Mark Smyth is investigating a long-suspected but previously unproven role of the immune system – keeping cancer development in a holding pattern such that it neither grows nor gets ‘cured’.

Advances in proteomics are finally starting to catch up with some of the nifty tricks used by viruses such as RSV to evade the immune system.

Who would have thought that a few incontinent mice dubbed Winnie and Eeyore could reveal a whole new way of thinking about and possibly treating inflammatory bowel disease in humans?

The new Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI) will officially open in Melbourne next year, modelled on the prestigious European Molecular Biology Laboratory.

A symposium at ComBio on wound healing promises to take audiences on a journey from basic cell biology right through to 3D skin scaffolds as therapies.

Australian-trained scientist Dr Paul Trainor has made a career of making faces. In doing so, he hopes to uncover novel ways to prevent or treat congenital birth defects.

A pocket of middle Australia on the northern outskirts of Perth is the setting for a proposed biobanking project that even its instigator, Professor Lyle Palmer of the University of Western Australia, calls “ludicrously ambitious”.

Fresh from his role as one of the head spruikers of Queensland biotech at BIO in San Diego and DIA in Boston, the CEO of the Queensland Clinical Trials Network, Mario Pennisi, is looking forward to hosting CRX08.

The Clinical Research Excellence (CRX08) conference starts in Brisbane tomorrow. We talk flu pandemics with plenary speaker Anne Kelso.

Professor Alan Cowman of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute will deliver the Rubbo Oration at this year's Australian Society of Microbiology (ASM) annual meeting, being held in Melbourne next week.

Deciphering vertebrate development, sorting out the roosters from the hens and taking on bird flu - dare we say, all in one fowl swoop - that is the job of CSIRO's Dr Mark Tizard, who has created a new microRNA catalogue for the humble chook.