What does the landscape look like in terms of funding for digital health? Geoffrey Starr, a partner at Cooley LLP, dove into this question during the Digital Health Summit, part of CES 2020. He acknowledged that 2019 saw a slight dip in funding compared with the record-breaking previous year. With that said, it was the second largest year ever for digital health care financings, with more than one-third of all health care venture financings involving digital health technologies.

HONG KONG – South Korean-based med-tech Lunit Inc., of Seoul, has secured ₩30 billion (US$25.6 million) in series C funding. Founded in 2013, the Korean company has raised $50 million so far. Lunit’s corporate value was evaluated at as much as ₩200 billion as of the fundraising.

Researchers at the Riken Center for Advanced Intelligence Project in Japan developed artificial intelligence (AI) technology that found previously unknown features related to prostate cancer occurrence in unannotated pathology images.

Amyloid and tau proteins are both involved in the disease pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. The diagnostic and treatment research focus has long been on amyloid, which has proven almost entirely fruitless after decades of effort. But tau is becoming better understood, as investigational tau imaging agents offer the ability to visualize its presence in the brain.

Ear infections are a common occurrence in kids, causing pain, fever and, in worst cases, hearing loss. Yet up to half of all cases are misdiagnosed, due to doctors’ inability to look deep into the middle ear where infections reside. Now, the U.S. FDA has cleared the Tomi Scope, a first-in-class technology from Photonicare Inc., of Champaign, Ill., that allows doctors to not only detect the presence or absence of fluid in the middle ear but characterize the type of fluid they see.

Two players in the gene sequencing space, Illumina and Pacific Biosciences, have scotched their planned $1.2 billion merger roughly two weeks after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) posted a 5-0 vote to seek an injunction against the merger. While Illumina is consequently liable for nearly $100 million in termination fees, it could recoup those monies under some circumstances. The $1.2 billion merger between Illumina Inc., of San Diego, and Pacific Biosciences of California Inc., was formally announced by the two companies in November 2018, but the deal faced substantial regulatory difficulty from the outset.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is better than humans at pattern recognition within images and other densely complex datasets. That fact has long been expected to translate into meaningful change in the way we interpret health care data, but beyond a few early exceptions that is not yet the case. Now, the research is starting to amass that demonstrates the real potential for machine learning to significantly improve diagnostics and treatment.

PARIS – Mauna Kea Technologies SA, of Paris, is welcoming a major shareholder on board. The company, which developed Cellvizio optical biopsy technology for tissue imaging directly at the cellular level, reported an increase in share capital for the benefit of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JJDC Inc. The venture capital arm of J&J has invested $8.3 million by subscribing to 5,357,142 new shares at a unit price of $1.56.

Check-Cap Ltd., of Isfiya, Israel, reported positive results from a U.S. pilot study of its C-Scan System, a preparation-free, ingestible scanning capsule-based technology aimed at preventing colorectal cancer (CRC) through early detection of precancerous polyps. The company is currently preparing an IDE submission with the U.S. FDA and plans to launch a pivotal clinical trial in late 2020.