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...