The international conference “Statistics and Life Sciences: Perspectives and Challenges” (Lifestat 2008) took place in Munich from 10 to 13 March 2008 and was organised by Ulrich Mansmann and Gerhard Tutz as chairs of the Local Organizing Committee. In the presence of IBS President Andrew Mead, the Central European Network was inaugurated which currently comprises the German (DR) and Austro-Swiss (ROeS) regions and the Polish National Group (GPOL). The Network aims to encourage new and strengthen existing scientific exchange and collaboration in the participating regions and groups mainly through joint conferences, joint working groups and associate membership. The conference programme varied across the full range of applications of statistics in the life sciences, which is reflected in this special issue. The opening lecture entitled “High dimensional data analysis: Selection of variables, data compression and graphics – application to gene expression” was delivered by Jürgen Läuter and is included in this issue (Läuter et al., 2009). The conference's closing session featured a lecture by Jürgen Hüsler on extreme value statistics including applications to medicine, sports sciences and biology. An account of his lecture is published in this issue (Hüsler, 2009). The conference programme included a number of invited sessions and some of the highlights are presented in this issue. David Dunson offers an overview of the current state of the art in Bayesian nonparametric modelling and includes applications from biomedicine (Dunson, 2009). Bathke, Harrar, and Ahmad (2009) review the literature on multivariate statistics and report on some recent trends, in particular, in nonparametric statistics. Fröhlich, Tresch, and Beiβbarth (2009) give a comprehensive review of nested effects models in signalling networks with an application in breast cancer. Clinical trials biostatistics is the subject of four papers. James Hung and colleagues from the US Food and Drug administration discuss non-inferiority studies with a focus on regulatory issues (Hung, Wang, and O'Neill, 2009). The other three papers deal with sequential adaptive designs. Whereas Liu, Rosenberger, and Haines (2009) investigate sequential designs for small Phase I trials with ordinal outcome, Mike Proschan's paper reviews sample size re-estimation techniques (Proschan, 2009) and Wang, Hung, and O'Neill (2009) propose a design for adaptive subgroup selection applicable to Phase II/III trials. This issue is the first one we take responsibility for as Editors. Reproducible research is very close to our heart and therefore it has now become journal policy to ask authors to submit computer code used in simulations and applications, and data sets used to illustrate new methods. These will be published as supporting information on the journal's web page once the paper is accepted for publication. This is a way of making research more transparent and reproducible, and will further enhance the impact of the papers and, eventually, the journal. We have published such supporting information on our web page for the papers by Läuter et al., Liu et al. and Fröhlich et al. in this issue. Torsten Hothorn was appointed as Associate Editor with special responsibility for reproducible research and we are working currently with Torsten to define standards for reproducible research. We will report about developments in this area in a forthcoming editorial.