IBM's Blue Gene has retained its position as the most powerful computer in the world.

Small changes in the drug discovery and development process can yield significant benefits in bringing new drugs to market, Merck Research Laboratories president Peter Kim told a recent conference.

A compilation of the world's top 100 R&D spenders finds that pharmaceutical and biotech companies have only modestly increased their spending over the last five years -- but that over the same time period the number of life science R&D spenders in the top 25 has significantly increased.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, former US president Bill Clinton, and pharmaceutical company research leaders met last week to discuss ways for drug companies, governments, and public philanthropic groups to work together to develop and deliver drugs to fight infectious diseases like tuberculosis (TB), malaria, and HIV/AIDS.

IBM and the Swiss research institute Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have announced a joint research initiative dubbed the Blue Brain Project to create a 3D model of the brain.

As venture capital funding returns to pre-crash levels, the life science industry seems to have taken a "What? Me Worry?" attitude, assuming everything is back to normal. But a closer look at investment patterns reveals a funding gap that is making it harder for academic and early-stage research to land support needed to get into biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

Scientists at IBM's TJ Watson Research Centre, along with a colleague from Wabash College, have published the first research results based on molecular dynamics simulations run on Blue Gene/L hardware.

From R&D analysis and pathogen detection to clinical diagnosis and drug delivery, the biomedical applications of nanotechnology, while still in their infancy, are starting to yield real results.

A report issued this week by the consultancy NanoMarkets predicts that nano-enabled drug discovery products will be widely adopted and deliver substantial benefits by 2009. But for this to happen, industry experts believe pharmaceutical companies will have to change their current emphasis and attitudes on the role of nanotechnology research.

The European Science Foundation this week released a policy briefing summarising the work of its medical standing committee's scientific policy on nanomedicine.

Electronic components vendor Maxell, along with laboratory equipment partners, has demonstrated a 96-rack test tube system that uses an embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) chip in each test tube to improve tracking of lab samples and specimens.