As we enter a new year, Scrip takes a look at the five biggest themes that got the most hits from our readers over the last 12 months.

By their very nature, crises are unexpected, which makes the planning and management involved all the more important when defining a company strategy in the modern age of 24-hour social media.

A newspaper has launched a campaign in the UK to review the way that clinical trials are carried out in adolescents. It follows the death of a 17-year-old girl with Ewing’s sarcoma who was rejected for inclusion in a clinical trial of an experimental anticancer product on the grounds that she was too young: the inclusion criteria specified a minimum age of 18 years. The case has become something of a cause célèbre, as the girl was only weeks away from her 18th birthday.

The €70 million first close of Germany's Wellington Partners fourth fund on 19 September was widely lauded as a sign of recovery of the European venture capital market (scripintelligence.com, 19 September 2012). But a more tangible indication of value was the clinical progress announced in the same week by publicly-quoted German biotech Morphosys.