It pays for a company to consider using alternative technologies as a stepping stone while it continues to develop innovative new technologies, a European technology executive told a conference in Melbourne this week.

These are exciting times in medicine: the era of gene-targeting drugs has arrived, promising new standards in safety, selectivity and rational drug design. Antisense oligonucleotides are the best known examples of gene-targeting therapeutic agents.

Genetically modified canola may be busted in Australia, but GM cotton is booming -- new Bollgard II varieties, doubly protected against bollworm attack, will make up 60 per cent of Australia's total crop in season 2004-05.

A Sydney endocrinologist says athletes who inject themselves with the illegal drug Equigen put their lives and careers at risk for no benefit.

How do plant pathogens proliferate? Graeme O'Neill finds that new research suggests the answer is blowin' in the wind.

Imagine if you could map out your dream lab on the concrete floor -- and then stock it with whatever you wanted. Susan Williamson spoke with Ian Findlay and his team at Gribbles Molecular Science, who did just that.

Australia's biotechnology industry is tiny by comparison with its US and European counterparts, but it offers glimpses of what a future in which most cancers will be curable, or ideally, preventable, writes Graeme O'Neill.

Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche has begun a massive, 484-centre Phase III trial of its new drug for anaemia associated with chronic kidney disease.

Perhaps one day patients will be treated with low-toxicity drugs for cancer years before tumours show up in their bodies, Dr Judah Folkman suggested in a provocative keynote talk at a Massachusetts Biotechnology Council forum yesterday.

Technological innovations including better imaging methods, datamining tools and medical devices are already beginning to transform healthcare, notably in the way certain diseases such as cancer are treated, speakers said at a two-day symposium on the future of the pharmaceutical industry last week.

First there was golden rice, a genetically modified variant of the world's number two cereal, designed to prevent blindness and ill health in an estimated 400 million malnourished people in Asia and Africa, whose monotonous diet of rice leaves them vulnerable to blindness and ill health. Now Western Australian company Grain Biotech Australia has engineered an experimental wheat, the world's number one cereal crop, that could help by keeping over-nourished Westerners in the pink of health.