TV pick of the week: Tomorrow's World: A Horizon Special

AstraZeneca's new boss yesterday agreed his first major deal at the pharmaceuticals giant, spending up to $272m (£169m) on the rights to an experimental kidney drug. This month, on his first day in the job, Pascal Soriot suspended Astra's share buybacks for the rest of the year.

I have heard many experts say that the best days of the pharmaceutical sector are behind it.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given British scientists a multi-million pound grant to develop GM crops in what could be the most significant PR endorsement for the controversial technology.

The obsessive world of the ground-breaking geneticist is memorably portrayed in an ambitious debut novel that examines what happens when science and human appetites collide.

Britain's biggest drugs firm, GlaxoSmithKline, yesterday stormed ahead with its $2.6bn (£1.6bn) hostile takeover of United States biotech Human Genome Sciences, waving aside the board to take its bid direct to shareholders.

GlaxoSmithKline yesterday made a hostile $2.6bn (£1.6bn) bid for Human Genome Sciences (HGS), its long-term partner on treatments including lupus medicine benlysta.

Britain's biggest pharmaceuticals maker, GlaxoSmithKline, has teamed up with Johnson & Johnson and the private equity house Index Ventures to launch a ground-breaking €150m (£125m) fund to discover new drugs.

Free and open access to research, both past and present, is vital to solving global issues

Elliott Advisors, the dissident Actelion shareholder which has proposed six independent directors for the Swiss biotech's board, partially welcomed the company's recent nomination of former GlaxoSmithKline boss Jean-Pierre Garnier and ex-Schering-Plough finance chief Robert Bertolini as board members.

Babies born to women who eat a poor diet during pregnancy are more likely to suffer prematurely from chronic age-related conditions such as type 2 diabetes, say scientists.

The French pharmaceuticals company Sanofi-aventis is to buy the US biotech firm Genzyme Corp in a multibillion-dollar deal it has been pursuing for nine months.

Leading UK neuroscientists today attacked "draconian" funding cuts that could see £4 million stripped from "vital" brain research every year.

George Freeman, the Tory MP and biotech expert, is calling on the Government to open Pfizer's site in Sandwich to venture capitalists and biotech angels in a bid to save as many of the 2,400 jobs, due to be axed when the plant closes, as it can.