The market for percutaneous catheter-based heart procedures such as transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) has been developing at a rapid pace, but vascular access and closure devices have not been able to keep up.

Agile Therapeutics (Princeton, New Jersey) reported new results from a Phase III pivotal trial of AG200-15 (the Agile Patch), the company's once-weekly low-dose combination birth control patch containing ethinyl estradiol (EE) in combination with levonorgestrel (LNG). The data were presented yesterday at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' (ACOG; Washington) 60th annual clinical meeting in San Diego.

An Army wife friend of mine is diabetic and has been taking insulin for eight years. Last fall she and her husband were moved to a new duty station where she was assigned a new primary care manager at a military hospital that shall remain shameless – oops, I mean nameless. When she tried to order her diabetic supplies, including insulin, a representative of the hospital told her she couldn’t possibly be diabetic because they didn’t have any record of her diabetes. I have experienced similar frustrations with the same military hospital because of my own unusual medical history. It...

In what could be the biggest medtech deal of the year so far, the boards of Hologic (Bedford, Massachusetts) and Gen-Probe (San Diego) have approved an agreement under which Hologic would acquire all of the outstanding shares of Gen-Probe for $82.75 a share in cash, or a total enterprise value of about $3.7 billion.