LONDON - The combined force of Belgian life sciences has been brought together in the launch of Exevir Bio BV, which arrives on the scene with a €23 million (US$27 million) series A and ready for a phase I study of its novel antiviral therapy in hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

A medical device company has partnered with a couple of investment firms to tap new technologies and help bring them back to China. Venus Medtech (Hangzhou) Inc. formed a health care investment platform, Ascendum Capital Partners, to invest in new medical devices and technologies around the world, particularly in the cardiovascular and lung disease spaces.

Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) kills millions of people worldwide each year, triggered by an electrical malfunction in the heart that causes it to unexpectedly stop beating, often without warning. Health care startup Transformative AI Ltd. wants to reduce those deaths. To that end, the company has secured $1.7 million in seed funding for artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software that predicts a patient’s risk of suffering SCA based on subtle physiological changes.

Four IPOs from biopharmas chasing an aggregate $781.8 million launched on Friday with mixed results. Two of the companies, Inozyme Pharma Inc. and Annexon Inc., finished the day in positive territory while the other two, Iteos Therapeutics Inc. and Nurix Therapeutics Inc., saw their shares close flat.

Virtual reality headsets offered a lot of hype around five years ago, but not much in results when it came to medical applications. Medical holograph company Realview Imaging Ltd. has raised a $10 million series C round to enable it to market its first product, Holoscope-i, which offers real-time, 3D holographic images based on any volumetric imaging data during minimally invasive procedures.