Before you head off for the weekend, let’s take a look back at a few of the stories we’ve covered recently, and give you a few updates:

— With the passage of US health care reform, you’re probably wondering which provisions actually made it through. Well, among the survivors is a $500 million National Institutes of Health program that will fund research on new therapies. The ‘Cure Accelerations Network’, which we highlighted in February, will distribute individual grants of up to $15 million a year, and work in close coordination with the US Food and Drug Administration to ensure that therapies make it to market sooner.

— A new initiative for comparative effectiveness research also came through in the health care bill. The $500 million institute will be created to oversee all such research, which compares one treatment to another, as well as determine how the results are applied to practice.

— Lastly among the health care updates, the legislation ended up allowing 12 years of data exclusivity for new biologics. Some had hoped these therapies, which are derived from living cells, would be given only five years of exclusivity before cheaper generics enter the market.

— Algae is blooming: Our February feature described how green algae can replace mammalian cells to produce therapeutic human proteins. Now, Stephen Mayfield, director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, reports that among seven proteins he derived from genetically modified algae, four proteins were produced at levels suitable for commercial use.

— In this month’s issue we feature new rat models of disease, as well as the battle over stem cell patents. Those two topics came together last week, when the UK Intellectual Property Office granted StemCells, Inc. a patent on rat pluripotent stem cells, as well as any genetically modified rats derived from those cells.

— Finally, the UK is looking to combat a downward trend in clinical trials, as we discussed in last month’s issue. And yesterday, the country’s secretary of state for health, Andrew Burnham, announced that the Academy of Medical Sciences would conduct a review of government regulations that might be hindering research.

Image by Speaker Pelosi via Flickr Creative Commons