Aptus Endosystems (Sunnyvale, California), a device company developing technology for endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR), said it has received FDA 510(k) clearance for its thoracic-length HeliFX Aortic Securement System.

A breakthrough medical procedure that would have sounded like science fiction more than five years ago now holds a very real promise to cure tracheal cancer. The technology involved also has potential for eventually treating esophageal cancer.

iWalk (Bedford, Massachusetts) has raised $17 million in a private Series D equity financing round led by Gilde Healthcare Partners. Geoff Pardo, partner at Gilde, has joined iWalk's board.

The U.S. healthcare system blows close to $750 billion a year – about 30% of health spending – on unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud, and other problems, according to a new report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM; Washington).

Testing for antibiotic resistance and susceptibility where staph infections are concerned is an ongoing concern in healthcare and a topic that is being discussed this week at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) meeting in San Francisco. Currently the only rapid test cleared by FDA to differentiate methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections from methicillin susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) infections is the KeyPath MRSA/MSSA blood culture test, from MicroPhage (Longmont, Colorado), which provides same-day results for these deadly infections.

The future medical applications are potentially limitless when artificially engineered tissues are embedded with networks of biocompatible nanoscale wires, according to one of the lead researchers of a multi-institutional team that has developed a method for doing just that. These networks mark the first time that electronics and tissue have been truly merged in 3-D and allow direct tissue sensing and potentially stimulation.