The European Commission is working with Alere Inc., of Waltham, Mass., on the divestitures required for its acquisition by Chicago-based Abbott. As part of that, the terms have been revised on an Alere deal with Quidel Corp. Now, the San Diego-based Quidel will assume direct commercial responsibility for Alere's B-type Naturietic Peptide (BNP) assay business that runs on Beckman Coulter analyzers.

Device-based approaches to pain management are seeing a renaissance of interest as the ongoing opioid crisis highlights the perils and limitations of existing drug treatments. Cleveland, Ohio-based SPR Therapeutics LLC is among the latest beneficiaries of that momentum with its new $25 million series C financing.

Early stage pancreatic cancer is typically asymptomatic, making it difficult to detect before it advances and becomes hard to treat. Johns Hopkins University scientists have developed a novel approach by combining a liquid biopsy based on circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) with an analysis of four protein biomarkers to create the basis for a potential biomarker screening tool for the early identification of pancreatic cancer.