In these austere times, when the NHS is charged with delivering efficiency challenges of £120 billion, the adoption of an integrated, IT-driven healthcare system is seen as an important move, enabling the introduction of new services, saving time (and money) and providing more efficient operations and better informed decision making.

The human brain can learn to treat relevant prosthetics as a substitute for a non-working body part, according to research published in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Mariella Pazzaglia and colleagues from Sapienza University and IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia of Rome in Italy, supported by the International Foundation for Research in Paraplegie.

Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) researchers Alfonso Valencia, Director of the Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programme and David de Juan, jointly with Florencio Pazos, from the Spanish National Centre for Biotechnology (CNB-CSIC), publish a review on the latest computational methods that, based on evolutionary principles, are revolutionising the field of analysis and prediction of protein structure, function and protein-protein interactions, as well as the short- and long-term expectations for the field.

Doctors 2.0 TM & You and Creation Healthcare have announced a research partnership that will reveal for the first time how healthcare professionals (HCPs) discuss cardiovascular disease and treatments using public social media channels. The research is being conducted using Creation Pinpoint, the world's first social media monitoring tool dedicated to studying public conversations among HCPs, and will be presented at Doctors 2.0 & You in Paris, June 6 - 7, 2013.

Researchers at the University of Warwick and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust have completed a study that may lead to clinicians being able to more accurately predict which patients will suffer from the side effects of radiotherapy. Gastrointestinal side effects are commonplace in radiotherapy patients and occasionally severe, yet there is no existing means of predicting which patients will suffer from them.

The growing ease of DNA sequencing has led to enormous advancements in the scientific field. Through extensive networked databases, researchers can access genetic information to gain valuable knowledge about causative and preventative factors for disease, and identify new targets for future treatments.

The European Commission today announced the winners of a multi-billion euro competition of Future and Emerging Technologies (FET). The winning Graphene and Human Brain initiatives are set to receive one billion euros each, to deliver 10 years of world-beating science at the crossroads of science and technology. Each initiative involves researchers from at least 15 EU Member States and nearly 200 research institutes.