Last week, in between multiple internal meetings in Swindon, I gave talks (or more accurately a rather similar talk twice…) at two events. The first was a very interesting conference on systems medicine, arranged by Systems Biology Ireland. Certainly the part that I was able to attend was very wide ranging, including detailed models of metabolic and signalling networks that greatly aided the discovery of new diagnostics and therapies, and some very interesting advances in stem cells and how they might be targeted to damaged tissues. There was also a very interesting Panel discussion, as well as a great opportunity to hear of progress from Rudi Balling at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine. It was clear that at least this audience had entirely ‘got’ the systems medicine agenda, and that the subject was making rapid progress on multiple fronts. [...]

It is not news that in order to make principled use of the data, ideas and knowledge from a scientific paper it is necessary to have read it. However, there are two immediate problems with this ostensibly simple fact. The first is that it is necessary to have access to the paper in the first place, and traditional publishing models require that the user needs to pay for this privilege – and not all can do so. The second is that even if one does have access to the paper, one potentially has access to millions of them (as I mention regularly, PubMed alone is increasing its list of peer-reviewed papers in biomedicine by two per minute!), so clearly any individual scientist (or layperson) needs means to prioritise those that they might wish to read. UKPubMedCentral (UKPMC) is a new service that is intended to provide them. [...]

Last week started with a major announcement, and an important opening of a research facility previously sanctioned. The new announcement was for a £100 million building programme for facilities at our Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright. Since the major UK-wide outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in 2001, and subsequent reports such as those by Anderson (twice (PDF)), Beringer, Callaghan, Gilligan (PDF) and Gull (PDF), the value of maintaining research into exotic animal diseases, and preferably concentrating it at a well-constructed world-class site, has been well recognised. For instance, Anderson showed that the costs (PDF) of the 2001 FMD outbreak were some £8,000 million, and an independent report (PDF) showed that pre-emptive action by Philip Mellor and his colleagues at the IAH prevented the incursion of bluetongue disease into the UK at a financial saving (PDF) for one year alone of £485 million – let alone the saving in human and animal misery. We are all really delighted with this new announcement, that will put BBSRC researchers, and the UK as a whole, at the forefront of research into diseases of this type – many of which are viral (such as ‘swine’ flu) and as zoonotic diseases can infect humans as well as animals. [...]