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INDIA – Zinc Treatment for Infections in Children.

JAPAN – Japan Pharma Portfolio Finds Renewed Strength through Record Growth in 2012.

JAPAN – Joint Development of a Novel Lyophilized Dual Chamber Prefillable Syringe System.

JAPAN – A Genetic Alternative to Fertilizer.

SINGAPORE – Made-in-Singapore H5N1 Bird Flu Diagnostic Kit - Detects All Known Strains of H5N1 Virus with a Single Test.

THAILAND – KEEEN, Thai Bioremediation Product, Awarded Gold Medal for "Bioremediation Agent developed to Greenovation Product".

EUROPE – MorphoSys Antibody Reaches Major Milestone in Collaboration with Roche.

EUROPE – New Technique to Predict Heart Attacks.

USA – FEI Launches 'Living Lab' for Structural Biology Research at NIH.

USA – Synthetic Platelets Built to Treat Bleeding.

USA – Software Scans Tongue for Signs of Disease.

USA – US Legislation Will Ensure Tighter Checks on Foreign Drug Factories.

The following topics are under this section:

• Could Jurassic Park become a Reality?
• Brightening the Future with Liquid Sunshine
• New Gene Therapy for Huntington’s Disease Proves Successful in Mice
• Fight or Flight?
• Distinguishing between Two Species of Red Pandas
• Freeze-drying Soil for Studying Reactive Nitrogen Gas Emissions
• Remodelling the Future of Air Pollution Studies

This book aims to provide views of complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs) from multiple perspectives to enable the reader to come to their own informed conclusions. Practitioners of conventional medicine range from those who highlight the dangers of treatments that lack conventional evidence to those who wish to integrate CAMs into conventional practice. The authorship also includes educators and researchers into CAMs, those involved in public policy, regulators and consumers. The term CAMs encompasses a wide range of treatments from the biological and the physical to the mental and energy therapies. Mechanisms of action may not be known and should not be subject to pseudoscientific explanations. There are methodological challenges in researching CAMs. Also, CAMs are regulated differently to conventional medicines and yet the public must understand that CAMs can have side-effects and should know upon what evidence claims of efficacy are based and how often it is known to be effective. Medical practitioners should be familiar with CAMs so they can respond to their patients' questions and know if there are any problematic interactions between CAMs and conventional therapies. How to integrate CAMs and conventional medicine is a challenge being explored by some medical centres.

A conception of the left and right projection which one fuzzy vector project on another is introduced in this paper. The purpose is to propose a new method to select an optimal alternative in fuzzy multi-attribute decision making environment. Using the conception of the left and right projection, the difference of each alternative with the fuzzy ideal solution or negative ideal solution are projected on the fuzzy weight vector. The size of the combination projection coefficient that combines the left and right projection coefficients is used as a judgement standard to measure each alternative. The decision making criterion is that the more the combination projection coefficient, the more superior the alternative.

A conception of the left and right projection which one fuzzy vector projects on another is introduced in this paper. Using the conception of the left and right projection, each alternative is projected on the fuzzy weight vector. The size of the combination projection coefficient that combines the left projection coefficient with the right one is used as a judgement standard to measure each alternative.

This article contains some observations on cancer and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in Italy. Italy does not have a strong tradition of using CAM approaches in the treatment of cancer. While the Italian population is eager to learn more about CAM, the medical profession is largely dismissive of these methods. In 1997–1998 the notorious Luigi Di Bella Affair occurred in Italy, when a professor of physiology at Modena proposed a non-conventional approach to cancer treatment, based around the off-label use of somatostatin. This treatment found champions in the media and general public, but was opposed by most of the medical profession. This affair divided Italian public opinion. Italy no longer has prominent proponents of non-conventional treatments in cancer. However, it continues to have innovative scientists who do work that is consonant with a CAM approach. This article considers the work of three such scientists: Paolo Lissoni, MD, of Monza (Milan), who has carried out numerous clinical trials with the pineal hormone, melatonin; Giancarlo Pizza, MD, of Bologna, who has done extensive work on the use of transfer factor (TF) and other immunomodulators in the treatment of renal cell and other kinds of cancer; and Aldo Mancini, MD, of Naples, who has isolated a mutated form of Mn-SOD-2 from the growth medium of a unique liposarcoma cell line. These scientists have introduced some flexibility into a rigid state-run hospital system by offering patients innovative treatment options in the context of approved clinical trials.