Fresh research could improve the action of anti-cancer drugs by keeping them inside tumour cells for longer.

Professor Chris Fell, President of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS), has said it was time for the government to announce the second stage of its plans for science and technology.

Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and The University of Texas Anderson Cancer Centre have found that patients with the blood cancer chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) had a 26% probability of long term survival when treated with chemotherapy compared to 40% when treated with bone marrow transplant.

Researchers at the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry (IBMTR) at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, and at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found that patients with depressive symptoms six months after their transplant have three times higher risk of death by one year post-transplant than do non-depressed patients.

Researchers in the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Institute of Molecular Medicine (IMM) have cloned and identified the role of a regulatory gene that in the presence of underlying heart failure, appears culpable in the occurrence of cardiac arrhythmias, or irregular heart beats, that can lead to sudden cardiac death.

A protein linked to accumulation of harmful brain plaque in Alzheimer's patients has been shown in fruit flies and mice to be an important part of a molecular transportation system that moves signals and vital protein cargoes within the brain.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, in conjunction with colleagues from Lund University in Sweden, have identified in the laboratory a target for cancer chemotherapy that could impact tumour formation and metastasis by inhibiting cell growth.

Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia, have determined the shape of an antibody that could unlock treatments for the debilitating disease lupus.

Data on a complex enzyme that lies at the crossroad between cell suicide and tumor suppression has opened a promising front in the battle to find effective treatments for stroke and cancer.

Leptin, a protein secreted by fat cells, may be an independent risk factor for heart disease in humans, according to an article in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Individuals who had taken at least one aspirin in the week before suffering an ischemic stroke had milder strokes than people who had not taken aspirin, according to a report in the December issue of Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Dr Meek is the first appointee under the Gene Technology Act 2000, which provides a comprehensive legal framework for the regulation of genetically modified organisms in Australia in order to protect human health and safety, and the environment.

A study by an international team of researchers shows vision can be successfully preserved in rats that go blind in the first months of life.

Australian biotech company Progen Industries has announced that recently conducted preclinical research of its leading anti-cancer compound, PI-88, revealed that the compound also had a novel profile as a potential anti-thrombotic and inhibitor of restenosis.

An anti-tumour durg, AQ4N, which destroys tumour cells that other anti-cancer treatments cannot - is undergoing clinical trials at Leicester Royal Infirmary and Oxford's Churchill Hospital in the UK.