The economic recovery process has proved difficult for the pharmaceutical industry. Factors like patent expiry, dry pipeline, and strict approval guidelines, have slowed down the attractive drug discovery and industry growth. Coupled with an investment risk in new therapy or molecules, this creates a challenge for the industry to overcome.

According to the World Health Organization, about 33 million people currently live with HIV infections. Several drugs used to treat AIDS inhibit this HIV protease target, but drug-resistant mutants that impede the effectiveness of these drugs keep appearing and getting worse.

Hospitals in the Middle East are set to benefit from sophisticated electronic clinical decision support following the commercial agreement between First DataBank International (FDB International) and GE Healthcare (GE).

Google announces an addition to Google Labs - the Public Data Explorer. The purpose of the new tool, Google says on the new lab's page, "The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate.

Trophos, the pharmaceutical company specialising in therapies for orphan diseases including ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), announces, on behalf of the MitoTarget consortium, the launch of MitoTarget Online. The multilingual web-based resource aims to be the first point of call for all of those affected by ALS.

EU-funded researchers have sequenced the genome of the community of microbes that lives in our guts. The study sheds new light on the influence of these microbes on our health and could lead to the development of new treatments and diagnostic tests for a variety of diseases.

Physicians will significantly expand the range of activities they conduct on mobile devices by 2012, according to Manhattan Research's "Future of Physician Media" report. Currently physicians primarily use mobile devices to access clinical content and perform quick tasks.