Enjoy your first roundup of July! And make sure to wish your Canadian friends a Happy Canada Day!

FOR WASHINGTON STATE, THE FUTURE IS BIOTECH – During a presentation at Seattle’s Biomedical Research Institute earlier this week, Rep. Jay Inslee (D) declared that over the coming decades, Washington State will be best known for “Boeing, Bytes and Biotech”. He spoke during a press conference to promote a new report that attempted to catalog all the various drug, device, and other biomedical technologies emerging in the state’s labs. According to the report, 119 new medicines developed in Washington labs are now being tested in clinical trials. This number includes 46 treatments for cancer alone. The full story was covered by Xconomy’s Eric Hal Schwartz.

Additionally, Scientists at the Research Institute announced that they’ve made progress toward developing a malaria vaccine using a weakened form of the malaria parasite. Dr. Stefan Kappe, lead researcher for the institute’s malaria program, said he has found a way to genetically engineer malaria-causing parasites and that his test vaccine has proved 100 percent effective in trials on rats and mice. Kappe said his lab will start testing the vaccine on human volunteers early next year. More details can be found at The Seattle Times.

BIOTECH CORN GETS THUMBS UP IN EUROPE – Yesterday, AFP reported that the European Food Safety Authority declared that Monsanto’s MON810 maize poses no risk to health or the environment. Specifically, the DNA modification that takes place in this strain of corn, which gives it its special insect-repellent quality, “does not raise any safety concern”, according to the EFSA’s GMO panel. This comes only a day after the announcement that a new research center from Britain’s Biotechnology Research Council (BBSRC) will decode the DNA of plants and animals used in agriculture in an effort to help farmers boost food production. The BBC outlined the specific goals of this groundbreaking project:

Research will focus on economically and socially important plants such as wheat and ryegrass. It’s also hoped that the work will lead to breeding of livestock better able to resist emerging diseases, such as Bluetongue.

Scientists at The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) also hope to help develop crops with increased tolerance to drought and new antibiotics to fight ’superbugs’.

The exact projects that TGAC will initially work on will be decided by an independent advisory board but there’s interest in creating sustainable biofuels and vegetables containing compounds that reduce the incidence of some cancers.

ALGAE FIELD OF DREAMS – Dow recently announced a partnership with Algenol Fuels to build and operate a 24-acre algae biorefinery demonstration farm that will produce ethanol at a target cost of $1 per gallon. The facility will be constructed at the Dow facility in Freeport, TX and will make ethanol that can be used as a base for the production of a variety of green chemicals as well as the development of certain bioplastics. Biofuels Digest covered the project in more detail:

Georgia Institute of Technology, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Membrane Technology & Research are partners in the project, which is targeting production of up to 140 gallons of algae fuel per day, or 51,000 gallons per year at a yield of 2,120 gallons per acre.

Last February, Biofields CEO Alejandro González Cimadevilla said that the company is targeting 2 billion gallons of ethanol from algae by 2020 using the Algenol process. The company said that it considered 15 other locations in Mauretania, Algeria, Spain, and the US, before settling on Sonora because of its 328 days of annual sunshine and 3.75 million annual tons of CO2 emitted by local power plant CFE.

ISRAEL BOOSTS FUNDS FOR BIOTECH INDUSTRY – Biotechnology is saving lives, and the world is taking notice. Israel’s industry, trade and finance ministries announced on Monday that the country is setting up a capital fund of up to 1 billion shekels ($255 million US) to finance biotechnology start-up companies. The full story was reported by Reuters.