Good morning! This Tuesday roundup brings you a top-10 list of biotech innovators, anti-trust law, and a set of NSF’s greatest science photos from 2009:

TOP TEN BIOTECH INNOVATORS – Fast Company recently released a list of its top-10 biotech innovators. Novartis, Synthetic Genomics and Roche/Genentech count themselves in the top five, but are in the company of some of our industry’s greatest competitors. The list definitely errs on the side of medical biotechnology, but there is at least one shout-out to the industrial/environmental sector’s biofuel efforts as well. Check to see if your company is on the list too, and let us know what you think about the choices in the comments below.

THE CASE FOR BIOTECH TREATMENTS’ 12-YEAR DATA EXCLUSIVITY – Over at Antitrust and Competition Policy Blog, the authors argue that the recent dust-up over a 12-year data exclusivity period for biotech treatments ignores the facts. Namely that while shortening this 12-year exclusivity period might have a miniscule effect on the cost of healthcare reform, the damage caused to the R&D pipeline and biotech companies in general would be devastating:

We argue that regulatory data exclusivity is a sideshow. Current estimates find that the effect of data exclusivity on health care expenditures would be trivial. For this and other reasons, any potential benefit to patients that might result from a shorter period of data exclusivity would be outweighed by the financial risks to the biotech industry, and particularly the negative impacts on investments in research and development. More importantly, we believe that the current focus on data exclusivity is misplaced. Weak competition in markets for biotech drugs poses a much greater and longer-term problem for patient access – without effective competition, pricing of many biotech drugs will remain high indefinitely.

NSF ANNOUNCES TOP SCIENCE GRAPHICS – The NSF recently announced the 2009 winners of its International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, and the winner is self-assembling polymers! Check out these amazing photos of life at work, especially for you teachers struggling to capture students’ attention.