The Australian Academy of Science has announced this year's winners of its prestigious annual awards for scientific excellence. As Academy President Professor Suzanne Cory explained, "These awards celebrate both career-long contributions by some of Australia's most distinguished researchers and remarkable discoveries made by younger investigators." [ + ]

Shakespeare’s Hamlet was correct - "what a piece of work is a [hu]man! ... how infinite in faculty" - and now it seems, according to a team of researchers in Sydney, in gene expression regulation. [ + ]

Long-term follow-up data from a trial of Patrys's (ASX:PAB) IgM antibody PAT-SC1 in gastric cancer shows improved 10-year survival rates in treated patients. [ + ]

Abraxane, a chemotherapy drug licensed in Australia by STA, achieved a three-year overall survival of 4% during a combination trial in metastatic pancreatic cancer. [ + ]

Belgium's FAMHP has become the first regulator to sign off on the modified protocol for Prima BioMed's (ASX:PRR) upcoming trial of CVac in ovarian cancer. [ + ]

Solving the structure of proteins is all in a day's work for Dr Megan Maher, who is using X-ray crystallography to further our understanding of how cells acquire and use trace metals. [ + ]

pSivida (ASX:PVA) licensee Alimera Sciences has announced that the first UK NHS patient has been implanted with its Iluvien diabetic macular edema (DME) treatment. [ + ]

Using sea urchin eggs as a model system, Professor Jens Coorssen is unveiling the mechanisms underlying the essential cellular process of vesicular release and paving the way for this pathway to be targeted in rational drug development. [ + ]

NHS Wales has completed the first phase of the national rollout of InterSystems TrakCare Lab, a comprehensive, multidisciplinary laboratory information management system (LIMS). The product is designed to support modern laboratories that provide consolidated, comprehensive pathology services. [ + ]

Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research has been chosen as one of the first facilities in the world to acquire machines that can sequence a whole human genome at a base cost below US$1000. [ + ]

Hepatitis C researcher Rowena Bull and her colleagues have provided an intimate account of the surprising behaviour of the hepatitis C virus during the first 100 days of infection. Their findings point towards new strategies to prevent chronic HCV infection, cirrhosis and liver cancer. [ + ]

The new year has dawned with news that biotechnology has become a "20-year overnight success", with The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald (4/1/14) reporting that "biotech has finally boomed". The article reported the array of successes of 2013, which included IPOs, four- to nine-fold surges in share prices for a number of companies, high-profile investors turning their attention to biotech and a steady flow of capital raisings that totalled $739.1 million (Biotech Daily, 2/1/14), the highest amount since 2007. [ + ]

The Australian listed biotech sector handily outperformed both the All Ordinaries and the Health Care Index last year, analysis from Bioscience Managers shows. [ + ]

Researchers from the University of Warwick in the UK and York University in Canada have created a molecular communications system which can be used for the transmission of messages and data in challenging environments. [ + ]

Professor Martin Pera, Program Leader of the ARC-supported national research consortium Stem Cells Australia, reflects on his involvement in the discovery of human embryonic stem cells and where the research field is at today. [ + ]