The Health division of Wolters Kluwer, a leading global provider of information and point of care solutions for the healthcare industry, is aiding clinicians in the battle against the rapidly spreading Zika virus through free online access to a number of its industry leading medical content and clinical decision support resources.

A computer program that can predict whether or not a given pharmaceutical will have worrying side effects has been developed by researchers in the USA. Jamiul Jahid and Jianhua Ruan of the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Texas at San Antonio, have developed the "in silico" testing system for drugs in the early stage of drug development.

Strategic investments to discover and develop new health tools, together with innovations in effectively delivering today's health tools and services, could avert 10 million deaths a year within just one generation, argue leading global health experts in a new PLOS Collection.

Linde Healthcare, a global business of The Linde Group, has announced the new beneficiaries of its REALfund initiative, a programme supporting ideas and projects with the potential to improve patient outcomes and health economics across the wide field of respiratory medicine.

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.