The first stage of calls for the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), which is supported by the EU with €1 billion in funding, was recently closed and is already being regarded as a success by many of those involved. From 30 April until 15 July 2008, numerous consortia of academia, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), regulatory organisations and industries not affiliated with the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) submitted their Expressions of Interest to the IMI Joint Undertaking (IMI JU) first Call for proposals.

The preDiCT project officially launched 1 June 2008, with a mission to model, simulate, and ultimately predict the impact of pharmacological compounds on the heart's rhythm using computer models. This will require advances beyond the current state-of-the-art in:

• Mathematical models of individual ion channels, which control how and when cells contract;
• Tissue models, which encapsulate chemical processes and physical relationships at millions of separate points in the heart; and

BASF SE and Transinsight GmbH, a provider of semantic search technologies for Web 2.0, have agreed to establish close cooperation in the area of semantic analyses to search for alternatives to animal testing. Together with the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung BfR), both companies will expand the first specialized semantic search engine for this research area called www.Go3R.org to become a global internet platform.

Researchers define cell therapy as the transplantation of living cells for the replacement or repair of damaged tissue and/or cells. Hot on the heels of stem cell therapy research is a group of leading cell imaging experts who are participating in ENCITE (European network for cell imaging and tracking expertise), a four-year project supported by the EU with €11 million in funding.

The European Medicines Agency (EMEA) has recommended updating the product information for epoetin-containing medicines with a new warning for their use in cancer patients stating that blood transfusion should be the preferred method of correcting anaemia in patients suffering cancer.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it is revising the way it communicates to drug companies when a marketing application cannot be approved as submitted. Under new regulations that govern the drug approval process, FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) will no longer issue "approvable" or "not approvable" letters when a drug application is not approved.

According to the latest physician study and advisory service released by Manhattan Research, approximately one-third of physicians are currently communicating with their patients online - a number which has grown over the past few years, but still lags behind consumer interest in communicating with physicians through the Internet.