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Ray of Sunlight

May 28, 2009

It's not all bad out there for biotech. The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog lists five positive developments. Namely, Exelixis is getting $140 million from Sanofi-Aventis in exchange for licensing two experimental cancer drugs; MAP Pharmaceuticals has received promising results from a late-stage trial of a migraine drug; Amgen will pay $50 million to Cytokinetics for a heart-failure drug; Johnson & Johnson will buy Cougar Biotechnology for $894 million; and finally, after reporting positive results from its prostate cancer drug, Dendreon raised $221 million.

Breaking News
The Scan

Gone, But Now Reconstructed SARS-CoV-2 Genomes

In a preprint, a researcher describes his recovery of viral sequences that had been removed from a common database.

Rare Heart Inflammation Warning

The Food and Drug Administration is adding a warning about links between a rare inflammatory heart condition and two SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, Reuters reports.

Sandwich Sampling

The New York Times sent tuna sandwiches for PCR analysis.

Nature Papers Describe Gut Viruses, New Format for Storing Quantitative Genomic Data, More

In Nature this week: catalog of DNA viruses of the human gut microbiome, new dense depth data dump format to store quantitative genomic data, and more.