The Lupus Research Institute (LRI) has named 12 new grant recipients for 2009. The awards, totaling $3.6 million, recognize innovative work across a broad spectrum of lupus research. All were selected for their creativity, novelty, and potential to drive scientific discovery to ultimately prevent, treat, and cure the complex disease of systemic lupus.

Three University of Idaho researchers will embark on an unconventional approach to DNA research as one of 20 teams chosen nationwide by federal officials for the ideas to explore scientific frontiers.
Chemist Patrick Hrdlicka and molecular physiologist Madhu Papasani, who are both 32, were the youngest researchers chosen among several hundred applicants. They will be joined [...]

A research team may have broken the impasse that has frustrated HIV vaccine researchers by using an unconventional approach that bypasses the usual vaccine development path. Using gene transfer technology to produces molecules that block infection, the scientists protected monkeys from infection by a virus closely related to HIV — the simian immunodeficiency virus, or [...]

Elbow: ‘you are the only thing in any room you’re ever in’
Elbow, winner of ‘Best British Group’ in the Brit Awards 2009, is taking part in Larger Than Life – a series of unusual celebrity photographs – to help raise vital funds for Trinity Hospice, based in SW London.

The earlier cancer is diagnosed, the better the chance of effecting a cure. A revolutionary new hybrid technology offers the possibility of detecting this and other diseases right at inception.
Within a few years, when the technology comes to market, every doctor’s surgery could have a small, inexpensive device which can test blood on the spot [...]