Pharmathen S.A announced the establishment of a new Research and Development Centre in Pallini, Athens. The new Research Centre will focus on developing Generic molecules and is expected to significantly reinforce Pharmathen's already excellent R&D capabilities. Pharmathen is one of the strongest generic developer in Europe and with the operation of the new facility the company's R&D activities will be further increased.

In an effort to attract young people to the clinical laboratory profession, Labs Are Vital(TM), an initiative sponsored by Abbott, has tapped into Facebook, a popular social networking Web site, to reach out to more than four million students with an interest in life sciences.

More than one million people have used Thomson Healthcare (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC) Profiler treatment option tools to help make treatment decisions for cancer, heart disease and lung disease. "When you consider more than 20 million people are diagnosed with cancer, heart disease or lung disease each year, this is not the kind of milestone one celebrates," said Alicia Moffat, Thomson Healthcare's vice president of Web operations.

An international team of researchers has discovered a gene locus that could help the development of new drugs to fight cardiovascular disease (CVD). The locus is associated with low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, which plays a causal role in the development of diseases of the cardiovascular system.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration notified the public that Botox and Botox Cosmetic (Botulinum toxin Type A) and Myobloc (Botulinum toxin Type B) have been linked in some cases to adverse reactions, including respiratory failure and death, following treatment of a variety of conditions using a wide range of doses.

SIMID is the first in Europe to use a single centralized databank to bring scientific-medical full-text publications within easy reach. Through S.M.I.L.E. (Scientific Medical Information Library Europe), medical professionals can search for and download original publications and reviews online, from prominent international peer-reviewed medical scientific journals. Currently, the database contains more than 1000 journals from 28 internationally renowned publishers.

The EU-funded project DRUID (Driving under the Influence of Drugs, Alcohol and Medicine) project is tackling the question of what impact psychoactive substances have on traffic safety. In order to gather reliable information in this area, where knowledge is still limited according to the project partners, the University of Ghent, Belgium, has started collecting blood and saliva samples from drivers involved in accidents, as well as drivers stopped for random checks.