Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn announced nearly €7 billion to kick-start innovation through research. The European Commission's biggest ever such funding package, under the EU's Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7), is expected to create around 174 000 jobs in the short-term and nearly 450 000 jobs and nearly €80 billion in GDP growth over 15 years(1).

The European Commission calls on EU Member States to develop and pursue a common vision on how to coordinate research at EU level in the field of ageing. This was the message of a Recommendation just adopted by the Commission entitled "More years, better lives - the potential and challenges of demographic change".

The Virtual Physiological Human Institute for Integrative Biomedical Research, in short VPH Institute, was recently established as an international non-profit organisation incorporated in Belgium and it is now ready to operate and to start the membership campaign.

Researchers at Hospital del Mar Research Institute (IMIM) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) have successfully reproduced and reconstructed the complete process of a small molecule binding with its target protein.

p-medicine is a 4-year Integrated Project co-funded under the European Community's 7th Framework Programme aiming at developing new tools, IT infrastructure and VPH models to accelerate personalized medicine for the benefit of the patient.

The Digital Agenda Scoreboard gives essential data and in-depth analysis of progress so far with the implementation of the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE). The Scoreboard is the first to be published by the European Commission showing the performance of the EU and Member States in delivering on the agreed targets after the first year of existence of the DAE.

An EU eHealth Task Force to assess the role of information and communications technologies (ICT) in health and social care and to suggest ways for ICT to speed up innovation in healthcare to the benefit of patients, carers and the healthcare sector has met for the first time in Budapest on 10th May, chaired by Estonia's President Toomas Hendrik Ilves.