UNESCO has adopted the first set of global standards on the ethics of neurotechnology amid the rapid advancement in the development of the technologies and increasing investor interest. These standards, which take effect on Nov. 12, 2025, establish safeguards to ensure that neurotechnology improves the lives of those who need it the most without compromising human rights.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has resurrected a previous policy that requires parties to a proceeding at the Patent Trial and Appeals Board to disclose all the parties of interest in the proceeding. PTO said this shift is driven in part by national security considerations, but the reversal forces participants in PTAB proceedings to disclose the identity of any affiliates that may have an interest in the outcome lest the petition for an administrative hearing be denied.

In San Francisco, the first day of Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics 2025 annual meeting offered presentations on the future of the convergence of devices, drugs and AI. The takeaway from the session seems to be that while the future is bright, it will become the present only when payers can find an economic argument to pay for the advances formed by this convergence.

SK Biopharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. and Eurofarma Laboratórios SA launched a new joint venture (JV) called Mentis Care Inc. Oct. 21, dedicated to developing an AI-powered platform for epilepsy management.

The U.K. Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency reported the winners of the second phase of the AI Airlock challenge, which includes the Tortus AI, a medical scribe system developed by physicians in the U.K. National Health Service.

Japan is reimagining how mental health care can be delivered digitally and proactively, with local governments investing in digital technology to create data-driven safety nets that aim to detect distress and deliver help, presenters said during the Bio Japan 2025 conference in Yokohama, Oct. 8 to 10.

Vektor Medical Inc. recently secured CE mark for Vmap, its AI-powered electrocardiogram mapping system, marking a “major milestone” for the company, said CEO Rob Krummen. The regulatory approval from the EU authorities confirms that Vmap meets the stringent safety and performance requirements of the EU Medical Device Regulation, opening the door for clinical use in Europe, he told BioWorld.

ARC (Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate), the innovation arm of Israel’s Sheba Medical Center is looking to use the principles of gaming and simulation to create smarter, more scalable solutions that will benefit both patients and providers.

Pharma companies are collaborating to boost the power of artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery by allowing access to proprietary structural data to train a large language model. Each of the partners is contributing data from several thousand experimentally determined protein:ligand interactions, creating one of the most diverse datasets and the richest chemistry assembled to date for model training.

AI seems to suggest that a world of problems with health care spending may become more manageable, but Stephen Bittinger, a shareholder in the D.C. office of the law firm of Polsinelli PC told BioWorld that all the headaches surrounding validation of these algorithms suggests a need for an independent AI validation institute.