The FDA has granted orphan drug designation and priority review status to Astex Pharmaceuticals' Inqovi, or decitabine and cedazuridine, for treating individuals with myelodysplastic syndromes or chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, after a trial showed that Inqovi had a similar safety profile and drug concentration as intravenous decitabine.

Most longevity and aging research focuses on specific genes in extremely long-lived species, but a growing body of evidence suggests "lifespan is a complex and highly context-dependent trait that calls for a shift in how biologists think about aging," writes Amanda Kowalczyk, a PhD candidate in computational and systems biology. A better approach may be to study the interaction of many genes with similar functions that impact longevity and study those genes and interactions in many species, Kowalczyk writes.

Pioneering Portuguese scientist Maria de Sousa, who founded the American-Portuguese Biomedical Research Fund, died recently at 80 years old. De Sousa was an adjunct professor at Cornell Medical College, ran Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's cell ecology lab, and was known for her research on the thymus, T cells and hereditary hemochromatosis.

Mary Gunn was appointed chief operating officer of contract research organization Health Decisions, where she will oversee client relations. Gunn has held leadership positions at Becton Dickinson, ClinTec International, Crucell and Pfizer, and she was most recently regional vice president of business development for the Asia Pacific region at ICON.

Breast cancer-related mortality risk could be reduced by more than half among survivors of pediatric cancer that involved chest radiography if they began MRI-based breast cancer screenings sometime between 25 and 30 years of age, researchers reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine. MRI with mammogram reduced mortality risk by 56% to 71%, and MRI alone reduced the risk by 56% to 62%, researchers reported.

The term "woman scientist" is grammatically incorrect and implies that women who are scientists are outsiders and somehow lesser than men, writes Rachel Lance, who has a PhD in blast trauma. NASA is replacing male-focused language, such as "crewed" instead of "manned" aircraft, and "maybe, as society slowly edges toward equality, we can at least start to be more equal in our language too, like NASA, and dispose of the grammatically incorrect two-noun woman phrases," Lance writes.

Implicit bias tests showed women, men, girls and boys consistently associated brilliance with men more than women, but participants did not say they thought men are smarter than women, researchers reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. "Stereotypes that portray brilliance as a male trait are likely to hold women back across a wide range of prestigious careers," said lead author Daniel Storage.

Several studies have found that women in life and medical sciences have not seen gains in publication that men have since the coronavirus pandemic began, and researchers suspect the gap is due in part to women's child care duties. Employers in academia can support women by offering options for work-family integration, part-time work, remote work, family-friendly meeting times and paid parental leave, says Miriam Bredella, director of Massachusetts General Hospital's Center for Faculty Development.

Medtronic has signed a 5-year cross-licensing deal with Tandem Diabetes Care to avoid future legal disputes related to diabetes treatment technology. The contract has a provision that prevents both companies from cloning each other's products.

The FDA has given clearance to Baxter for its Altapore Shape bioactive bone graft for bone growth and fusion.