China’s National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) recently met with a delegation from Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority (HSA) to discuss cooperation in the two agencies’ regulation of medical products, part of a series of efforts by NMPA to expand its use of regulatory reliance.

Japan has long been one of the premier markets for medical technology, but this market has suffered from a reputation for slow adoption of technologies outside the cardiovascular device space, a problem the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency is keen to address.

While the pace of executive orders (EOs) coming out of the White House has slowed, the Trump administration is still churning them out. As of the end of the third quarter, President Donald Trump had issued 209 EOs. Of those, BioWorld tracked 37 that directly impact drug and device R&D, regulatory burdens, pricing and market competition.

Patent litigation doesn’t always create outlandish damages awards but when it does, the outlandishness typically trends toward inordinately large sums. This was decidedly not the case in the Federal Circuit hearing in a patent lawsuit pitting Intuitive Surgical Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif., against Rex Medical LP, of Conshohocken, Pa., given the damages awarded to Rex amounted to a mere $1.

Breaking up isn’t so hard to do, it seems. 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 up 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.

Private equity firm Keensight Capital acquired a majority stake in Bedfont Scientific Ltd. in a move that will allow the company to expand the use of its devices for breath analysis and monitoring worldwide. Although the value of the deal was undisclosed, Keensight typically invests in profitable companies generating revenues in the range of €10 million to €400 million.