Kentucky’s Jewish Hospital and St. Mary’s HealthCare is eliminating 500 jobs this month. The layoffs represent the first large-scale cuts in a Louisville-area hospital system since the recession began.

OXiGENE, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel therapeutics to treat cancer and eye diseases, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with certain institutional investors to sell 6,578,945 shares of its Common Stock and separate series of warrants to purchase Common Stock in a private placement.

A recent study raises questions about the frequency of doctors’ use of elective heart angiograms, which showed no disease in almost 40 percent of patients. BusinessWeek reports: “Doctors may be sending patients too quickly for elective angiograms to detect heart disease, exposing them to radiation and driving up U.S. health-care costs, a study suggests.

Covidien, a leading global provider of healthcare products, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Health Canada have approved the use of the Maria Research Reactor (Maria) in Poland as a site to irradiate highly-enriched uranium targets for Molybdenum 99 (Mo 99) production. Covidien will use the Mo 99 obtained from Maria in the manufacture of its Technetium 99m (Tc 99m) generators. Patients should begin to benefit from Maria-produced Mo 99 in the United States and Canada later this month.

When it comes to the documented 40 percent effectiveness of PSA testing in preventing death from prostate cancer, neither the American Cancer Society nor the discoverer of the PSA protein, Richard Ablin, are telling the public the complete story.

“Health care reform takes center stage Thursday as President Obama and top congressional Democrats work behind closed doors to nail down a final agreement,” CNN reports. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., hosted a “meeting of the entire House Democratic caucus in the morning,” while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid plans to hold a news conference that will “build public momentum by framing the issue in more personal terms.”

Monsanto Co., facing antitrust probes into its genetically modified seeds, may benefit from previous court rulings in which intellectual property rights trumped competition concerns, antitrust lawyers say.

A shirt-sleeved President Barack Obama took his closing arguments for health care reform to the St. Louis area Wednesday.

Microchip Biotechnologies, a maker of automated microscale biotech laboratory systems, today announced that it has changed its business name to IntegenX. The new name articulates the company’s focus on integrating sample preparation and analysis technologies into complete products that address generic problems shared by life science and biotechnology research laboratories worldwide.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has accepted for review the supplemental new drug application (sNDA) of a new six-month 45-mg formulation of Lupron® Depot (leuprolide acetate for depot suspension) for use in the palliative treatment of advanced prostate cancer. Palliative treatment helps to relieve symptoms associated with advanced prostate cancer.