WASHINGTON, DC—MHS plans to honor female physicians for the second straight year with its “Building Stronger Female Physician Leaders in the MHS” award. The award recognizes women who have made significant contributions to medicine and/or who have served as exemplary role models for other female physicians.

HYATTSVILLE, MD—Even though the Medical Device User Fee Act is not scheduled to expire until September 2012, FDA is already beginning the process of soliciting comments on how the act has worked to date, and how it might be improved.

BETHESDA, MD—To help advance research on how genes affect responses to medicines, NIH is spending $15 million over five years to expand the Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB).

ROCKVILLE, MD—“One of the things the public has problems dealing with is uncertainty and building science around that uncertainty,” declared Jesse Goodman, MD, FDA’s science chief, at a recent meeting of the FDA Science Board.

WASHINGTON, DC—Navy patients in remote locations are expected to have greater access to pharmacists as a result of a telepharmacy system that the Navy is using.

WASHINGTON, DC—Receiving medications by mail rather than waiting in line for them is one of the benefits of a new pharmacy initiative piloted by IHS and VA.

WASHINGTON, DC—What does a pharmacist working in a VA hospital look like? Twenty years ago, that person would likely have been male, have entered the VA system with a baccalaureate degree, and spent much of their time behind a counter doing the grunt work of filling prescriptions.

WASHINGTON, DC—One of the most difficult challenges that severely wounded servicemembers face is that they are physically and mentally changed after their war experience. Mentors in the Wounded Warrior Mentor Program, however, hope they can help these severely injured servicemembers see that their life is not over.

WASHINGTON, DC—The federal government is taking every step possible to keep funding flowing to research projects involving the use of embryonic stem cells after a judge ordered a halt to such funding.

BETHESDA, MD—Efforts in basic science at FDA have, in recent years, been “underappreciated, under resourced, and underfunded,” even though they are an essential component of the agency, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, MD told the members of FDA’s Science Board at a recent meeting.