In the final debate before the Iowa caucuses, the six leading contenders to be the Democratic presidential candidate had an opportunity to lay out how they would deal with U.S. prescription drug prices.

SAN FRANCISCO – Major genetic research efforts designed to encompass millions of people globally have been setting up their infrastructure in recent years to serve both researchers and patients. This work is being done by major national initiatives, such as All of Us in the U.S. and Genomics England in the U.K., as well as by health care systems such as Intermountain and Kaiser.

SAN FRANCISCO – Guardant Health Inc. has set the standard for liquid biopsy. That success has catapulted the Redwood City, Calif.-based company from an IPO in the fall of 2018 to a current valuation in excess of $7 billion. It has made its name – and much of its revenue – with its Guardant360 test, a molecular diagnostic test that assesses 74 cancer-related genes from the circulating tumor DNA to aid in designing the best treatment for advanced cancer patients with solid tumors.

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear the case of Athena v. Mayo, which many hoped would ease the patent subject matter eligibility problem. This outcome leaves Congress and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as the only likely sources of resolution for the problem, but there is skepticism as to whether either of these parties is both willing and able to overcome the impasse.

SAN FRANCISCO – Single-cell analytics has the potential to replace all sorts of biology laboratory equipment, expects Pleasanton, Calif.-based 10x Genomics Inc.

SAN FRANCISCO – This was the final presentation for Omar Ishrak at the J.P. Morgan (JPM) Healthcare Conference. He has held the CEO position at Medtronic plc since June 2011. During that period, the Dublin-based company managed to roughly quadruple its valuation to $160 billion from $40 billion – making Ishrak’s tenure clearly a successful one.

SAN FRANCISCO – Dexcom Inc. is working hard to take its business to the next level. Wall Street has been rewarding it heavily, doubling its market cap to about $21 billion since the end of 2018. But investors pulled back a tad on the company’s presentation at the J.P. Morgan (JPM) Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, sending shares down about 4% despite beating analyst expectations.

As regular as clockwork, U.S. patients were hit with a spate of price hikes on prescription drugs last week – even as they were faced with once again having to meet their hefty annual deductibles.

Amyloid and tau proteins are both involved in the disease pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. The diagnostic and treatment research focus has long been on amyloid, which has proven almost entirely fruitless after decades of effort. But tau is becoming better understood, as investigational tau imaging agents offer the ability to visualize its presence in the brain.