SANTA CLARA, Calif. – It has never been easy to get payers to reimburse in a timely and adequate fashion for novel diagnostics, making it notoriously difficult to build a business from them. But a few high-flying diagnostics companies, such as Madison, Wis.-based Exact Sciences Corp. and Redwood City, Calif.-based Guardant Health Inc., have been blazing the trail recently on how to rapidly scale up to become valuable commercial entities from origins as a research-based startup.

LONDON – Ionctura SA has closed a €15 million (US$16.6 million) series A to fund phase I development of its lead cancer program, IOA-244, and prepare a second product, IOA-289, for clinical development.

It was a trifecta to remember for Neurotrope Inc. on Wednesday as the company cast revealing light on a seemingly failed clinical program involving its lead candidate, had the NIH offer a grant to create a phase II trial to explore the program’s strengths, and then found institutional investors and individuals to pony up an $18 million registered direct offering for the company’s securities. It was a re-examination of data that resurrected Neurotrope’s hopes for its lead candidate months after a confirmatory phase II of bryostatin-1 failed to outperform a placebo in people with moderately severe to severe Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in the absence of Namenda (memantine, Allergan plc), an NMDA receptor antagonist.

HONG KONG – Bionetix Inc., of Suwon, South Korea, has secured ₩10.8 billion (US$9.33 million) in series B funding. The biotech, founded in February 2017, has attracted a total of KRW14.7 billion to date. The company will use the funds to advance NTX-301, a therapy for myelodysplastic syndrome/acute myeloid leukemia (MDS/AML) with epigenetic dysregulation, and NTX-101, a glaucoma treatment.