"Prognosis of the individual course of disease - steps in developing a decision support tool for Multiple Sclerosis" by M. Daumer, A. Neuhaus, C. Lederer, M. Scholz, J. S. Wolinsky and M. Heiderhoff has been published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2007, 7:11. Almost since the beginning of SLCMSR's life we have been thinking about an online tool which can help the doctor in his decision for further treatment of his/her patient suffering from multiple sclerosis. Very early SLC and its IT partner Trium were able to develop such a tool but - in most cases - controversial discussions kept us from publishing and thus making public the OLAP tool. In order that everyone has the possibility to read the paper and use the tool we have submitted the manuscript to a peer-reviewed open access journal. According to the journal's policy the source code of the tool is available under open public license, the tool itself is freely available for non-commercial purposes, the disclaimers are equivalent to similar tools from Harvard School of Public Health and compatibility with German Law and regulations has been confirmed. From the time of publishing this paper the SLC will name its core resource "The Ian McDonald MS database"

A separate Website has been launched for the actibelt® project.

"A project proposal to test the actibelt® – originally developed for the monitoring of disability and gait disturbance of persons with MS – in a zero gravity environment was approved by the German Aerospace Center (read a description of the DLR campaign here with financial support of the Bayerische Forschungsstiftung (Bavarian funding association), one of Bavarians premium research funding organisations. In November 2006 the Sylvia Lawry Centre successfully attended a series of parabolic flights (watch flash-video, 2,5 MB) where the actibelt® turned out to be a potentially useful tool to monitor the activity of astronauts."

The SLCMSR and others have been consulted by the EMEA in order to receive comments and views from Learned Societies and other Interested Parties in the field. The comments provided by the SLCMSR have been taken into account for the finalisation of the guideline

The Critical Path Initiative is FDA's effort to stimulate and facilitate a national effort to modernize the scientific process through which a potential human drug, biological product, or medical device is transformed from a discovery or "proof of concept" into a medical product.