Commentary in 2007

As sequencing technology and prediction algorithms improve, HIV genotyping and coreceptor usage prediction are likely to play an increasingly important role in guiding patient prognosis and treatment selection.

Continued investment from big pharma and a slew of new drugs with novel mechanisms of action are fueling investor interest in the antiviral space.

To design the vaccines of the future we need to fully exploit microbial genomes and understand the basic mechanisms of the immune system.

Will our increasing understanding of virus-host interactions translate into a new generation of antiviral therapeutics or steer us toward an expensive journey to nowhere?

Outsourcing has been relatively rare in academia until now, but is that beginning to change?

An analysis of recent returns from venture-backed biotech firms reveals that companies receiving the most financing do not necessarily deliver the best returns.

Securing material transfer agreements can be burdensome for academics and make downstream research prohibitively expensive, particularly for small startups with limited resources. Two technology-transfer professionals debate the pros and cons of such contracts.

The major national regulatory regimes for agbiotech products fail to satisfy scientific legitimacy on several counts.

A group of academics, industry executives and security experts propose an oversight framework to address concerns over the security of research involving commercial DNA synthesis.

Given that Californian voters authorized state coffers to sell $3 billion in bonds to fund the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) with the expectation of health and financial benefits, what benchmarks should be used to measure the initiative's success?

Lack of recognition of the ethical, social and policy issues associated with the commercialization of neurotechnology could compromise new ventures in the area.

The Brookhaven Protein Data Bank was once a pioneering database, but its organization of structural data is now outdated and in need of an upgrade.

Other areas of biomedical research should emulate new standards from the International Society for Stem Cell Research highlighting the importance of sharing materials, data and research rights, and requiring fair global access to resulting diagnostics and therapies.

To reduce unacceptably high death rates from snakebite envenomation, sub-Saharan Africa must adopt not only a new generation of multivalent biotech antivenoms, but also an infrastructure to deliver them.

The evidence gathered thus far—ultimately to be published in the Draft Risk Assessment on Animal Cloning—indicates that there are no unique risks associated with animal cloning.