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Healthcare Trust of America Inc., which owns and operates medical-office buildings around the country, is in advanced talks to combine with smaller rival Healthcare Realty Trust Inc. in a deal that could create a company worth more than $10 billion. A cash-and-stock deal could be finalized by early next week, people familiar with the matter said, though the talks could still fall apart. Details of the potential transaction couldn’t be learned. The expected move would culminate a monthslong sale process run by Healthcare Trust of America. (Lombardo and Hoffman, 2/24)

Paraclete, maker of an employer-facing virtual mental wellness offering, raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding from Sovereign's Capital and several individual investors, the company's founder, Vineet Rajan, tells Axios exclusively. Behavioral health is a sizzling sub-sector of the digital health market, and Paraclete targets people with mental health needs other than depression, ADHD or anxiety, the conditions most commonly addressed. (Brodwin, 2/24)

The abrupt dissolution of a blank-check merger on Thursday points to more trouble for the already deflated gene therapy field. Amicus Therapeutics called off a planned spinout of its gene therapy division via a combination with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The $600 million deal, announced five months ago, would have created a new publicly traded gene therapy company called Caritas Therapeutics. But on Thursday, Amicus and its SPAC partner terminated the merger citing “unfavorable market conditions” for new biotech financings, as well as an “increasingly challenging environment for stand-alone gene therapy companies.” (Feuerstein, 2/24)

In 1996, 32,655 Americans died from AIDS. A year later, that number was 16,685. The difference? Protease inhibitors — drugs that prevented HIV from building more copies of itself inside human cells. Acting with record speed, the Food and Drug Administration approved three such drugs in 1996 — the products of a high-intensity race between scientists at Merck, Roche, and Abbott Laboratories. “I feel sort of the same energy now, all these years later,” said John Leonard, a former National Institutes of Health virologist who led Abbott’s work on its first-generation AIDS drug, speaking at a STAT virtual event Thursday. Now the president and CEO of Intellia Therapeutics, Leonard joined STAT senior medical writer Matthew Herper to discuss the pace of clinical advances in genome editing. “It’s the nature of the adventure,” said Leonard. “Thinking about 1979, 1980, inconceivable stuff back then is mundane today.” (Molteni, 2/24)

Health care workers across Maine say they are being attacked by patients more than ever, leaving long-lasting physical and psychological wounds. That is why more than 60 staff members of Maine Medical Center in Portland represented by the Maine State Nurses Association union held a demonstration outside of the hospital on Thursday, with some bringing a petition to hospital president Jeff Sanders. (Marino Jr., 2/24)

Leaders with the South Central Montana Regional Mental Health Center, a coalition of Eastern Montana counties providing mental health resources throughout the region, are frustrated. The Health Center's board chairman and its executive director met on Thursday with the three Yellowstone County commissioners and expressed their concerns about how the Billings-based Substance Abuse Connect has operated over the last six months. (Rogers, 2/24)

They were supposed to be near death and in desperate need of end-of-life care to ease their pain. Authorities, however, allege that many of the patients were not dying but merely unwitting pawns in a sophisticated Medicare fraud scheme engineered by two Inland Empire couples who took in more than $4.2 million in federal reimbursements. State prosecutors say the couples ran two hospice businesses and paid doctors and others for bogus diagnoses or illegal kickbacks for patient referrals — accusations that mirror the type of widespread hospice fraud detailed in a 2020 Los Angeles Times investigation of the industry. (Christensen and Poston, 2/24)

KHN: Health Care Firms Were Pushed To Confront Racism. Now Some Are Investing In Black Startups

Tenn. — Marcus Whitney stands out in Nashville’s $95 billion health care sector as an investor in startups. In addition to co-founding a venture capital firm, he’s organized an annual health tech conference and co-founded the city’s professional soccer club. And, often, he’s the only Black man in the room. So in summer 2020, as Black Lives Matter protesters filled city streets around the country following George Floyd’s murder, Whitney pondered the racial inequalities that are so obvious in his industry — especially locally. (Farmer, 2/25)