GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has agreed to plough up to €14.6m into a new partnership with Trinity College Dublin and The National University of Ireland Galway. The joint R&D programme has a strong focus on translational medicine and will investigate new therapies for Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Some five million Europeans currently suffer from this disease and available therapies only treat the symptoms rather than the cause - an imbalance this new collaboration will seek to address. GSK already has a number of Alzheimer's drugs in its pipeline, some of which are designed to alleviate symptoms and others to slow or halt disease progression.

"To turn these early projects into effective medicines for AD, we have increasingly invested in translational research and state-of-the-art technologies in order to support dose-prediction, identify novel pharmacodynamic end-points and aid selection of appropriate patient populations for clinical studies," said Dr Neil Upton, Head of Translational and Pharmacological Sciences.

Prof. Nicholas Canny, VP Research at the NUI Galway, said scientists at the institution have been studying "novel cognitive, electrophysiological and behavioural endpoints in patients with Alzheimer's disease" that could prove useful in both preclinical and clinical research of new therapies.

UK biotech firm Summit (formerly VASTox) has received £220,000 from the UK muscular dystrophy charity Parent Project UK (PPUK). The funding will partly be used to support Summit's preclinical Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) programme and also to identify additional DMD therapies using zebrafish disease models.

Summit's two platform technologies are based around carbohydrate chemistry and using zebrafish in drug screening. The firm's lead DMD drug candidate, SMTC1100 is expected to enter clinical trials in the second half of next year.

By teaming up with a charity, Summit will also be able to access its registry to recruit for future clinical trials.

Nick Catlin, CEO of PPUK, commented: "DMD is a devastating muscle-wasting condition. Young people are left totally paralysed by their early teens and are dying from respiratory or heart failure in their early twenties. There is no cure. Summit's commitment to finding a treatment for this disease has been inspiring and its first drug candidate - SMT C1100 - offers our families real hope for a drug treatment in the near future."

Novelos Therapeutics, a US biopharma firm, and the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) have been awarded $150,000 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support the development of NOV-002. This drug is Novelos' lead compound and is currently in a pivotal Phase III trial for non-small cell lung cancer.

"This [Small Business Technology Transfer] STTR award enables Novelos to accelerate and broaden the scope of investigation around NOV-002's mechanism of action in relation to its unique therapeutic profile," said Dr Christopher Pazoles, head of R&D at the company.

NOV-002 was designed to modify redox-based cell processes and represents and acts

together with chemotherapy as a chemoprotectant and an immunomodulator.

A global research network has established a virtual 'gene regulation' bazaar that allows biologists to share information through individually managed data collections - likened to boutiques within a shopping centre.

According to an article in Genome Biology , customers can access data from any boutique or extract information from the 'superstores' that aggregate data of similar types; all without any charge.

Much of the information gathered in costly studies of gene regulation is poorly accessible if available at all. Individual research teams often generate databases or post files on the internet, but these data are fragmented and can be lost over time.

Wyeth Wasserman and his team at the University of British Columbia and the Child & Family Research Institute, Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues from Bulgaria, Canada, France, and the USA, describe a novel approach to managing this information by bringing it together for the first time. The resulting "open-access and open-source database of transcription factor and regulatory sequence annotation" has been dubbed 'PAZAR' (Bulgarian for shopping mall).

Its structure is designed to allow researchers to share data and computational predictions in an organised and accessible manner.

The data is being expanded all the time, and the researchers are also looking to improve the curation tools, in the hope of encouraging other to open new boutiques.