Researchers define cell therapy as the transplantation of living cells for the replacement or repair of damaged tissue and/or cells. Hot on the heels of stem cell therapy research is a group of leading cell imaging experts who are participating in ENCITE (European network for cell imaging and tracking expertise), a four-year project supported by the EU with €11 million in funding.

NHS Connecting for Health, the flagship NHS IT programme, is to be evaluated by a national team of researchers led by the University of Edinburgh. The £1.5m study, which begins on 1st September 2008, will run until December 2010 and also involves researchers from the Universities of Nottingham, LSE, School of Pharmacy and the NHS.

The DebugIT project is a large -scale integrating project funded within the 7th EU Framework Programme (FP7). The main objectives are to build IT tools that should have significant impacts for the monitoring and control of infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistances in Europe. This will be realized by building a technical and semantic infrastructure able to:

European researchers have forged a partnership with counterparts in the Western Balkans, North Africa and Latin America to strengthen cooperation in the fields of biomedical informatics (BMI), grid technologies and nanoinformatics. Their work is being carried out through ACTION-Grid, a project supported by the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) with funding totalling some €1 million.

Using a Blue Gene supercomputer, scientists of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) and the IBM (NYSE: IBM) Zurich Research Laboratory demonstrated the most extensive simulation yet of real human bone structures, providing doctors a "high definition" view of the strength and fragility of bones they never had before.

The SOS project is a first step in addressing problems faced by doctors treating patients who seek health treatment when abroad. These problems include re-supplying essential medication that a patient has lost or forgotten, communicating medical situations to foreign-language doctors, diagnosing illness and prescribing proper medication with little knowledge of patient history.

The French have set the construction of the European Research Area (ERA) as the main research priority for their presidency of the EU. Other priorities include boosting Europe's role in space and making progress towards a Community patent. The French took over the EU Council Presidency from Slovenia on 1 July.