The U.K. government has published a road map for phasing out animal testing in life sciences research and announced £75 million (US$98.6 million) for work to develop nonanimal models, leaving scientists concerned because they say, in many cases, there can never be meaningful alternatives to using live animals.

At first glance, the results of the CLOSURE-AF study would seem to spell doom for left atrial appendage closure devices for patients at risk of stroke, but there is some noise in the signal, including that the devices used in the study no longer represent the state of the med-tech art.

Patients and their doctors are no fans of long-term use of direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) after ablation treatment for atrial fibrillation, but three-year data from the OCEAN trial suggests that some patients may not need these DOACs after all, an outcome that qualifies as a crowd-pleaser for all but the makers of these pharmaceutical agents.

SPT Labtech Ltd. recently partnered with Alithea Genomics SA to integrate its firefly liquid handling platform with Alithea’s single-cell RNA-sequency technology to create a scalable and reproducible workflow for transcriptomics research.

A four-way interagency initiative in South Korea, started in 2020, is working to bolster funding for the local medical device industry and grow homegrown devices for the global market.