One of the largest med-tech deals of 2023 was wiped off the charts when Medtronic plc terminated a $738 million agreement to acquire South Korean wearable insulin patch maker Eoflow Co. Ltd., citing “multiple breaches” under its agreements, on Dec. 6.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven tools have the ability to design new drugs, with a bit of help from humans, said Anders Hogner, from Astrazeneca plc’s R&D department at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Europe in London. “We don’t have anything out there yet,” he added, but the company appears to be working on it.

Wubin Bai, assistant professor of applied physical sciences, and members of his lab at UNC-Chapel Hill have developed a wearable, wireless sensing patch for deep tissue monitoring of multiple biometric indicators, including tissue oximetry, pulse oximetry, photoplethysmography, heart pulsation, and respiration.

Conncons GmbH filed for patent protection of its networked medical infusion systems. The connecting components of their infusion systems house sensors that can detect data associated with medications in drug reservoirs.

The mRNA technology used in vaccines against viral infections could also be developed for cancer therapies. A group of scientists has designed a circular RNA (circRNA) encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) that acts in the mitochondria of tumor cells through the protein gasdermin-D (GSDMD) and reduces adenocarcinoma. The work was published on Oct. 16, 2023, in Nature Cancer.

No one is looking in the rearview mirror at Medtronic plc as a fresh U.S. FDA approval for the next generation version of its intrathecal drug delivery system allows the company to leave behind a spate of problems associated with its Sychromed II device. The device delivers medication directly to the fluid surrounding the spinal cord via a small catheter positioned to deposit the drug at the site of most severe pain. The targeted delivery improves management of chronic and cancer-related pain as well as management of severe spasticity without use of systemic opioids.

Inventors from the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy reported filing a patent for a graphene-based device for the targeted mucosal and transmucosal delivery and/or controlled release of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) for various therapeutic applications when on-demand drug administration is needed.

Proteome analysis with artificial intelligence has made it possible to create a catalog of all possible missense mutations in the human genome to predict diseases.

A research team based at MIT and Harvard has engineered a bacterial injection system to precisely deliver proteins to human cells. This work, published online March 29, 2023, in Nature, is important as while more and more molecular therapies are being developed, off-target effects are always a concern and precise targeting of cells and tissues can still be a challenge.