The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG) will recover more than $2 billion through audits and investigations of fraud, waste and abuse in HHS programs, the office announced last Thursday (Jun 12).

"OIG's accomplishments reflect a robust oversight agenda implemented through audits, evaluations, and compliance and enforcement activities," said Inspector General... Click to continue

Chimeric mice generated from cells reprogrammed for pluripotency (induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells) show significant health problems, pointing to further challenges that must be overcome before such cells can be used in the clinic, noted iPS researcher Shinya Yamanaka said on Saturday (June 14).

Speaking at the meeting of the ... Click to continue

The technical challenges of using retroviruses to reprogram cells to a pluripotent state could be worked out within the year, researchers said today in a press conference at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Philadelphia. However, they stressed, human embryonic stem cells are still, and will continue to be, the gold standard for research on pluripotency and differentiation.

The speakers, including ... Click to continue

The American Museum of Natural History's new exhibit explores the human - horse relationship

When I was seven years old I decided I'd rather be a horse than a human. In an attempt to dissuade me from this point of view, my parents had me start riding lessons when I was nine. It didn't work. I am still convinced the horse is a superior creature.

So I was the natural choice from The Scientist's editorial office to review The Horse, a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural... Click to continue

New compounds that target leukemia stem cells are moving into the clinic this summer. But researchers have yet to pin down exactly how some of these compounds do their job.

Today at the International Society for Stem Cell Research's (ISSCR) annual meeting, Craig Jordan from the University of Rochester presented his group's recent work on a compound TDZD-8, which was originally developed to inhibit GSK-3, and potentially treat... Click to continue

Biotech company Invitrogen announced today (Jun 12) that it will acquire Applied Biosystems in a deal valued at $6.7 billion.

"This transaction combines the industry's premier consumables provider with the industry's premier systems provider to create a world-class biotechnology tools company," said ... Click to continue

You can now have your say about regulations on bringing stem cell therapies to the clinic.

A special task force set up to create guidelines for bringing stem cell therapies from bench to bedside will be accepting public commentary on the guidelines, continuing until this fall, the group announced today at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) here in Philadelphia.

The task force's primary goals are to create guidelines that will help basic researchers... Click to continue

Trees from the Caribbean to Canada maintain a constant leaf temperature regardless of the ambient air temperature, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The findings could dramatically alter interpretations of data used to approximate past climate from the composition of tree rings, the researchers say.

Scientists who measure cellulose... Click to continue

In another move to encourage innovation while trimming its research and development budget, pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline has announced that it will cut two percent, or 350 jobs, from its global R&D staff, according to The Wall Street Journal.

"These changes are part of GSK's longer-term strategy to ensure that we invest in key areas of future growth and evolve our business to compete... Click to continue

The US Senate today (June 11) plans to introduce a biosafety bill that takes small steps towards resolving some controversial aspects of the system regulating research with agents that could be used for bioterrorism.

The regulations, called the Select Agent Program, have been controversial since they were established in 2002. Researchers have said that the rules created red tape that stymied research, hindered international... Click to continue

With blockbuster drug patents set to expire in the next few years, big pharma is looking hard for ways to pack the discovery pipeline.

One approach: the biotech model. Patrick Vallance, the head of drug discovery at GlaxoSmithKline, said at a meeting on Friday (June 6) that research at the company would be reorganized to be "more biotech-like," the Financial Times reported. He said the plan was... Click to continue

Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York City today (Jun 10), telling delegates and dignitaries that the key to controlling HIV/AIDS in developing nations is prevention, and especially the development of vaccine for the disease.

Fauci said that "a preventive HIV... Click to continue

The Food and Drug Administration has disqualified seven investigators so far this year for misconduct, according to an FDA document. The ruling bars the doctors from conducting clinical trials of any kind.

The FDA, for reasons including submitting false information to the trial's sponsor or the FDA, or not complying with regulatory requirements, has disqualified more than 100 investigators from clinical trials over the past 40... Click to continue

The NIH's $1 billion plan to improve peer review also includes compensation for reviewers: Grant reviewers will be compensated $250,000 for six years of service, if they qualify, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. This surpasses the current $200 per day compensation.

"In the end, peer review is only as good as the quality of the people doing it,"... Click to continue

Cosmetics company L'Oreal has launched a search for the most influential woman scientist of all time. The corporation, which for the past decade has sponsored a fellowship program for female researchers, unveiled a website listing the nominees last Friday (Jun 6).

