COVID-19 brought the world’s top pharmaceutical companies together to cooperate on treatments and vaccines, and now, Novartis’ corporate responsibility chief is hoping they will pick up his calls for a big ask.

Though demand for COVID-19 testing this year has receded faster than many diagnostics companies expected, the quick return of patients to the clinic for routine care—such as screenings for heart disease or cancer—may be picking up the slack.

After Roche initially denied conversations with the FDA about its Alzheimer’s disease drug candidate gantenerumab, CEO Severin Schwan has now confirmed they are talking to the regulator.

Glaucoma can cause blindness and has no cure, as current therapies only slow vision loss by decreasing elevated eye pressure. Mount Sinai researchers have developed a one-time gene therapy that they hope will prevent vision loss induced by glaucoma and other conditions that cause retinal degeneration.

There’s been precious little good news for Seres Therapeutics of late, and the woe continues today as it records another trial failure.

An investigational breast cancer drug Bayer recently licensed from Systems Oncology has shown strong antitumor responses in mice, offering early clues as to why the German pharma shelled out $25 million for the preclinical asset last September.

The idea of implanting a device inside the heart to block blood flow may sound counterintuitive, but in the case of left atrial appendage closure devices like Boston Scientific’s Watchman FLX, that intentional blockage could save lives.

Drug development for the liver condition alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD) has had its ups and downs lately, with Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals and Takeda posting phase 2 success and Vertex reporting two failures in less than a year. Now, Dicerna is revealing promising early results for its RNA-silencing drug for liver disease stemming from the rare, genetic disorder.

In news sure to excite even the most melancholy of artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, mental health platform Woebot has closed its series B funding round with a whopping $90 million.

Though tech giants Microsoft, Amazon and Google typically vie against one another to become a collaborator’s sole cloud provider, they’ll be working in harmony for once to support the National Institutes of Health’s biomedical research work.