To help healthcare professionals, medical researchers and the public understand the ongoing outbreak of the Zika virus, Elsevier has created a Zika Virus Resource Center on Elsevier's public news and information website. In addition, The Lancet, one of Elsevier's top medical journals, has created a Zika virus resource centre on its website,

Merck, a leading science and technology company, announces the start of its equity-free accelerator program for digital health startups. Just as the big bang shaped the universe, Merck Accelerator is looking for startups with the potential to reshape entire industries and make people's lives richer.

The search for new medicines is becoming unsustainably expensive despite huge technological advances because researchers are using the wrong methods, experts say. They say drug discovery should focus on 'validity' - how well the results of experiments predict results in sick people. Instead, it has focused on methods that are easy to industrialize or methods that are academically fashionable.

Screening large "libraries" of compounds to find those with a desired biological activity is a powerful method for discovering new drugs, but requires a large, expensive and dedicated facility. Now, scientists at the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have devised the central component of a screening system that would be orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper.

Conducting clinical investigations of mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRT) in humans is ethically permissible as long as significant conditions and principles are met, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a multi-national trade agreement now being considered by 12 countries. In an insightful commentary in Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy (RSAP), the ramifications of major components of the agreement are discussed, especially those potentially impacting the worldwide pharmaceutical industry.

More than 80 leading international pharmaceutical, generics, diagnostics and biotechnology companies, as well as key industry bodies, have come together to call on governments and industry to work in parallel in taking comprehensive action against drug-resistant infections - so-called 'superbugs' - with a joint declaration launched today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.