Rahul Rao, the deputy director of the FTC Bureau of Competition, discussed the agency’s thinking on recent pharma deals that it viewed as anti-competitive.

Ankur Dhingra has replaced Joydeep Goswami as Illumina’s chief financial officer after Goswami spent just 14 months on the job. The San Diego-based sequencing and array tech company also appointed Jakob Wedel as chief of strategy and corporate development officer.

The Federal Trade Commission broke new ground last year in its opposition to M&A transactions and challenge of Orange Book patent listings. The biopharma community is waiting to see if deals will face similar hurdles in 2024 and whether there will be legal battles if manufacturers of drug-device combination products decline to delist their patents. Researchers advocate that the FTC extend its inquiry to device patents on GLP-1 receptor agonists, including Wegovy and Ozempic.

Medtech Insight's News We're Watching highlights a few medtech industry developments we are following: Illumina will lay off 111 people from its San Diego headquarters as it comes to grips with the impending Grail divestiture; a team of researchers have devised a way to use spinal cord stimulators to give amputees "feeling" in a leg that is no longer there; Samsung earns FDA de novo for sleep apnea monitor.