Biopharma industry leaders in China who were the first to experience the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic shared their thoughts during a closing plenary session of the virtual Bio-Europe Spring 2020 meeting.

Leuven, Belgium-based Midiagnostics NV, which is looking to bring miniaturized, rapid, blood-based tests with built-in connectivity to both patients and clinicians, reported the completion of a €14 million (US$15.4 million) investment round. The company intends to use the funds to speed the development of its nanofluidic processor on a chip and prepare it for industrial-scale manufacturing.

DUBLIN – Bio-Europe Spring’s virtual panel on the partnering dynamic between big pharma and microbiome-focused biotech firms was essentially an in-house webinar hosted by Seventure Partners, a Paris-based venture capital fund that has led the way in investing in microbiome-related therapeutics, diagnostics and other products.

PARIS – With more than 10,000 people now infected, 3,626 hospitalized and 450 having died, France is in third place of European countries most affected by the coronavirus epidemic, after Italy (35,700 cases) and Spain (13,910 cases). The exponential spread of COVID-19 has led to a surge in demand for respiratory therapy equipment in intensive care units.

Business as usual only three months ago has transformed into health care industry overdrive as biopharma and med-tech companies scramble to test and scale-up treatments, vaccines and diagnostics to address COVID-19.

PARIS – The French government is seeking to curb the growth in spending on medical devices. According to recent work by the parliamentary information commission, led by deputies Julien Borowczyk and Pierre Dharréville, medical technology is the source of $5.8 billion in annual spending in the community and $2.1 billion in hospitals.

LONDON – The extent to which existing DNA databases fail to reflect human genetic diversity is laid bare in the most geographically comprehensive sequencing initiative to date. The study applied the latest sequencing techniques to 929 genomes from 54 diverse populations around the world.

LONDON – As the epicenter of the COVID-19 epidemic shifted to Europe and the number of deaths in Italy exceeded the toll in China, the EU stepped up efforts to mount a coordinated response, with a big boost for collaborative R&D funding and a call for clinical research to be pooled in multicenter, multi-arm randomized controlled trials.

As COVID-19 testing remains elusive in the U.S., much of the nation’s focus has started to shift to how to treat the presumed millions of patients who are already or soon to be infected with the novel coronavirus.

PERTH, Australia – On the heels of scoring a CE mark for its Novosorb biodegradable temporizing matrix (BTM) in the EU, Melbourne-based Polynovo Ltd. crossed its first AU$2 million (US$1.3 million) month in December sales for its initial commercial product.