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After a few troubled years in the nest, Heron Therapeutics' opioid alternative for post-operative pain is ready to take flight. The FDA on Thursday approved Heron's dual-acting anesthetic Zynrelef, an extended-release combination of the local anesthetic bupivacaine and the anti-inflammatory drug meloxicam. (Kansteiner, 5/13)

Diagnostics that can identify biomarkers of disease in the blood are helping speed drug trials for intractable conditions like Alzheimer's. Blood biomarker diagnostics can help pharmaceutical companies identify the right patients to enroll in drug trials for difficult-to-diagnose neurological conditions without resorting to more expensive and invasive methods like brain scans or spinal taps. (Walsh, 5/15)

One day in 2012, Weilin Xie got a call out of the blue telling him he had $1 million coming his way. No, Xie had not won a lottery. His former professor, Brigham Young University biochemist Daniel Simmons, had called to tell him the money was for Xie’s participation 20 years earlier in research that led to the development of blockbuster anti-inflammatory drug Celebrex. Xie did not know what to say, he would later testify in court filings, except to express gratitude for the financial recognition of his hard work in Simmons’ lab at BYU. Xie would later learn to his dismay that Simmons hadn’t shared the full picture with him. (Maffly, 5/16)

For Francis deSouza, the CEO of DNA sequencer manufacturer Illumina, the hardest moments of the Covid-19 pandemic are still fresh. He has, he says, been talking to his aunt, who is in her 90s and lives in a village in Goa, India, who is afraid to leave her home. “She’s confused, and there’s a lot of misinformation out there,  so it’s heartbreaking to watch her go through this and be unable to help from so far away,” deSouza said last week at the STAT Health Tech Summit. “And that story has played out so many times over the last year.” (Herper, 5/17)