Researchers and... Click to continue

The NIH has wrapped up its year-long effort to reform the way it reviews grant applications, releasing today (June 6) a report that focuses on changes such as shortening and redesigning applications, making it easier for good reviewers to serve, and encouraging innovative and "transformative" projects.

For instance, the agency plans to create a new investigator-initiated Transformative R01 Award program worth at least $250 million, and invest at least $750 million in innovative awards, such as... Click to continue

More bad news from Australia's war on cane toads: Now they're killing freshwater crocs.

According to a blog on Nature's website, the invasive amphibians - which have recently hopped their way into the Northern Territory - are turning up in the stomachs of dead crocodiles.

A ... Click to continue

In a world where most companies seem to be cutting jobs, one company is looking to up their ranks by 25%.

MedImmune announced today that they are looking to fill more than 800 positions in research and development and the clinic.

AstraZeneca acquired MedImmune in 2007, and since then the latter company is doubling their pipeline in order to represent a quarter of Astra's projects.

The recent acquisition may be a boon to MedImmune employees: AstraZeneca ranked at number two of best large... Click to continue

A new funding guideline for the National Institutes of Health is making its way through Congress.

Yesterday the Senate approved a budget resolution that includes $59.7 billion for health categories, including the NIH. This represents nearly 6% more than President Bush requested for 2009, and it's 12% more than the current funding level. The resolution will act as a guideline for Congressional planners when they set appropriations for 2009, beginning this October.

The House is expected to... Click to continue

A new report from the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) paints a gloomy picture of how US medical schools are failing to craft policies that keep the pharmaceutical industry at arm's length.

The AMSA's PharmFree Scorecard 2008, released yesterday (June 3), surveyed 150 medical school's across the country, asking about the institutions' policies to limit ... Click to continue

For the first time, researchers have succeeded in reversing a condition that causes seizures in mice by transplanting progenitor cells into the brain. The finding, reported in this week's Cell Stem Cell, has important implications for treating a class of childhood diseases marked by myelin insufficiency.

"These are spectacular results," said Ian Duncan at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not... Click to continue

A new study confirms a seemingly obvious assumption about human embryonic stem cell research: Countries with fewer restrictions on research outperform countries with more restrictions. But the picture may be more complex than that, according to some experts.

The article, published online today (June 4) in Cell Stem Cell by Aaron Levine at the Georgia Institute of... Click to continue

Some of you may remember Aleister Saunders, the Alzheimer's researcher at Drexel University in Philadelphia who was kind enough to open up about the difficult process he went through to apply for tenure. (You can read his story in our September, 2007 feature about tenure.)

Well, his hard work paid off. He emailed me to say he was awarded tenure last month.

And it looks like his R01 application will be funded, as... Click to continue

The US government is poised to start a new AIDS vaccine trial, prompting some to caution that it is too soon to initiate such studies after a Merck vaccine not only failed to show effectiveness but also may have increased participants' HIV infection rate.

Late last week, the NIH's AIDS Vaccine Research Subcommittee voted 23-3 in favor of beginning the PAVE 100... Click to continue

In order to evolve novel traits, organisms may depend upon smaller, less dramatic mutations that they amass through their evolutionary history rather than suddenly acquiring a single mutation that gives them drastically different phenotypes, according to a study published online today (Jun 2) in PNAS.

Whether an organism arrives at major evolutionary innovations through a single key mutation or a history of many accumulated... Click to continue

Jacob Robbins, an NIH thyroid researcher and co-discoverer of the active form of thyroid hormone, died on May 12 in Bethesda, Md, of heart failure. He was 85 years old.

In the 1950s Robbins and colleague Joseph Rall, both then at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, hypothesized that levels of the thyroid hormone, thyroxine, might fluctuate in the bloodstream and found that the hormone could not be bound to any other proteins in the blood in order to be active.

"It was extremely important... Click to continue

A space biotech company hopes its Salmonella vaccine project will pave the way for other lucrative space biotech projects. The company, SPACEHAB, launched its proof-of-concept experiment as part of the space shuttle Discovery's payload on Saturday (May 31).

In April, I reported that SPACEHAB's CEO Tom Pickens talked up the potential for space biotech at a Congressional hearing on the future of the ... Click to continue

A new genomics and systems biology journal will collaborate with an international, open access database to include a section devoted to publishing genetic datasets.

Human Genomics and Proteomics (HGP) was officially launched Saturday (May 31) at a human genomics symposium in Barcelona by editor-in-chief, George Patrinos, a geneticist at Erasmus University Medical Center in The Netherlands.

The new journal is the first offering from... Click to continue