  We analyze the existence of activable bound entangled states in
multi-particle systems. We first give a series of examples which illustrate
some different ways in which bound entangled states can be activated by letting
some of the parties to share maximally entangled states. Then, we derive
necessary conditions for a state to be distillable as well as to be activable.
These conditions turn out to be also sufficient for a certain family of
multi-qubit states. We use these results to explicitely to construct states
displaying novel properties related to bound entanglement and its activation.
