While weekly global and U.S. confirmed cases of COVID-19 are below each of the last two years, infectious disease experts remain on guard. There are still about 1,500 people dying around the world each day, including 350 in the U.S., and the SARS-CoV-2 virus may continue to find ways to outmaneuver current treatments and vaccines.

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. has agreed to acquire The Binding Site Group (BSG) from a shareholder consortium in a $2.6 billion cash transaction that folds in neatly with Thermo Fisher’s existing product portfolio. The acquisition should be completed in the first half of 2023, but while the news had only a modest effect on Thermo’s share prices, this transaction should boost adjusted earnings per share by seven cents in the first full year after the transaction has closed.

Nowadays, there are many tools for cancer diagnosis, from imaging techniques to biopsies. In traditional blood tests, liquid biopsy bursts onto the scene as an explosion of possibilities driven by molecular techniques for the detection and sequencing of proteins or genetic material. But specialists are cautious because they know that in liquid biopsies not everything is detected. At the ENA 2022 session “The role of ctDNA in clinical trials,” Marie Morfouace, a translational researcher at the EORTC, presented “ctDNA in clinical trial practice today,” where she described the balance of the possibilities of the liquid biopsy when confronting it with the results in patients offered by the studies published to date.

Researchers from the University of Saskatchewan have developed a novel theranostic candidate, [67Cu]EB-TATE, as an alternative to [177Lu]DOTATATE, for the imaging of gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NET). EB-TATE, which is a derivative of octreotate with evans blue (EB), was radiolabeled with electron linear accelerator-produced 67CuCl2.

The U.K. is launching a £230 million (US$260 million) project to build a database linking the health records and genetic information of 5 million people, which will be open for discovery research and as a source of clinical trial recruits for academics and companies.

Enhanc3D Genomics Ltd. has raised £10 million (US$11.3 million) in a series A round to advance development of its Genlink3D technology for directly linking gene regulators in non-coding DNA to their target protein coding genes.

The U.K. is launching a £230 million (US$260 million) project to build a database linking the health records and genetic information of 5 million people, which will be open for discovery research and as a source of clinical trial recruits for academics and companies.

Radiopharm Theranostics Ltd.’s phase II F-18 Pivalate positron emission tomography trial in brain metastases saw positive results with high uptake regardless of the origin of primary tumors, showing that Pivalate could be used to monitor brain metastases.