In an important development, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has received approval from the U.S. State Department to establish eight full time permanent FDA positions at U.S. diplomatic posts in the People's Republic of China, pending authorization from the Chinese government.

A new EU-funded information and communication technology (ICT) project is tackling issues of safety in newly developed drugs. Over the next three and a half years, the ALERT ('Early detection of adverse drug events by integrative mining of clinical records and biomedical knowledge') project partners will work on an innovative computer system for a better and faster detection of adverse drug reactions (ADRs).

Tattooing is a more effective way of administering DNA vaccines than direct injection into muscle tissue, according to new research by German and Czech scientists. In DNA vaccination, a gene from a pathogen is injected directly into the host, which then produces the corresponding pathogen protein inside its own cells. This triggers a response from the host's immune system. Advantages of DNA vaccination include the fact that the vectors can be constructed quickly, and rapid and large scale vaccine production is much cheaper than for traditional vaccines.

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.