PARIS – Damae Medical SAS has just raised nearly $6 million to develop new technology to detect skin cancer noninvasively without need for a biopsy. This series A round was led by BNP Paribas Développement SA and supported by original investors Kurma Partners SA and professional private equity fund, Paris Saclay Seed Fund.

PARIS – Resilience SAS raised $46 million in a series A round to ramp up European distribution of its mobile application intended for remote monitoring of breast cancer patients, in partnership with the Gustave Roussy Center in Villejuif, France. This funding round was led by two Parisian venture capital funds specializing in digital health – Cathay Innovation SAS and Singular Capital Partners SAS – along with Dutch-based Exor Seeds NV, German-based Picus Capital GmbH and Seaya Capital Gestion, SGEIC, SA, from Spain.

Curevo Vaccine Inc. closed on a $60 million series A financing designed to take the company through releasing top-line data for its phase IIb study of CRV-101 for treating shingles in older adults. That means taking on a blockbuster, Shingrix from Glaxosmithkline plc.

LONDON – Orthox Ltd. is primed for an assault on the mountain that is knee cartilage repair after raising $12.5 million in a series A funding round. After more than a decade of translational and preclinical research, these funds will allow the company to start a trial of Fibrofix, a tissue regeneration product derived from silk, in the middle of this year. An initial cohort of six patients in the U.K. will be treated for sports injury-related cartilage damage, with six months follow up to demonstrate safety. Assuming positive results, that will be followed by treating a further 75 patients in the U.K., Hungary and elsewhere in mainland Europe.

These days it’s nearly impossible to turn around in the biopharma world without hearing about how some company is going to use machine learning to revolutionize drug development. “It really is a catchphrase,” acknowledged Jo Viney, whose latest startup, Seismic Therapeutic Inc. launched with a $101 million series A round to advance a platform incorporating machine learning capabilities to find new drugs for autoimmune diseases.

Congruence Therapeutics Inc. has closed on a $50 million series A financing to design small molecules to treat rare diseases with protein misfolding. Montreal-based Congruence uses structural bioinformatics, computational chemistry and machine learning in its in silico platform that detects key biophysical features on proteins. That data are used to then design drugs.

Cancer diagnostics company Biofidelity Ltd. reported a $23 million series A+ investment round, led by Octopus Ventures with participation from SBI Investment Co. Ltd. and existing investors. Funds will be used for the commercial launch of the company’s first commercial assay Asypre-Lung. The oncology panel is designed to detect DNA mutations from tissue or liquid biopsy quicker than current approaches like gene sequencing.

The G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) is a foundational building block of modern medicine. While nearly everyone has taken one sometime in the past few decades, development has greatly slowed. With a fundraiser in hand, Septerna Inc. is looking at new ways of working around and through old problems.

LONDON – Cytovation AS has raised $20 million in a series A, enabling it to expand the monotherapy arm of a phase I/II trial of its tumor membrane immunotherapy, Cypep-1, and to test it in three combination arms with the checkpoint inhibitor Keytruda (pembrolizumab).

LONDON – Engitix Therapeutics Ltd. has raised $54 million in a series A round to advance early programs arising from its human extracellular matrix (ECM) target discovery platform towards the clinic with the support of new partner and equity investor Dompé Farmaceutici SpA.