Safety steps

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced a set of measures to improve the science it does, the safety of drugs it has approved, and the way it communicates safety concerns to the public (see Nature 443, 372; 2006). Among these is a pilot programme to assess the safety of drugs with novel active ingredients 18 months after they have gone on market. But Senator Christopher Dodd (Democrat, Connecticut) says the measures don't go far enough and, with Senator Chuck Grassley (Republican, Iowa), he has introduced legislation that would give the drug agency additional powers to enforce the safety of existing drugs.

Cell bank

Richard Branson, flamboyant chairman of Virgin Group, has set up a company that will charge parents £1,500 (US$2,900) to store blood stem cells from umbilical cord tissue for possible future use in the treatment of blood diseases. Virgin Health Bank, which will run the store in collaboration with London-based investment company Merlin Biosciences, will also put half of each sample in a bank for public health use. Branson says that profits will be donated to fund stem-cell research.

Biofuels winner

BP says it will spend $500 million over ten years on biofuels research at an Energy Biosciences Institute to be established at the University of California, Berkeley. The university won the race to host the centre against rivals reportedly including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Imperial College London. Its bid was backed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of the state, which will also contribute $40 million to the centre. It will operate as a consortium that will include the nearby Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.