France Biotech, the French organization of ummm, ehhh, biotech companies, is asking the French government for help. With the global economic crisis, total investments in biotech companies dropped 79% in 2008, a drop from 694M EUR ($890M) in 2007 to 143M EUR ($184M) in 2008.

Damn, that’s a lot.

And get this, investments into public companies only totaled 12M EUR ($15M) in 2008, down 98% from 2007!! Yikes!

VC’s only pumped in 132M EUR ($170M) in 2008, a decrease of 27% compared to 07.

France Biotech’s Chairman, Philippe Pouletty (pictured), said this:

“In order to underpin the optimism of our entrepreneurs, we must adopt an aggressive stimulus plan for young, innovative companies. Assuming that they can access finance, today’s innovative SMBs will become tomorrow’s multinationals and thus constitute an essential driver of strong, sustainable economic growth.”

The organization went on to say that 09 will be more of the same and that they would like to double to budget allocation French state innovation agency OSEO, including tax reforms and revisions of research tax credits.

These are hard times indeed. We need more cash to fuel the blockbusters and acquisition targets of tomorrow…

Here’s the full article from MarketWatch.

Images from France-Biotech and wittycell

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