St. Jude Medical (NYSE:STJ) (St. Paul, Minn.) said that it has agreed to acquire Thoratec (NASDAQ:THOR) (Pleasanton, Calif.) for $63.50 per share in a cash transaction valued at about $3.4 billion.

The goalpost for a health care system solely focused on personalized medicine always gets closer when the FDA clears devices and technologies like Medtronic's (NYS:MDT) GenCut biopsy system. The tool works with the company's superDimension navigation system – a device that's often called a GPS tracking system for the lung. Medtronic reported launching the device, earlier this week.

The race for med-tech companies to get a bioabsorbable stent (BVS) on the U.S. market for coronary intervention procedures is quickly heating up. Abbott Vascular (Santa Clara, Calif.), a division of Abbott (NYSE: ABT) (Abbott Park, Ill.), is pulling away from other competitors in the space and has developed a BVS that can be fully dissolved within the body.