Nothing has arguably hurt pharmaceutical investors and dealmakers quite so often and with such force as novel pain drug development failures. As a result, a once hot field has gone cold. Despite setbacks, great strides have been made in understanding the complex biology of pain. Scientists have discovered numerous new pain pathway targets with the potential for designing effective agents with fewer off-target effects. Improvements that make preclinical studies more predictive of clinical success are also opening up new opportunities. At the same time, drug developers now understand better how to design drug trials that can segment patient populations to demonstrate therapeutic efficacy more precisely, potentially reducing placebo effects and paving the way for an era of personalized pain medicine.

Stent failure is a significant risk in endovascular procedures such as coronary angioplasty. The two primary causes of morbidity and mortality following stent placement are in-stent restenosis (scar tissue growing within the stent and clogging the artery) and in-stent thrombosis (clot formation within the stent, resulting in blockage of arterial blood flow). CorNova strives to treat or eliminate these two common stent complications by integrating innovative technologies into the procedures and devices that practitioners are already using. The company's flagship product, the FiberHalo stent delivery and angioplasty catheter, consists of tiny fiber optics that have been integrated into the catheter itself to measure the vessel from inside the balloon and detect final stent expansion., because stent under-expansion is the leading cause of stent failure.

Brief summaries of recent medtech market and industry developments. This month we cover the medtech industry's recent buying spree and present highlights from the annual meeting of American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

Mark Greener reviews a selection of ion channels currently attracting researchers' attention, demonstrating renewed interest in the clinical and commercial potential of an underexploited therapeutic target