TORONTO – Audioptics Medical Inc. has raised a C$1.9 million (US$1.5 million) seed investment round for development of a device that visualizes and assesses the structures of the middle ear to help patients avoid surgery for conductive hearing loss. Audioptics Medical CEO Dan MacDougall told BioWorld the investment marks a major step in his company’s path towards commercial development of its flagship product, the Ossiview Middle Ear Imaging system.

PARIS – Imageens SAS just raised a $1.4 million seed round to develop its two artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the field of medical imaging in Europe. Its first solution Artfun+, an AI software application, makes it possible to anticipate cardiovascular pathology thanks to new prognostic biomarkers. Its second product is Label, an algorithm which automatically classifies and assesses medical imaging data.

PARIS – Barely one year after its formation, startup company Quantiq SAS has just closed an $825,000 seed round, to develop its contactless medical diagnostics technology. French business angels from the medical, artificial intelligence and fintech worlds participated in this initial fundraising.

Israeli med-tech startup Forsight Robotics Ltd. has closed a $10 million seed funding round led by Eclipse Ventures and joined by Mithril Capital. The funding will help advance the company’s work on a surgical robotic platform that employs microsurgical robotics, computer visualization and machine learning to automate many of the complex elements of ophthalmic surgery.

Asalyxa Bio Inc. has closed on an oversubscribed seed financing of more than $2 million designed to advance its lead candidate, ASX-100, into the clinic in acute respiratory distress syndrome.

Slate Bio Inc., a startup developing an interleukin 2 fusion cytokine for the potential treatment of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, has closed a $1.75 million seed financing led by Epidarex Capital. Financing for the company, a spinout of the University of Virginia, also came from the UVA Licensing & Ventures Group Seed Fund, Center for Innovative Technology's GAP Biolife Fund, VTC Seed Fund, Pharmadirections Inc., company management and others.

PARIS – Braintale SAS has completed a $1.2 million seed round towards its portfolio of digital quantification and prediction medical devices for neurology and intensive care. This funding round, including a loan from Bpifrance, attracted investment from business angels, as well as industry and health care professionals.

When the first chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR T) therapy, Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel), was approved in 2016 for treating B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, its developer, Novartis AG, confined the initial rollout to just 20 treating centers. Its label carried a black box warning, because of the risk of life-threatening cytokine release syndrome, and Basel, Switzerland-based Novartis put in place a comprehensive risk evaluation and mitigation system to ensure its safe use. Catamaran Bio Inc., a Boston-based startup that has raised $42 million in seed and series A financing, is considering the administration of similarly engineered natural killer cells in walk-in clinics. “If the product is safe, it can be given as an out-patient treatment,” Chief Scientific Officer Vipin Suri told BioWorld. “As a field, this absolutely has to be our ambition.”

LONDON – Myricx Pharma Ltd. has launched with £4.5 million (US$5.9 million) seed funding to advance a new approach to targeting Myc, an oncogene that has defied long years of effort to drug it. The company will take a synthetic lethal approach, developing small-molecule inhibitors of N-myristoyltransferase to perturb pathways that Myc drives, causing cancer cell death.