The European Commission adopted new rules for investing public money in small private companies that it says will make it easier for start-ups to raise risk capital.

Biotech start-ups in France and elsewhere in Europe make a unique and important contribution to healthcare. They merit special treatment to help them grow.

Blue biotech is getting into its stride, as the tools of genomics and high throughput screening are applied to unlock the chemical diversity of the oceans.

PharmaLinks, a business dedicated to commercialising pharmaceutical research, is looking for a development partner for an immunosuppressive cytokine with therapeutic potential in inflammatory diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, COPD and arteriosclerosis.

Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig are two well-known law professors affiliated with very prestigious US universities, Yale and Stanford, respectively. They are specialised in intellectual property like policemen are specialised in crime: it is their bailiwick but they do not particularly like it.

The American Bar Association makes available its take on the USA's "federal environmental statutes" and their implications for nanotechnology.

The Food Standards Agency in the UK has published its Science Strategy 2005-10

New approaches are needed for predicting the safe dose of novel drugs that are designed to interact with highly specific human targets because existing preclinical toxicology studies may be inadequate.

We applaud a rare bout of honesty.

The IP battlefield is large and diversified. It goes way beyond highly-publicized battles about patenting genes or semi-conductor designs. A case in point is a lawsuit filed July 14 by Materialise nv, a spin-off of Belgium’s Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, against a Swiss-Swedish company, Nobel Biocare.