GE Healthcare has introduced an all-digital PET/CT System featuring a new category of digital BGO (crystal-based gamma ray detection) employing a smaller crystal size to deliver greater spatial resolution than other digital scanners. Pitched at the European Association of Nuclear Medicine’s annual meeting in Barcelona on Oct. 16, Omni Legend was designed to accelerate scan times and has demonstrated, according to GE Healthcare global chief marketing officer Sonia Sahney, “impressive small lesion detectability.”

At the Saturday, Oct. 22 session, ‘Basic Science: Correlates of protection, immune response and the host-microbe interaction,’ of the IDWeek 2022 infectious disease conference, moderator Luiz Bermudez, professor at Oregon State University, introduced the latest advances to prevent infections with Treponema pallidum during neurosyphilis (NS), Staphylococcus aureus and osteomyelitis, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis during influenza.

After years of aggressive acquisitions, Medtronic plc joined 3M Co., General Electric Co. and Johnson & Johnson in rationalizing its business by splitting into more focused enterprises. Medtronic will separate its patient monitoring and respiratory therapy groups into a new company with projected annual revenue of $2.2 billion and 8,000 employees in the next 12 to 18 months, assuming regulatory and final board approvals.

It’s been a long road, but Astrazeneca plc’s anti-CTLA4 antibody, tremelimumab, finally earned its first U.S. FDA nod, cleared for use in combination with anti-PD-L1 drug Imfinzi (durvalumab) to treat patients with unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The commercial impact of the dual checkpoint therapy, however, remains to be seen, as it goes up against Roche Holding AG’s combination of Avastin (bevacizumab) and Tecentriq (atezolizumab), which gained standard-of-care status in first-line HCC in 2021.

Researchers based at the City University of New York (CUNY) have designed a deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) model that can improve preclinical predictions of drug responses in humans. As outlined in the Oct. 17, 2022, online issue of Nature Machine Intelligence, the researchers believe their model – a context-aware deconfounding autoencoder (CODE-AE) – can help improve the quality of early drug response prediction and help reduce subsequent clinical trial failures.

Sinaptica Therapeutics Inc. received a U.S. FDA breakthrough device designation for its electromagnetic therapy for Alzheimer’s disease. Sinaptistim-AD combines neurostimulation, brain wave monitoring and artificial intelligence (AI) to address the cognitive and functional decline in patients with the neurological disorder.

In a bit of déjà vu, the U.S. FDA’s Obstetrics, Reproductive and Urologic Drugs Advisory Committee once again voted that Makena (hydroxyprogesterone caproate) should be withdrawn from the U.S. market while a second confirmatory trial is designed and conducted. But this time around, the committee’s 14-1 vote was much more decisive than its 9-7 vote in 2019.