European researchers are relentless in their pursuit to develop technologies across the board. Case in point is medical technology and bone implants. Enter a team of researchers from the Germany-based Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Applied Materials Research who have developed a simulation programme calculating the internal structure and density distribution of bone material.

Collexis Holdings Inc, (OTCBB: CLXS) a leading developer of high definition search and knowledge discovery software, announced that its premier professional scientific social networking site, Biomedexperts.com, has more than 30,000 registered users, enabling researchers across organizations and around the globe to collaborate more efficiently and effectively.

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.