Three months earlier than an expected update on a deal, Becton, Dickinson and Co. reported its biosciences and diagnostic solutions business will combine with Waters Corp. in a transaction valued at $17.5 billion. The resulting enterprise will operate under the Waters name and use its trading symbol (NYSE:WAT). Waters CEO Udit Batra will head the combined company.

Serac Imaging Systems Ltd. reported encouraging data from two clinical trials demonstrating the effectiveness of its Seracam portable hybrid gamma-optical camera as a point-of-care imaging solution. The studies show the camera’s value in nuclear medicine, particularly for small organ imaging and image-guided surgery, while also revealing new potential applications beyond those initially expected.

Companies in the life sciences must tread carefully when it comes to the Anti-Kickback Statute, but a recent advisory opinion by the Office of Inspector General lends little clarity on the point.

The med tech patent wars opened a new front in the region of screening tests for colorectal cancer, pitting Exact Sciences Corp., of Madison, Wisc., against St. Louis-based Geneoscopy Inc.

Degradation is a therapeutic strategy that could offer possibilities to get at currently undruggable target proteins. In targeted degradation, compounds induce interactions between a target protein and a protein that can tag the target for degradation. In principle, there are several pathways that could be used for such tagging; the most attention has gone to ubiquitin ligases, in particular cereblon, a protein that is part of a ubiquitin ligase complex and the target of several approved drugs.

Lunit Inc. reported a new collaboration with Microsoft Corp. July 2 to jointly develop medical AI programs accessible on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

The U.S. Supreme Court preserved the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force coverage mandate that requires payers to cover certain preventive services at no cost to patients in a 6-3 ruling. That’s very good news for many diagnostics companies including Exact Sciences Corp. and Guardant Health Inc. as well as companies that manufacture HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PReP) medications such as Gilead Sciences Inc.

The U.K. government will offer women home-testing kits for cervical screening as part of an effort to tackle barriers and get more of them taking this potentially life-saving test.

Despite raising the price of its IPO twice, Caris Life Sciences Inc. left money on the table with a 33% increase in price as soon as trading commenced on the Nasdaq, though no one is squawking about raising nearly $500 million. The cancer diagnostics company initially priced its IPO at $16 to $18, then raised it to $19 to $20, before closing on a price of $21 per share. As management rang the bell for the start of trade on June 18, shares began trading at $28.