Boston Scientific Corp. moved to acquire the balance of Nalu Medical Inc. in a $533 million cash deal, expanding its chronic pain portfolio with the addition of peripheral nerve stimulation. The Nalu neurostimulation system delivers mild electrical impulses to interrupt aberrant pain signals from nerves in the shoulder, knee and lower back before they reach the brain.

Caught between the rock and the hard place of most-favored nation (MFN) pricing and the threat of a hefty biopharma sector tariff, drug companies marketing in the U.S. are exploring their options. Several large firms already have committed millions and billions of dollars in investment in new or expanded U.S.-based manufacturing facilities to avoid tariffs on finished drugs.

The U.S. FDA named the first nine recipients of the recently unveiled commissioner’s national priority voucher (CNPV) program aimed at addressing unmet public health needs by shortening regulatory review times to as little as one to two months. For one of those firms, Disc Medicine Inc., which submitted an NDA for bitopertin for rare genetic disorder erythropoietic protoporphyria in September, that could mean a potential approval before the end of 2025.

ISS became the third proxy advisory firm to recommend shareholders vote against the proposed sale of Staar Surgical Co. to Alcon AG, joining Glass, Lewis & Co. LLC and Egan-Jones Ratings Co.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has proposed to limit the use of administrative challenges to patents when the patent in dispute is already the subject of litigation in district court, a change that many in the life sciences might see as an improvement over the current hyper-litigious environment.

Aicuris Anti-Infective Cures AG is preparing to file for U.S. FDA approval after reporting positive phase III results for lead antiviral pritelivir in the healing of refractory herpes simplex virus lesions in immunocompromised patients.

Dianthus Therapeutics Inc. has joined the recent trend of companies licensing therapies in development from China. The company will pay as much as $1 billion to Nanjing Leads Biolabs Co. Ltd. for DNTH-212, a bifunctional BDCA2 and BAFF/APRIL inhibitor to treat autoimmune disorders.

Success by nearly all measures with Praxis Precision Medicines Inc.’s essential tremor phase III candidate, ulixacaltamide, drove the company’s stock up significantly and provided solid data for an NDA filing planned for early 2026.

Genedx LLC partnered with Illumina Inc. to test whether Illumina's constellation map read technology could shed light on hard-to-detect variants that appear in rare diseases. Constellation met or exceeded the ability of other sequencing methods to detect variants implicated in multiple disorders and worked across a range of sample types, a study presented at the American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG) Annual Meeting in Boston on Oct. 15 found.

Sweeping “radical” changes in both the U.S. FDA and China’s drug development landscape are keeping the global life science industry on its toes in assessing what’s temporary and what’s not, speakers said at the Bioplus Interphex (BIX) Korea 2025 conference in Seoul, South Korea, on Oct. 15.