FDA's Dermatologic and Ophthalmic Drugs Advisory Committee may help provide guidance in the increasingly competitive therapeutic space of postoperative ocular pain.

XOMA (US) has appointed James Neal vice-president of business development. He was most recently acting chief executive officer at Entelos, which was acquired Iconix Biosciences, a privately held company where Mr Neal was CEO.

Drug developers can now tap into an array of new preclinical technologies including some that give them the ability to interrogate compounds in a broad biological context-a systems biology approach. In this issue, we profile four start-ups with technologies designed to predict drugs' efficacy: Champions Biotechnology, Cytox, Immuneering and Rhenovia.

SimuGen has developed an analysis system that includes a pre-packaged kit that customers can use to test their own compounds. Accompanying client management software then imports the data and sends it to SimuGen's servers for analysis. It produces a dose-response curve for every clinically significant toxicity and also ranks related compounds based on their toxicity profile, allowing medicinal chemists to evaluate potential leads. Finally, clustering analysis reveals how changes to the molecular structure could affect the toxicity profile. The product has been designed to work with relatively few biomarker genes, which simplifies the laboratory procedure and avoids platforms such as microarrays.