Stem-cell source

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $16 million to the WiCell Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin to create and run the US government's first human national stem-cell bank. The grant will “dramatically reduce the cost of these cell lines to investigators”, says James Thomson, WiCell's scientific director, who first isolated stem cells in 1998. Researchers have complained about the $5,000 fee that WiCell currently charges to provide federally approved stem-cell lines (see Nature 435, 272; 2005). This will now drop to $500.

Chips in

Global semiconductor sales are growing rapidly and are set to comfortably exceed last year's record total. Sales this year up to the end of August totalled $144 billion, the Semiconductor Industry Association says — 6% up on the same period in 2004. Semiconductor demand actually dropped in Europe, the United States and Japan, but grew sharply in the rest of Asia. Last year, the industry predicted that sales would flatten out in 2005.

No cure yet

Human Genome Sciences of Rockville, Maryland, suffered a setback when it reported that LymphoStat-B, a drug it is developing to fight the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus, wasn't as effective as it had hoped during phase 2 trials. Shares in the 13-year-old company, which has yet to bring a drug to market, lost nearly a third of their value on the news. But the drug did subdue some symptoms of the disease, and Thomas Watkins, the company's chief executive, says he still hopes to move on to larger, phase 3 trials.