The Net returns from an extended summer vacation, bringing news and opinion of interest to bioentrepreneurs around the world. This week, things are looking up in Taipei and San Antonio; the FDA gets tough; and is this biotech Big Pharma’s next big buy?

• Frank Glatz, managing director of Melbourne-based Cardia Bioplastics, tells the Australian small business site StartupSmart that biotech start-ups looking to go stateside should prepare for a long approval process. “It takes much longer [to receive FDA approval than it used to] and therefore you need a very good kind of offering,” Glatz says. Anything that used to take a year to get approved could now take two years or longer, and the FDA is “an important part of that process.” Read more here.
• Forbes profiles rumored takeover target Spectrum Pharmaceuticals. With two cancer drug approvals already under its belt, Spectrum’s market cap has risen from $2 million at start-up 10 years ago to $900 million in 2012.Read the full article.
•  San Antonio, Texas is the latest US city to pin its hopes on biotech. In 2010, it invested $6 million in California-based InCube Labs’ incubator, which expanded to San Antonio with three early-stage biotech companies. And last year, City Council approved a $3.3 million investment the University of Texas Health Science Center’s South Texas Research Facility. More details here.
• Taipei leads South Korea and Singapore in the Asian biotech boom, according to legislative speaker Wang Jin-pyng. Around eight new drugs developed in Taiwan will be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in two or three years, surpassing its neighbors’ output. Read the article in Focus Taiwan.
• Finally, OneMedPlace’s handy blogpost lists the most “distinguished, pointed, successful (and oftentimes hilarious) biotech investors” on Twitter, based on their life science focus and tweet frequency. Quite an impressive group, we say.