Are intellectual property protections slowing progress?

Credit: Mark Evans" /> Credit: Mark Evans NIH To Student Loaners: Let's make a deal Struggling to make your student loan payments? The National Institutes of Health has a deal for you. In exchange for a two or three-year commitment to conduct specific research at your university or nonprofit institute, the NIH will repay up to $35,000 per year of your undergraduate and graduate school debts as well as any resulting increased tax

Federal government may soften proposed restrictions on foreign-born scientists

The US Senate plans to offer new incentives to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries to develop more vaccines, drugs, and countermeasures against a range of pathogens.

Tired of waiting for the National Institutes of Health to approve your grant proposal?

Research, biotech organizations are requesting grants for venture capital-backed small businesses

President Bush also calls for advances in cell-culture technology, liability protection for vaccine makers

If you're struggling to win your first National Institutes of Health grant, here's another reason to be depressed: One of the most unusual NIH awards ever given went to a 9-year-old boy.

When Todd Zion began looking for funds to launch Smart-Cells, a new company developing self-regulating insulin-delivery systems for patients with diabetes, he needed to raise just shy of $1.25 million, a number that "doesn't even show up on the radar screens of big venture capital firms," he says.

© Anthony FosterFunding for biomedical research in the United States jumped from $37.1 billion in 1994 to $94.3 billion in 2003, a doubling of support when adjusted for inflation, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Private industry provided 57% of this total and the National Institutes of Health supplied 28%."We were surprised to find that the total numbers are as large as they are," says lead author Hamilton Moses III, chairman of the Alerion In

Legislation described as "the most comprehensive change to US patent law" in more than 50 years is pitting research universities and the life sciences industry against the computer and financial services industries.

Public, private support for biomedical research tops $94 billion, shifts further down pipeline