Abbott Laboratories made plans to enter the cancer screening market with its reported acquisition of Exact Sciences Corp. The deal will pay Exact Sciences shareholders $105 per share in cash, a nearly 50% premium to Exact’s unaffected share price on Nov. 19. That represents a total equity value of approximately $21 billion and an estimated enterprise value of $23 billion.

Ottobock SE & Co. KGaA got the Frankfurt Stock Exchange on its feet and dancing with Germany’s largest IPO in more than 18 months Oct. 9. The €808 million (US$934.23 million) gave the prosthetics company a market capitalization of €4.2 billion (US$4.88 billion), which rapidly rose as the share price shot up from €66 to €72 at the start of trading. The second med-tech to go public in October should have more company soon, with U.S. molecular diagnostics company Billiontoone Inc. filing Oct. 7 for an IPO with placeholder value of $100 million.

Phase Scientific International Ltd. launched China’s largest clinical study for urine-based cervical cancer screening. If successful, the blood-based test could be the first non-invasive test for HPV.

In what represents the first filing to have emerged in the name of Cellect Laboratories Inc., one of the start-up’s co-founders, Claire Theresa Murphy, describes their development of a non-invasive screening method that could one day replace the Pap test.

Globally, over half of people living with HIV are women. But in clinical cure trials, they make up only about 20% of participants. And that gender imbalance is causing researchers to miss out on ways to improve cure strategies. Because women’s immune systems appear to be better at controlling HIV infection in a way that silences the reservoir – the provirus integrated into host cells in infected persons.

Medtronic plc received U.S. FDA approval for Altaviva, a minimally invasive implantable tibial neuromodulation device designed to treat urge urinary incontinence. Insertion near the ankle requires neither sedation nor imaging and patients walk out the clinic door with the device already activated.

Elutia Inc. agreed to sell its Elupro and Cangaroo bioenvelopes for implantable medical devices to Boston Scientific Corp. for $88 million in cash. Elutia will use the funds to further development of NXT-41x, an antibiotic biomatrix designed to reduce post-surgical complications in breast reconstruction.

The financing environment remains difficult for solutions addressing women’s health, Lara Zibners, co-founder and chair of Calla Lily Clinical Care Ltd., told BioWorld. “Until I entered this space, I've never spoken to an investor in any other area who said, ‘I need to go home and ask my wife’,” she said on the sidelines of the LSI conference in London.

Researchers from the University of California, Davis (UC-Davis) continue to assemble intellectual property in support of their development of methods and techniques which improve the accuracy of wearable sensor technologies.

The U.K. Medicines and Healthcare products Agency (MHRA) is calling for more research into the vaginal microbiome as a way to redress the historic under-representation of women in clinical studies, which it said has contributed to “critical shortcomings” in understanding of female-specific conditions.