After I had just finished wrapping up my daily missive from FierceBiotech yesterday, a tweet caught my eye at the corner of the screen. @adamfeuerstein from TheStreet had just picked up the first word that Dendreon's Provenge had been approved.
Inside of a few minutes, the editorial team at FierceBiotech had nailed down a news link to the report and added it to the top of our online news round-up for the day. You had it in your e-mail queue while the first reports were still spitting off the wires at news outlets around the world.
It's a lot of fun to go toe-to-toe with a daily deadline like that. It also helps illustrate what an important source Twitter can be when it comes to news gathering. Without much effort, you can see what a host of biotech news junkies like myself--@JohnCFierce, or @FierceBiotech and @FiercePharma by Maureen Martino and Elizabeth Jones respectively--are thinking about and working on. Or just toying with.
Of course, our mission at Fierce is taking much of the industry scouting work out of the biopharma industry. We do that for our 115,234 subscribers so that you can go on about your business and check out the top news source in the industry at your leisure. But if you like to be the first one to hear about something, you owe it to yourself to check it out.
Any biotech Twitter starter kit will include the following: @adamfeuerstein, an often cantankerous professional with an uncanny nose for news and the know-how to find it; @matthewherper, the Forbes writer who understands what the PhDs in the room are talking about; @ldtimmerman, Xconomy's aggressive biotech national editor; and all your Fierce contacts. @mhuckman, the longtime CNBC pharma reporter and spinning master, has been the life of the biopharma party on Twitter. When he announced recently that he was headed to the PR world, you could hear groans from coast to coast. My faves include @MaverickNY, who specializes in cancer subjects, the analysts at @BiotechStockRsr and a whole host of other biotech followers who join in the online discussion. - John Carroll (twitter | email)