News in a nutshell

- Is the US Food and Drug Administration's 2006 initiative to gain approval for old drugs that predate the current approval process boosting safety or just inflating the cost of such medicines, asks linkurl:an article;http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-unapproved-drugs18-2010jan18,0,7696622.story in the LA Times. - Researchers have launched linkurl:an open access database;http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2010/WTX058219.htm of more than 520,000 small molecules and drugs -- a resource for both the biopharma industry and academic chemical biologists -- containing information on compounds' binding properties, toxicity and absorption, and effects on biological systems. The database, called ChEMBLdb, belonged to the Belgian biotech company Galapagos NV but was transferred to the public domain with the help of a grant from the Wellcome Trust and is now hosted by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute. -A physical chemist has been tapped to run France's chief national research agency, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Alain Fuchs, who has served as the director of Chimie ParisTech since 2006, may be confirmed as soon as Wednesday, linkurl:ScienceInsider reports.;http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/01/chemical-engine.html - The National Institutes of Health has put out the call to small businesses to apply for one of two categories of translational grants -- the Small Business Innovation Research grants and the Small Business Technology Transfer program. See the announcement linkurl:here.;http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-09-080.html -Finally, Elsevier is considering shutting down its journal Medical Hypotheses after AIDS researchers complained about an article it ran by AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg which stated that there was "as yet no proof that HIV causes Aids," linkurl:according to the Times Higher Education.;http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=409997 The journal, which is not peer reviewed, linkurl:aims to publish;http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/623059/description provocative ideas. The papers it publishes are chosen by its editor.
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:Morale mire;http://www.the-scientist.com/2008/12/1/67/1/
[December 2008]*linkurl:Changes to federal biotech grants?;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54441/
[ 20th March 2008]*linkurl:[CNRS reform opposed;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22643/
[5th April 2005]

News in a nutshell

The Scientist ARCHIVES

Become a Member of

Meet the Author

Alla Katsnelson

Related Research Resources

Study Confirms Safety of Genetically Modified T Cells

Research Resources

Podcasts

Webinars

Videos

Infographics

eBooks

TaqMan Probe & Assays: Unveil What's Possible Together

Meet Aunty and Tackle Protein Stability Questions in Research and Development

Detecting Residual Cell Line-Derived DNA with Droplet Digital PCR

Making Real-Time PCR More Straightforward

Products

Product News

Biotium Launches New Phalloidin Conjugates with Extended F-actin Staining Stability for Greater Imaging Flexibility

Latest AI software simplifies image analysis and speeds up insights for scientists

BioSkryb Genomics and Tecan introduce a single-cell multiomics workflow for sequencing-ready libraries in under ten hours

Agilent BioTek Cytation C10 Confocal Imaging Reader