"The Innovative Medicines Initiative aims to pool scientific expertise to create better methods and tools that streamline the drug development process." The global financial crisis has beaten down science budgets everywhere. So it's no surprise that science-spending forecasts for Europe are grim. The EU's gross domestic product shrank by 2.5 percent this year. Consequently, politicians might cut ...
Jupiter Images Corporation "It is the ability to focus and plan for the future" Singapore has fast become a significant biomedical hub. But can it maintain the momentum? By Gunjan Sinha In a quiet room, two men stare wide-eyed at a television on the distant wall—cars race around a track. The men, wired with electrodes, appear to be playing a video game, although there are no joysticks to be seen....
Last year the federal and state governments announced the first winners of the Excellence Initiative—a measure introduced by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Wissenschaftsrat, a scientific commission that advises political decision makers. For the first time in decades, universities and collaborative research groups have a chance at winning substantial extra funding if they prove...
PDF Version To work in biotech or pharma? For newly minted Ph.D.s as well as postdocs considering jobs in industry, that frequently may be the question. The answer, however, may be that it does not matter. Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly acquiring biotech companies to broaden their portfolios, and some biotech companies have grown so diverse that they resemble pharmaceutical companies. ...
Cinzia Casiraghi Cinzia Casiraghi "I felt shocked and then happy and also a bit scared because it also meant that I had to get serious." --Cinzia Casiraghi When Cinzia Casiraghi applied for the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, she didn't think she'd win. The €1.65 million grants, administered by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and endowed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, a...
PDF Version A glimpse at the numbers and one can understand why Europe's scientists migrate toward richer pastures. European countries spend far less than the United States and some Asian countries on research and development—widening the innovation gap. Two years ago, the EU's statistical office Eurostat showed that government and industry invested only 1.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP...
W anted: Scientist with business savvy to earn wads of cash for investing lots of other people's money in new companies. It might sound attractive, but "post vacant" ads--even more soberly worded ones--for would-be venture capitalists are rarer than hen's teeth. Do genuine opportunities exist for researchers to start handing out money rather than begging for it themselves? Well, it's true that fi...
BACK TO INDUSTRY INSIDER Power bars, probiotic dairy drinks, iron-enriched soy--it's not quite food in a capsule, but the future of future-food is here. Ordinary chow is now über-food--food that turns Clark Kent into Superman and the rest of us into Methuselahs--at least that's the dream. And there are plenty willing to pay good money for such grub in the hope that it will at least boost their ch...
BACK TO INDUSTRY INSIDER Determination Got Joris Kloek His Dream Job Adventures With Lactic Acid Bacteria Determination Got Joris Kloek His Dream Job Joris Kloek knew he wanted to work in industry long before he got there. It was a typical day in the pharmacology lab at Utrecht University. Kloek was pipetting reagents into vials, constructing graphs on his computer, and daydreaming. Still 2 years...
