Spotlight On... NIH funds Mayo Clinic biobank for Precision Medicine Initiative with $142M; EU agrees to more medical device monitoring; Infant blood draw device gets Class I recall; and more...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded a biobank for the U.S. Precision Medicine Initiative, which aims to conduct chemical and genetic testing on one million people with $142 million over 5 years. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MI, will establish the biobank. The infrastructure needs to be sufficient to store, analyze and share more than 35 million biological samples, the Mayo Clinic said. "This range of information at the scale of 1 million people will be an unprecedented resource for researchers working to understand all the factors that influence health and disease," said NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins in a statement. "The more we understand about individual differences, the better able we will be to tailor the prevention and treatment of illness." More

> Members of the European Parliament agreed to more scrutiny of medical devices including random inspections of producers of marketed devices, stricter checks on notified bodies, review for high-risk by a special committee, device tracing procedures and a requirement for clinical evidence of safety, particularly in higher-risk devices. This has been a long time in coming; the proposal was first made in 2012. More

> Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) has asked a Texas federal judge for its upcoming trials to be put on hold over the allegedly defective Pinnacle hip prosthetics as it intends to appeal an almost $500 million earlier verdict. More

> The FDA has classified a recall of the Hummi Micro-Draw Blood Transfer Device from Hummingbird Med Devices as Class I due to risks associated with potential disconnection, which can lead to blood or fluid leakage in the infants with which the device is used. More