[FirstWord]- The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) publicly listed for the first time the prices it pays individual drug manufacturers for vaccines. UNICEF spokesperson Joan Howe stated that the agency made the decision “in the hopes it will lead to a more competitive market and lower prices, especially for newer vaccines.”
The agency, which spent $757 [...]

[Reuters]- France looked set on Thursday to maintain its curbs on human embryonic stem cell research after the conservative government fought off a parliamentary bid to liberalize the country’s bioethics law.
The National Assembly voted to uphold the curbs in the second reading of the new bioethics law. Conservative legislators and the Roman Catholic Church had [...]

[GenomeWeb News]- The National Human Genome Research Institute will provide up to $10.8 million in grants next year to fund three new programs that will support investigators seeking to develop new high-throughput technologies for identifying, validating, and characterizing sequence encoded elements in eukaryotic genomes.
The goal of the new grant program is to build upon and [...]

[Nestle]- Nestlé Health Science S.A. today announced that it has agreed to acquire Prometheus Laboratories Inc., a San Diego-based company. Prometheus specialises in diagnostics and in-licensed specialty pharmaceuticals in gastroenterology and oncology, and has a dedicated team of highly qualified medical sales representatives. The company focuses on conditions such as inflammatory bowel diseases, including Crohn’s [...]

[USA Today]- An estimated 15,000 Medicare patients die each month in part because of care they receive in the hospital, says a government study released today.
The study is the first of its kind aimed at understanding “adverse events” in hospitals — essentially, any medical care that causes harm to a patient, according to the Department [...]

[Forbes]- Monya Baker has an interesting feature in this week’s issue of Nature, looking at the synthetic biology field a year after J. Craig Venter’s team published their breakthrough Science paper on the generation of a bacterial cell, operating completely on synthetic DNA designed in the lab.
Readers may recall that Venter’s paper touched off a [...]

[The Washington Post]- As the U.S. government steps up investigations of companies suspected of paying bribes overseas, law enforcement officials are leaving much of the detective work to the very corporations under suspicion.
The probes are so costly and wide-ranging that the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission often let the companies investigate themselves and then share the [...]

[San Diego Union-Tribune]- International Stem Cell enrolled the first of what it hopes will be at least 15 U.S. donors of unfertilized human eggs that will be used by the Carlsbad company to produce a vast bank of stem cell lines for clinical trials in humans, the biotechnology firm said Thursday.
The company plans to use [...]

[Yahoo]- End-of-life care falls short of what the average person wants, says a new study that compares palliative care in the U.S. and Ontario.
While most patients prefer supportive measures that avoid a hospital death, U.S. patients received more chemotherapy. Ontario patients have more days in hospital, have more use of emergency rooms, and were much [...]

[BBC]- Voters in the Zurich area of Switzerland are voting on two proposals related to assisted suicide.
The first, to introduce a complete ban on the practice, looks set to be defeated.
But the second, which proposes limiting assisted suicide to Zurich residents only, could get more support.
The Swiss are uneasy that so many foreign citizens are [...]