Queensland's Beattie Government has announced AUD$473 million in new funding for the second phase of its Smart State Strategy. [ + ]

Heart surgeons who perform coronary bypass operations or aorta grafts face a dilemma: they need to use anti-clotting agents to prevent potentially lethal post-surgical clots, but standard blood-thinning drugs like aspirin can cause bleeding from graft joins - or from weakened blood vessels in the brain. [ + ]

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie has committed $7m in state funding to build a new scale-up manufacturing facility for pharma and biotech companies to produce experimental drugs for pre-clinical and clinical trials. [ + ]

In the nick of time -- in terms of human history, anyway -- the National Geographic Society and IBM have announced a five year project that will use DNA markers to retrace the epic colonisation of Earth by modern human beings. [ + ]

Melbourne drug developer Phosphagenics (ASX:POH) has pulled a dozen-odd plump but otherwise healthy rabbits out of the hat after completing the first arm of a three-armed preclinical study of its anti-atherosclerosis drug candidate APA-01. [ + ]

Premier Peter Beattie has announced Queensland will commit $7 million towards a scale-up manufacturing facility to make drugs for pre-clinical and clinical trials. He said the funding would be used to encourage international and national investment. [ + ]

Melbourne is to be home to the world's first centre for medical bionics and hearing science, the brainchild of bionic-ear inventor Prof Graeme Clark. [ + ]

Agenix (OTC: AGXLY, ASX: AGX) subsidiary, Agen Biomedical has signed an agreement with diagnostics company Axis-Shield under which Axis-Shield will produce a new laboratory assay for deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. The Axis-Shield assay will use Agen's 3B6 D-dimer antibody, and will be incorporated into Abbott Laboratories' mmunodiagnostic analyser, AxSYM. [ + ]

Perth biotech Solbec Pharmaceuticals (ASX:SBP) has followed in the footsteps of small resources companies in setting up a $5 million facility known as a standby equity distribution agreement through US-based investment fund, Cornell Capital Partners. [ + ]

Mark Crowell -- a leading US technology-transfer expert -- has a message for Australian universities wanting to make money out of research: it is vital that the public sector continue funding good, basic science to drive the knowledge economy. [ + ]

A tissue engineering centre, a tumour tissue banking facility and a biopharmaceutical formulation facility are three of 17 projects that will share a total of $57 million in major infrastructure grants, announced today by the Victorian government. [ + ]

Researchers at the Diabetes Transplant Unit at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney have developed a new technique for extracting single human embryonic stem (ES) cells, bringing them one step closer to harnessing the therapeutic potential of stem cells. [ + ]

Although government and higher education R&D expenditure are on the up, and Australia generated almost 50 per cent more scientific and technical articles in 2003 than in 1999, the number of US patents granted to Australia has fallen, a government report has revealed. [ + ]

The NZ government looks likely to extend strict controls on xenotransplantation until at least December 2006 after a bill requiring trials of the technology to be approved by the minister had its first reading in the NZ parliament yesterday. [ + ]

Brisbane company Benitec (ASX:BLT) has signed a reciprocal licensing agreement with one of its biggest competitors in the RNAi field, US company Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. [ + ]