The IPO market in Europe is firmly shut and not a single company went public in the first quarter of 2023. The impact of this is trickling down to limit access to venture capital for biotechs.

Mediwhale Inc. closed a $9 million series A round that will see the company take its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered retina scans to prevent heart and kidney diseases to the U.S. market.

A precancerous condition caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV) affects up to 300,000 American women who are diagnosed each year, and yet there are no treatments, just preventive vaccines introduced in 2006 – targeted to younger generations prior to the first sexual encounter. That leaves a large proportion of the female population stuck with a “wait-and-see” approach that involves continuous monitoring of their HPV infection through pap smears to detect cellular changes that could lead to cervical cancer. South San Francisco-based Antiva Biosciences Inc. is seeking to find a better response to this condition known as high-grade cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN2,3) with its lead topical therapeutic, ABI-2280, a prodrug of an acyclic nucleoside phosphonate that is currently in phase I trials.

Pharmaessentia Corp. raised $462.7 million in a global depositary receipt (GDR) offering on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange that marks the largest global health care GDR offering so far this year. The capital raise “reflects confidence in the market opportunity for our approved product and the potential of our pipeline,” said Pharmaessentia founder and CEO Ko-Chung Lin.

Initial Therapeutics Inc. has launched with a focus on developing medicines that block difficult-to-drug protein targets with a new mode of action – selective termination of protein synthesis (STOPS).