Kyowa Hakko Kirin is committed to expansion, and the deal with Ultragenyx for a first-in-class therapy of a rare bone disorder is small but establishes a clinical trial foothold overseas

Pfizer’s partnership with the Alliance for Lupus Research to co-fund translational projects within the context of the pharma’s CTI program is a first. It’s a novel way to speed promising science into the clinic. But can Pfizer, a non-profit research foundation, and academic researchers reconcile their new roles and variant cultures to make the model work?

Pfizer's ambitious tie-ups with multiple research institutions across several cities is but the latest model of academic-industry collaboration, highlighting pharma's ongoing hunger for fresh approaches to drug discovery.

All but dead a half a dozen years ago, MAKO Surgical is alive and well with an innovative technology platform that both embraces robotics and looks past it. Key to MAKO's strategy: a focus on unicompartmental knee procedures that are extremely difficult to do manually but, company officials hope, are significantly enabled by its robotic arm platform. If company officials are right, MAKO's robotics system could help explode the unicompartmental segment of the knee market without cannibalizing the total knee replacement segment. This year's AAOS meeting was a kind of coming out party for MAKO, whose major challenge now is convincing surgeons that robotics is more than just an intriguing gadget-it's a critical part of the surgical armamentarium