Matt Gillespie is the new director of Melbourne's Prince Henry's Institute.

The Victorian government has pledged $26.6 million in infrastructure funding to 17 independent medical research institutes in the state.

Near enough isn't good enough when it comes to structure-based drug design and medicinal chemistry. That's the reasoning behind Avexa's (ASX:AVX) new collaborations with Melbourne's St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research and the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, according to CEO Julian Chick.

Monash University researcher Jamie Rossjohn has been awarded the AUD$50,000 2004 Science Minister's Prize for Life Scientist of the Year for his work on protein structure and crystallography.

The inventor of the cochlear implant, Prof Graeme Clark, will use the AUD$300,000 cheque from the 2004 Prime Minister's Science Prize he was awarded this week to establish a $6 million professorial chair in medical bionics at his Bionic Ear Institute in Melbourne.

Melbourne's St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research has opened its new AUD$10.5 million medical research building on the St Vincent's Hospital campus.

Changes to the wording of the Australian Research Council's discovery grant eligibility criteria have left scientists at medical research institutes believing they are no longer eligible to apply for grants from the organisation.

Medical research institutes in Victoria have received an 11 per cent increase in state government infrastructure funding, with almost AUD$20 million being distributed between 20 institutes.

It's one thing to design a system that can allow a library of 100,000 compounds to be screened against a protein structure in a day to assess each compound's structural compatibility with the target site. It's another to offer a way to score or rank the compounds according to the best-predicted fit.

A $1 million deal to analyse molecular changes in tumours has been signed between Melbourne's Bernard O'Brien Institute of Microsurgery (BOBIM) and a private London biotech.

Victoria's week-long festival of biotechnology education kicked off last night (May 13) with a call for more specially trained teachers.