Osiris Therapeutics Inc. is slated to be acquired by orthopedics player Smith & Nephew plc for about $660 million in cash. The deal is focused on skin substitutes – particularly allografts made of donor tissue that the London-based company expects will help to ramp up its wound management business.

New York-based startup Paige.AI has gained the first disclosed breakthrough device designation from the U.S. FDA for the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in cancer diagnosis. Pathology is an obvious early place for AI in health care; it's imaging-heavy, and a segment where AI is already being integrated. In addition, there's a high degree of variability between pathologists in their assessments, while digital pathology slides are becoming more commonplace, and patient outcomes could be improved by more accurate, consistent pathology reports.

Shockwave Medical Inc. is aiming to establish a new standard of care for the minimally invasive treatment of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Its intravascular lithotripsy (IVL) system uses sonic pressure waves to remove calcified plaque that narrows or blocks the blood vessels connected to the heart.

Startup Rani Therapeutics LLC has gotten positive safety results in a first-in-human trial of its pill that's designed to enable painless injections of biologic drugs into the small intestine. Later this year, the San Jose, Calif.-based company plans to start a clinical trial with the robotic pill that includes a drug-filled resorbable needle – the initial safety test was without any drug.

Startup Rani Therapeutics LLC has gotten positive safety results in a first-in-human trial of its pill that's designed to enable painless injections of biologic drugs into the small intestine. Later this year, the San Jose, Calif.-based company plans to start a clinical trial with the robotic pill that includes a drug-filled resorbable needle – the initial safety test was without any drug.

Genetics can only tell us so much when it comes to understanding cancer. It turns out that interrogating the myriad processes involved in the translation of DNA into actual bodily processes, as well as alterations over time, are crucial. To that end, researchers at the NIH are pursuing a more refined understanding of epigenetics, which is defined by how biochemical processes work to modify gene expression.