Commentary

Objective quality control indices are needed to facilitate clinical implementation of DNA microarrays used in transcriptional profiling as well as other types of genomic analysis.

The emphasis of traditional crop production on yield is counter-productive for human nutrition.

The US Environmental Protection Agency is developing a new guidance that outlines best practice in the submission, quality assurance, analysis and management of genomics data for environmental applications.

How can microarray data best be exploited and integrated into the regulatory decision-making process?

By rejecting gene-spliced ingredients in their products, some major food companies may be making foods that are less safe and wholesome for consumers—and that expose them to litigation.

Although technology adoption and remuneration are significant barriers to the development and implementation of innovative diagnostics, health imperialism may be just as important.

Tests for identifying the world's most important microbial pathogens are antiquated, inaccurate and inadequate. Innovative public-private partnership is needed to develop and produce new infectious disease diagnostics that are more rapid and of greater accuracy and sensitivity.

A major outreach effort is under way that recruits scientific and technological expertise in industry and academia to optimize regulatory decision-making for next-generation diagnostic tests.

The value of a diagnostic test should be assessed in the overall context of disease management.

Challenges abound when academic institutions try to bring new in vivo diagnostic agents to the clinic.

Chromogenic stains have long been used in immunodiagnostic assays, but fluorescence-based readouts could supplant them as emphasis shifts away from diagnosis to prediction by means of quantifiable results.

Low margins, tricky reimbursement issues and the difficulty of market penetration have traditionally made diagnostics unattractive to investors. However, with changes to healthcare economics, regulation and the adoption of companion diagnostic tests that are predictive for drug response, that may be about to change.

A substantial increase in political and financial investment that aligns plant and industrial biotech will pay dividends for sustainable energy and materials production.

Biofuels have been touted before, but failed to deliver. What's needed to get it right this time around?

Is the introduction of renewable biofuels a simple problem of technology development and diffusion or does it require an industrial revolution?

Developing and deploying specialized computing systems for specific research communities is achievable, cost effective and has wide-ranging benefits.

Even in sub-Saharan Africa's most progressive nations, agbiotech partnerships are still often poorly oriented to end users, fragmented in scope and of limited impact in achieving the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals.

Biopharmaceutical manufacturing capacity has moved through three discrete chapters in its 25-year history. Could the next chapter herald formal manufacturing-capacity sharing among companies?

Advances in our understanding of the control of early human embryonic development could offer solutions to the moral dilemmas associated with human embryonic stem cell research.

What changes, if any, can we expect in the system currently used to protect biotech inventions?