PARIS – Resilience SAS raised $46 million in a series A round to ramp up European distribution of its mobile application intended for remote monitoring of breast cancer patients, in partnership with the Gustave Roussy Center in Villejuif, France. This funding round was led by two Parisian venture capital funds specializing in digital health – Cathay Innovation SAS and Singular Capital Partners SAS – along with Dutch-based Exor Seeds NV, German-based Picus Capital GmbH and Seaya Capital Gestion, SGEIC, SA, from Spain.
Curevo Vaccine Inc. closed on a $60 million series A financing designed to take the company through releasing top-line data for its phase IIb study of CRV-101 for treating shingles in older adults. That means taking on a blockbuster, Shingrix from Glaxosmithkline plc.
Arkuda Therapeutics Inc., a company targeting lysosomal dysfunction to address neurodegeneration, has completed a $64 million series B financing co-led by Cormorant Asset Management and Pivotal Bioventure Partners. The funds will help advance its lead program, a small-molecule progranulin enhancer for frontotemporal dementia in people with an autosomal dominant mutation in the GRN gene, which codes for the protein.
LONDON – Orthox Ltd. is primed for an assault on the mountain that is knee cartilage repair after raising $12.5 million in a series A funding round. After more than a decade of translational and preclinical research, these funds will allow the company to start a trial of Fibrofix, a tissue regeneration product derived from silk, in the middle of this year. An initial cohort of six patients in the U.K. will be treated for sports injury-related cartilage damage, with six months follow up to demonstrate safety. Assuming positive results, that will be followed by treating a further 75 patients in the U.K., Hungary and elsewhere in mainland Europe.
These days it’s nearly impossible to turn around in the biopharma world without hearing about how some company is going to use machine learning to revolutionize drug development. “It really is a catchphrase,” acknowledged Jo Viney, whose latest startup, Seismic Therapeutic Inc. launched with a $101 million series A round to advance a platform incorporating machine learning capabilities to find new drugs for autoimmune diseases.