Recursion Inc.’s combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence, coupled to its wet lab work, caught Bayer AG’s attention so solidly that its investment unit, Leaps by Bayer, led the charge on Recursion’s new and oversubscribed $239 million series D financing.

While the retail, security and entertainment sectors dove in early with the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, the life sciences sector has “been a bit of a laggard, frankly,” said Pratap Khedkar, a principal at the Evanston, Ill.-based consultant firm ZS Associates.

Columbia University professor and robotics engineer Hod Lipson knows the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) on a global level. “It permeates everything we do, from the stock market, from predicting the weather to what product you’re going to buy,” he said Wednesday during the second day of the virtual Ai4 2020 conference. “It’s even grading essays. You name it.”

The U.S. FDA has greenlighted two new modules for Siemens Healthineers’ AI-Rad Companion platform, giving radiologists new artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist in interpreting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies of the brain and prostate. The AI-Rad Companion Brain MR for Morphometry Analysis and AI-Rad Companion Prostate MR for Biopsy Support join earlier intelligent software modules for Chest CT.

Sight Diagnostics Ltd. raised $71 million in series D financing to expand its commercial operations and increase research and development efforts into disease detection from its fingerprick blood analyzer Sight OLO.

Investigators have developed a new approach to classifying neurodegenerative disorders that used the overall patterns of protein aggregation, rather than specific proteins, to define six clusters of patients that crossed traditional diagnostic categories.

PARIS – Inheart SAS completed its first funding round of $4.2 million to improve cardiac arrhythmia treatment using medical imaging, artificial intelligence and digital simulation. This fund round was led by Elvia Partners SAS, a Parisian investment fund managed by Xavier Lazarus specializing in deep tech, and Aquitaine Science Transfer, a company accelerating technology transfer, from the University of Bordeaux.

Infervision Technology Co. Ltd. has received the green light from the U.S. FDA for its Inferread Lung CT.AI product. The artificial intelligence- and deep learning-based technology automatically performs lung segmentation and identifies and labels different types of lung nodules. According to the 510(k) notification, Inferread Lung CT.AI “is comprised of computer assisted reading tools designed to aid the radiologist in the detection of pulmonary nodules during the review of CT examinations of the chest on an asymptomatic population.”

The importance of artificial intelligence and machine learning continues to be acknowledged by drug development companies. Recently, to help accelerate the discovery of therapies to treat COVID-19, several deals have been forged to deploy those tools.