"Best of the Blog" is a monthly column highlighting the best of our free online content at www.windhover.com/blog. In May: cell therapy for Parkinson's, the difficulty of SPACs, Roche buys Piramed, and another boost for microRNA.

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies--SPACs--are springing up in the wide spaces abandoned by IPOs-- and they look tempting for those biotechs who can't get to a Big Pharma deal without first raising a big slug of money. That's Dynogen's problem: no deal until it can show solid efficacy from its two lead compounds. With no IPO or big private financing likely, Dynogen turned to a SPAC, a public shell company created to find a Dynogen-like opportunity. But SPAC investors can extract a big price for their cooperation-particularly in the current risk-averse public market.

In May 2000, START-UP profiled five medical device companies targeting stroke, in an article entitled "Making Progress in Stroke." We recently revisited Radiant Medical, Medivance, MicroVention, and two others to find out what went according to plan and what didn't In 2007, we have to say that there has in fact not been much progress, at least in acute ischemic stroke. Two companies dropped out, two remain active with promising programs--in clinical areas other than stroke, and one, which avoided ischemic stroke in the first place, enjoyed a nice exit.