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.

Breaking up isn’t so hard to do, after all. Just two years after spinning off its consumer products as Kenvue Inc., Johnson & Johnson aims to part ways with its orthopedics unit, which will take with it the Depuy Synthes name first created when Synthes Inc. married into the J&J Depuy ortho unit in 2012 for a tidy sum of $19.7 billion. Depuy was itself acquired in 1998.

Who knew? In addition to adopting a new name, Kneu Health Ltd. recently raised $5.6 million in a seed funding round for its smart-phone-based platform which helps to monitor neurological disorders to enable timely intervention. The funds secured will be used to expand commercial operations in the U.S., scale deployments for Parkinson's disease and advance the monitoring capabilities of the platform for dementia.

The budget impasse between Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill has implications for a wide range of federal government operations, including at the U.S. FDA, which is absorbing another round of layoffs and cannot accept new premarket filings that require user fee submissions.

Japan is reimagining how mental health care can be delivered digitally and proactively, with local governments investing in digital technology to create data-driven safety nets that aim to detect distress and deliver help, presenters said during the Bio Japan 2025 conference in Yokohama, Oct. 8 to 10.

John Squires, the recently anointed director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, has determined that a machine learning (ML) patent application met the standard for patent subject matter eligibility, an outcome that seems to bode well for ML-based patent applications going forward.