PARIS – Ganymed Robotics SAS reported the successful completion of functional prototype testing for its surgical robotic assistant used in total knee arthroplasty. According to a systematic review of the literature, published in the Journal of Arthroplasty, more than 2 million patients undergo knee arthroplasty each year after suffering arthritis of the knee.

KARACHI, Pakistan – Pakistan is taking steps to produce coronary stents domestically as a way to improve the delivery of health care at home and, perhaps, tap into a growing global market. N-ovative Health Technologies Pvt. Ltd., spun out of the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), started mass production of cardiac stents and angioplasty balloon catheters in October. It is the first such manufacturing facility in the country.

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.

TORONTO – Biomaterials med-tech company 3D Biofibr Inc. has raised CA$550,000 (US$423,500) seed funding to develop, commercialize and scale up a biofilm platform that mimics the spinning behavior of the common spider.

A multimillion dollar windfall for Icosavax Inc. will help allow the company to launch a COVID-19 vaccination program using its virus-like particle candidate (VLP), IVX-411, that displays the SAR-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain.

TORONTO – What’s the difference between an organ transplant container tucked under a paramedic’s arm and an ordinary beer cooler packed with ice? Surprisingly, not much, according to researchers at London, Ontario’s Western University. They’ve come up with a portable, temperature-controlled container that prevents spoilage of donor organs during transport to the operating room – and of potential vaccines.

Spectrawave Inc. has named Eman Namati as its CEO with the charge of commercializing its flagship cardiac imaging technology. The 3-year-old, Bedford, Mass.-based medical imaging company has set an ambitious 24-month timeline for getting its photonic imaging technology for coronary artery disease into the clinic.

Janpix Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., has raised a $10 million series B designed to progress its monovalent small-molecule protein degraders of STAT3 and STAT5 into final preclinical studies and eventually into the clinic to treat various hematological and solid tumor cancers.

HONG KONG – Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) has set up a company to further develop and commercialize its technology into a wearable device for predicting epilepsy-related seizures.

PARIS – Gleamer SAS has secured $8.75 million in series A financing for its CE-marked artificial intelligence (AI) application that automatically detects all types of fracture in radiography. “This funding will allow us to move forward with launching Boneview around the world,” Christian Allouche, CEO and co-founder of Gleamer, told BioWorld.