Leading influenza researchers published a letter in the Jan. 24 and 25, 2013, issues of Nature and Science, respectively, declaring an end to a voluntary moratorium on research about how the H5N1 avian influenza could become easily transmissible from person to person, though with a notable exception: "Scientists should not restart their work in countries where, as yet, no decision has been reached on the conditions for H5N1 virus transmission research," they wrote in their letter.

Autoimmune diseases are one area where it's a man's world. "Many autoimmune diseases are much more frequent in females," Jayne Danska told BioWorld Today. "That's been known for decades. But we don't have any insight into how to take that insight and do something useful for women with it."

Privacy concerns related to DNA sequencing got yet another airing today when a team from the Whitehead Institute reported in Science that using only publicly available information, they have been able to identify about 50 men who had anonymously donated DNA to projects such as the Thousand Genomes Project. While research subjects and sperm donors by and large want anonymity, others use DNA to find their relatives on the Internet, on sites like Y Search and the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation. In other words, there is plenty of DNA out there that has an identity attached to it. And if...

It may be a bad environment for early stage deals for most companies. But not for start-up EnBiotix Inc., according to its CEO Jeffrey Wager. The company, which was founded in 2012, is "in discussions with multiple pharma companies" for partnering opportunities.

In the course of studying the tumor suppressor p53 and its role in both cellular aging and metabolism, scientists have described a new interaction partner of p53 that might make a better therapeutic target for the treatment of cancer than p53 itself.

You'd think that a disease that is involved in half of all deaths in the developed world would not have trouble attracting interest from the biopharma industry.

Mostly, the idea behind creating cell lines with diseases is to find ways to fix those diseases. But in the case of sickle cells – red blood cells with an abnormal hemoglobin gene – there may be a twist.

Researchers have developed an experimental drug, ABT-199, that interferes with anti-apoptotic proteins. Unlike its precursor navitoclax, though, ABT-199 does not interfere with platelet function.

For an addict, melanoma cells can be pretty picky. About half of all melanomas result from mutations in the oncogene BRAF. Such tumor cells develop a so-called oncogene addiction, becoming dependent on BRAF for their survival.

Bacteria have several ways to defend themselves against antibiotics. Out-and-out resistance through mutations in the bacterial genome is one. But there is a related phenomenon, persistence, that could perhaps best be described as "I'm not deaf; I'm ignoring you."