Although physicians still struggle with the best ways to treat patients suspected of having prostate cancer, a new group of genetic-based tests could provide new tools that will help improve diagnostic accuracy. These new biomarkers offer hope in reducing the number of patients who receive unnecessary treatment for cancers that are not actually present in their bodies and for those cancers not aggressive enough to cause harm.

As a bribery crackdown spreads into the broader health care industry in China, analysts offer advice on surviving the landscape and forecast its duration and intensity.

While the PSA test is still widely recognized as a valuable prostate cancer screening tool, its dismal accuracy record has created an acute need for more effective and informative alternatives, and the field of molecular diagnostics, based on gene-based biomarkers, is leading the charge.

As befits this struggling economy, each of the Big Three in diagnostic imaging sounded downbeat in their 2008 year-end financial assessments. But more so than the other two, GE Healthcare focuses on the development of new imaging agents, owing to its acquisition of Amersham in late 2003. Ant that integration has been admittedly slow.