Biotech & Medtech
Biotech & Medtech news — Monday 19 October 2026
33 stories from 5 sources, every one in English. Each links to its publisher.
-
AdvaMed’s 4 Policy Priorities, According to Its CEO
MedCity News
AdvaMed CEO Scott Whitaker outlined four policy priorities at the MedTech Conference: tariffs, FDA user fees, payment and coverage, and cybersecurity. The post AdvaMed’s 4 Policy Priorities, According to Its CEO appeared first on MedCity…
-
Merck KGaA’s $1.1B Silence Therapeutics Buyout Brings RNA Drug for Rare Blood Cancer
MedCity News
The Silence Therapeutics acquisition gives Merck KGaA a drug ready for a pivotal test in the blood disorder polycythemia vera. Silence’s RNA therapy offers a different approach and a potential dosing advantage over a Takeda Pharmaceutical…
-
With $5M, Phantom GI Plans to Develop Minimally Invasive Alternative Ostomy Surgery Device
MedCity News
Phantom GI, a Tel Aviv-based medical startup, is developing the PercStoma device, a minimally invasive alternative to traditional ostomy surgery. The device would target patients with bowel obstructions who might otherwise be considered…
-
Trump orders creation of NIH division, task force on women’s health
STAT News
A new division in the National Institutes of Health and a new task force within the White House will advance the cause of women’s health, an executive order signed by President Trump promises. “Beginning today, we will change the reality…
-
Opinion: I was a Theranos whistleblower. In ‘You Can See Everything,’ Elizabeth Holmes is still lying
STAT News
This essay contains spoilers for “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder’s new film about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. “ You Can See Everything ” is a hilarious, thrilling, fascinating, beautiful piece of art. What it certainly is…
-
Disc’s once-spurned rare disease drug to get a second chance at approval
BioPharma Dive
Months after the FDA rejected its treatment for a rare light-sensitivity disease, the biotech claimed success in a Phase 3 trial and now plans to re-engage regulators.
-
STAT+: The umpires getting rich off surprise medical bills, and MLB job lock
STAT News
This is the online version of STAT’s weekly email newsletter Health Care Inc. Sign up here . We’ve got a meaty edition here for you, coming off our annual STAT Summit. We’re also still grieving the loss of Helen Branswell (more below). You…
-
STAT+: China moves to restrict foreign biotech acquisitions
STAT News
Want to stay on top of the science and politics driving biotech today? Sign up to get our biotech newsletter in your inbox. I might have been just as unblinking as Elizabeth during the three hours of “ You Can See Everything .” Seats-edge…
-
Merck KGaA bets on RNAi with $1.3B Silence buyout
BioPharma Dive
The acquisition gives the German company a promising blood disorder medicine that passed a Phase 2 test and could threaten a Takeda drug.
-
Two former Republican lawmakers say the GOP’s vaccine position is a liability
STAT News
Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here . Did you see “You Can See Everything” over the weekend? If so, please send me your hot takes and well-reasoned reviews. I’ve…
-
STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about Roche investments in Germany, a Gilead bowel disease drug, and more
STAT News
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to another working week. We hope the weekend respite was relaxing and invigorating. Now, though, that oh-too-familiar routine of meetings, deadlines, and the like has returned with a vengeance. You knew…
-
Roche inks $15B ADC pact with Hansoh; Veradermics scores in another baldness study
BioPharma Dive
Roche is paying Hansoh $400 million up front in a broad deal involving several ADCs. Elsewhere, another top investor formed a China-focused fund and Ultragenyx sold a second review voucher.
-
Diagnosis Is Beside the Point
MedCity News
Some of the thorniest problems in medicine that AI can improve have nothing to do with diagnosis. They have to do with triage. The post Diagnosis Is Beside the Point appeared first on MedCity News .
-
How early should you engage a CDMO?
BioPharma Dive
Discover which CMC activities can move forward early, and which decisions need to remain flexible.
-
From strategy to scale: How Saudi Arabia is building a biotech ecosystem
BioPharma Dive
Saudi Arabia’s biotech strategy now has named partners, sites and capital behind it.
-
Extractables in single-use systems used in ADC manufacturing
BioPharma Dive
Explore extractables data supporting single-use systems in ADC manufacturing.
