma by growing 8 percent over those five years.

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However, not all is well in bioscience, Baumunk says. "We're a little concerned about regulatory issues at the federal level and financial issues around the country," she says. "The FDA is undergoing major reforms that are having an impact on the bioscience industry. it's becoming a lot more stringent toward the medical device industry. New devices could have to go through the same trials a drug goes through. The cost of that is extremely high. What we're really concerned about is what this will do to U.S. competitiveness globally. If we're constantly implementing more and more regulation on our companies, it's not going to be cost-effective for them to manufacture here. It's a long haul already, and this makes it longer."

Proposals to lower the length of a patent on biosimilars...