Despite the recent volatility in the stock market, experts and industry insiders at the BIO CEO & Investor conference in New York said biotech remains a leading area to invest, predicting continued VC investment and more M&A ahead.

The latest drug development news and highlights from our FDA Performance Tracker.

Recent executive-level company changes and promotions in the biopharma, medical device and diagnostics industries.

There's growing conviction that gene arrays are less useful than first imagined for expression studies and diagnostics--and that directly reading protein expression will more likely provide an accurate picture of biological status-health, disease, and pharmaceutical response. Thus, a number of companies have started up to create, on the analogy of gene arrays, protein arrays, to allow the simultaneous and quantitative testing of large numbers of proteins-potentially thousands.But the task is easier said than done. First, there are too few proteins known to allow testing for worthwhile expression patterns; and, second, because of the delicacy and variety of proteins, surface chemistry and other problems have historically made arrays impractical. None of this daunts the start-ups who, opportunistic, are looking to exploit the markets they think they can get to first: clinical diagnostics and pharmaceutical clinical development programs.