PARIS – Myriade SAS reported the commercial launch of its Videodrop technology at the second congress of the French Society of Extracellular Vesicles (FSEV) held in October in Nantes. This new nanoscale imaging technique captures all nanoparticles ranging from 30 nm to 10 μm in a droplet of solution (5-10μl volume), without initial data labeling.

LONDON – Pfizer Inc. is taking further steps to distinguish its third-generation anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) inhibitor, Lorbrena, from the rest of the field, funding a pan-European trial that will use liquid biopsies to track the resistance profile of non-small-cell lung cancers (NSCLC).

LONDON – A U.K. national plan to upgrade population cancer screening will see greater adoption of genomics and biomarker-based testing, and the use of artificial intelligence to help interpret results. There will be moves to make it easier to pilot and adopt novel diagnostics and to do more targeted screening to identify and follow people who are shown to be at greater risk of developing specific types of cancer.

DUBLIN – Sofinnova Partners closed its ninth early stage venture capital fund, Sofinnova Capital IX, at €333 million (US$369 million) and is bringing the same playbook to bear on current investment opportunities that it has followed in the recent past.

As the U.K. pursues its divorce from the EU, smaller U.S. drug and device companies could be caught disproportionately in the collateral damage. Many of them already struggle with the cost of duplicative regulatory requirements involved in marketing their products in the EU, but those costs could increase under Brexit, according to a report released last week by the U.S. International Trade Commission on trade-related barriers impacting U.S. small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that export to the U.K.

PARIS – Carmat SA, from Vélizy Villacoublay, France, has just raised $66 million from European specialist investors in the life sciences and medical technologies sector.

The emerging methodology of federated learning can overcome many of the ethical and privacy obstacles preventing patient data from being pooled for analysis, according to research published this week.

A large-scale U.K. clinical trial of a portable electronic nose device has shown it is possible to distinguish bacterial from viral infection in an unselected population of patients presenting with a respiratory tract infection (RTI) symptoms, at the point of care.

DUBLIN – Versantis AG raised CHF16 million (US$16.1 million) in a series B round to progress clinical trials of a liposomal-based fluid in development for eliminating ammonia and other toxic metabolites from the circulation of patients in acute stages of liver failure who are undergoing peritoneal dialysis.

Croívalve, a Dublin-based startup supported by Enterprise Ireland that is developing a treatment for tricuspid regurgitation (TR), recently secured €4 million (US$4.4 million) in additional financing. The financing includes €2.5 million from the EU's Horizon 2020 SME Instrument grant and €1.5 million from Broadview Ventures and current investors Halo Business Angel Network Medtech and Irrus Syndicates, Atlantic Bridge University Fund and Sos Ventures. The funding will accelerate the development of the company's technology into first-in-human (FIH) studies.