In a deal worth up to $108 million, ophthalmic startup Eluminex Biosciences Ltd. has licensed the global rights to Fibrogen Inc.’s biosynthetic cornea derived from recombinant human collagen (RHC) type III intended to tackle corneal blindness.
LONDON – U.K. rapid diagnostics specialist Mologic Ltd. has been acquired by a group of philanthropists led by George Soros’ Economic Development Fund and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and will be turned from a for-profit company to a social enterprise. The aim is to use the change in status to expand access to low-cost point-of-care testing for tropical diseases, including dengue, bilharzia and river blindness, as well at COVID-19. The name Mologic will be changed to Global Access Health (GAH), with the philanthropic owners saying they are to invest at least $41 million in the deal.
In the largest private fundraising round for a U.S. medical device company in the past year, Imperative Care Inc. closed $260 million in a series D financing round on Thursday. The company also acquired its spinoff Truvic Medical Inc., a peripheral thrombectomy developer.
Heartflow Holding Inc. is aiming to bring its noninvasive, artificial intelligence (AI)-based test for coronary heart disease to more doctors and patients via a merger with Longview Acquisition Corp. II. The deal, valued at an enterprise value of about $2.4 billion, is the latest in a steady stream of med techs queueing up to go public via a “blank check” special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) this year.
Med-tech mergers and acquisitions are at their highest level in four years and have already beat the full year of 2020, primarily due to a multibillion-dollar whopper completed in April. The number of industry partnerships also tower over prior years, with digital health efforts covering about 40% of the volume. Looking only at this year, the second quarter (Q2) of 2021 performed better than the first quarter (Q1) in terms of both M&As and deals.
Nanodx Inc. entered into a license agreement with IBM Research to use IBM’s nanoscale sensor technology and develop diagnostic platforms for rapid and cost-effective detection of various diseases, including COVID-19 and traumatic brain injury, among others. This marks IBM’s first collaboration to allow a medical device company to use its nanoscale technology.
It’s more than 20 years since the tobacco firm Philip Morris International Inc. commissioned a controversial research paper, “Public Finance Balance of Smoking in the Czech Republic,” which infamously argued that smokers cut state health care expenditure by dying early. The paper was considered an outrage and led to a high-profile apology from the company, after being widely derided by politicians and commentators internationally. The company’s July 9 proposal to buy the respiratory diseases firm Vectura Group plc for $1.2 billion is already looking just as provocative according to U.K. politicians and anti-smoking groups, who are calling for the government to intervene to stop it going ahead.
Sonde Health struck a deal with Qualcomm Technologies Inc. to embed its vocal health biomarker product, Sonde One, in the Snapdragon 888 and 778G 5G mobile platforms. The deal would make vocal biomarker monitoring native to the devices that use the company’s chips in mobile and IoT devices.
The M&As that are the current business model of the drug and device world are in for increased scrutiny under the executive order U.S. President Joe Biden signed July 9. Answering the administration’s call for a whole-of-government-approach to increasing competition in the U.S., the Department of Justice “will closely examine its antitrust guidelines and policy statements to better educate the public on its enforcement priorities, and it will heighten its efforts to prevent mergers that would result in excessive consolidations of purchasing power,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
Steven Roy, CEO of Convergence Medical Sciences Inc., has designed a low-cost device that boosts the number of patients on a single ventilator to four simultaneously. To do this, he is collaborating with Calgary-based consulting engineers, Exergy Solutions Inc., to take the international Red Dot design winner through the Health Canada approval process.
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