After nearly 10 months of waffling on a $5.8 billion decision, Abbott Laboratories might have spotted an emergency exit from its contract to buy Alere Inc. "Alere is no longer the company Abbott agreed to buy 10 months ago," said Scott Stoffel, divisional vice president of external communications at Abbott. The company cited a series of what it called "damaging business developments" that Alere has suffered since the agreement was signed in late January. Alere lost its billing privileges for a substantial division, has suffered a permanent recall of an important product platform, has...

A common assumption about the rise of digital health care is that technology makes medical practice less human, but some start ups are proving the contrary to be true. One such company, San Francisco-based Augmedix Inc., developed a remote scribe service based on Google Glass that is intended to re-humanize the doctor-patient relationship by eliminating the time physicians spend on mandated electronic health care documentation.

After nearly 10 months of waffling on a $5.8 billion decision, Abbott Laboratories might have spotted an emergency exit from its contract to buy Alere Inc.

A liquid biopsy company that spun out of Illumina Inc. in January to search for what it considers the holy grail of oncology – a blood test capable of detecting cancer at the earliest, most curable, stages – recently took a big first step toward that end. Grail Inc., of Menlo Park, Calif., launched a study that will eventually include up to four-dozen U.S. sites tasked with analyzing blood and tissue samples from 10,000 patients in an effort to characterize the landscape of cell-free DNA profiles in both cancer and non-cancer patients using a...

A liquid biopsy company that spun out of Illumina Inc. in January to search for what it considers the holy grail of oncology – a blood test capable of detecting cancer at the earliest, most curable, stages – recently took a big first step toward that end.

Pump thrombosis has been such a well-established shortcoming of left ventricular assist devices (LVADs), that one heart surgeon went so far as to borrow Winston Churchill's phraseology to describe it as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" for the title of his September 2014 article in the Annals of Cardiothoracic Surgery. But St. Jude Medical Inc. may have unraveled that riddle with its Heartmate 3 LVAD system. According to short-term results of the company's U.S. pivotal study, MOMENTUM 3, there were no cases of pump thrombosis in patients implanted with the...

Pump thrombosis has been such a well-established shortcoming of left ventricular assist devices (LVADs), that one heart surgeon went so far as to borrow Winston Churchill's phraseology to describe it as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" for the title of his September 2014 article in the Annals of Cardiothoracic Surgery. But St. Jude Medical Inc. may have unraveled that riddle with its Heartmate 3 LVAD system.