South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety cleared Acryl Inc.’s Acryl-D01 as the country’s first AI-based digital therapeutic software solution to aid depression screening and diagnosis on Dec. 20. Approved as a class II software as a medical device, Acryl-D01 utilizes a patient’s medical records to quantify and analyze the individual’s emotional response and assess the probability of having clinical depression based on the data.

A new method to diagnose skin cancer was validated for the first time in clinical trials that show Dermr Health Solutions Pty Ltd.’s non-invasive microneedle patch collects near-equivalent genetic information compared to a skin biopsy without pain or cutting.

AI-powered drug R&D platform firm Oncocross Co. Ltd. is leading the procession of year-end Korea biotech IPOs this week, pricing an offering of about 11.85 million shares on the Korea Exchange at ₩7,300 each for gross proceeds of ₩85.56 billion (US$59.5 million).

Labcorp Holdings Inc. launched its new H5N1 bird flu molecular test for humans in the U.S. as an international outbreak of the disease continues to spread in cows and poultry – and people. As BioWorld reported recently, just one mutation would make the flu variant highly transmissible in humans.

Positrigo AG is raising $10 million for production and commercialization of its Neurolf brain positron emission tomography system in the U.S. The system hepls to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. With drugs such as Leqembi and Kisunla gaining U.S. FDA approval to treat the devastating neurological condition, the company is seeing increasing demand for its system, Neurolf CEO and co-founder Jannis Fischer, told BioWorld.

Beacon Biosignals Inc. can rest easy now that it has received U.S. FDA authorization of its predetermined change control plan for the Dreem 3s, a wearable sleep monitor that conducts electroencephalograms as users sleep. The authorization allows Beacon to incorporate updates to the Dreem 3S sleep-staging algorithm acquired through machine learning without submitting a new 510(k) application.

An artificial intelligence-powered contactless monitoring device developed by Albus Health Ltd. can detect signs of asthma attacks in children up to five days before they occur.

In what represents the first patenting from Glasgow-based Microplate Dx Ltd., three of its co-founders describe a system for diagnosing microbial infections and performing rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing, enabling quicker and more precise determination of effective antibiotics.

While women with “big hearts” play well in popular culture, cardiologists see a very different picture – with significant implications for women’s health and medical care. Women have smaller hearts and narrower blood vessels than men and their cardiovascular systems respond to disease and treatment in very different ways. Growing evidence that failure to reflect women’s distinct anatomy in cardiac care leads to deadly disparities in outcomes has recently stimulated development of new diagnostics and increased focus on inclusion of women in medical device trials.

The recent agreement between Devyser Diagnostics AB and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. to collaborate to obtain U.S. FDA approval for a next-generation sequencing (NGS) test for kidney transplant monitoring allows the test to be democratized, Fredrik Alpsten, CEO of Devyser to BioWorld.