-
STAT+: Gilead’s IBS drug eliminated symptoms for patients, mid-stage study finds
STAT News
An oral treatment from Gilead Sciences eliminated the symptoms experienced by patients with a type of inflammatory bowel disease, mid-stage study results reported Monday that could boost the biotech’s push to develop new drugs for…
-
Opinion: Measles is back — and becoming a midterm liability for Republicans
STAT News
As physicians, we’ve spent our careers giving parents the information they need to protect themselves and their families. As former members of Congress, we’ve helped our party promote sound public health policies. But right now, both of…
-
STAT+: Top immunology association divided over $8.4-billion California ballot measure to fund the field, emails show
STAT News
SAN DIEGO — Internal emails obtained by STAT show that the American Association of Immunologists, the field’s leading scientific society, is sharply divided over California’s Proposition 38, even though it would provide $8.4 billion in…
-
STAT+: How the No Surprises Act’s nonprofit arbitrators are operating like ‘mini gods’ and getting rich doing it
STAT News
Before it won a lucrative government contract, iMPROve Health’s very future was in question. The Michigan-based nonprofit lost over $2 million in 2022 alone — over a third of its revenue — on top of losses in previous years. There were…
-
Opinion: My mother killed herself. I wish assisted suicide had been an option
STAT News
I can’t count how many times my mother attempted suicide. It first happened when I was 15, in 1999. The final time — when she actually died — came when I was 32, in 2016. Read the rest… © Photo: Charlotte Bosch, courtesy Torie Bosch; Photo…
-
STAT+: Does Isomorphic Labs have what it takes to revolutionize drugmaking?
STAT News
On a day in late 2024, Avery Klemmer found herself on yet another transatlantic flight with her colleagues at the VC firm Thrive Capital. The team was flying to London to woo the secretive startup Isomorphic Labs — a mission that many…
-
Upper bounds on the number of causal pieces in spiking neural networks
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.22484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The input space of single-spike neural networks decomposes into causal pieces, and the number of causal pieces has been shown to provide a lower bound on the approximation error for some…
-
From anatomy to computation: axonal delay dispersion shifts neurons from event to sequence detection
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2609.04195v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cortical neurons fire sparsely -- often fewer than one spike per sensory window -- so a neuron's spike count in that window carries little information, and its spike timing can…
-
Brain-to-Language Decoding: Paradigms, Signals, Methods, Evaluation, Practical Use and Beyond
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2609.27650v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Brain-to-language decoding translates neural activity associated with language production, internal speech and perception into linguistic or expressive outputs. It offers a route to…
-
QD-Rec: Open-Ended Evolution of Recommendations via Quality-Diversity
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.23470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-ended search combined with foundation models has produced advances such as faster algorithms, new results on open mathematical problems, and self-improving agents. We extend this…
-
Wavelength Diversity Expands the Expressive Power of Optical Computing
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.23070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Universal function approximation underpins neural networks' capacity to represent nonlinear relationships, but realizing this capability in optical hardware requires engineering the…
-
Riding the Fixed-Point Curve: Image Classification in the Continuous Thought Machine
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.19220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Continuous Thought Machine (CTM) is a recurrent network that attends to inputs and makes predictions based on the synchronization between its neurons. On tasks spanning many…
-
When the implementation matters more than the algorithm: NSGA-II and other multi-objective optimizers in engineering design tools
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.22397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Engineering design tools increasingly embed optimizers as ready-made components that users select by algorithm name, while operator settings and bound, integer and duplicate handling stay…
-
Algorithm Modelization: Transforming Optimization Algorithms into Evolvable Intelligence
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.23161v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can algorithms be learned and evolved as models, rather than repeatedly redesigned as programs? We explore this question by introducing Algorithm Modelization, a new paradigm that turns…
-
SpikeQ: Spike-Guided Post-Training Quantization for Spiking Neural Networks
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.23046v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On neuromorphic chips, spiking neural networks (SNNs) consume far less energy than artificial neural networks (ANNs), but the limited memory of these chips requires low-bit synaptic weights…
-
STAT+: Cambridge scientist David Sabatini speaks out after courtroom victory: ‘The hardest years of my life’
STAT News
For five years, biologist David Sabatini has replayed his downfall from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the back of his mind, like a movie on repeat. More often than not, he tried to hit pause, avoiding headlines about his…
-
Editor’s pick: Bioptimus
Nature Biotechnology
Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 19 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03345-4 Each year, Nature Biotechnology highlights companies that received sizeable early-stage funding in the previous year. Bioptimus is developing…