LONDON - The world’s first COVID-19 human challenge trial is due to start in London next year, after the government announced £33.6 million (US$42.5 million) funding for the project. In the initial phase, the aim is to establish the dose of SARS-CoV-2 needed to cause infection and to characterize the immune response to virus. That will lead on to tests of individual COVID-19 vaccines, in which volunteers will be challenged with the effective dose of SARS-CoV-2 one month after inoculation.

Royal Philips NV is launching its Quickclear mechanical thrombectomy system in the U.S. four months after obtaining FDA clearance. “Quickclear's intuitive design simplifies the entire thrombectomy procedure work flow. Our new medical device can help bring cost-effective solutions in both the hospital and outpatient care settings,” Chris Landon, senior vice president & business leader, image guided therapy devices at Philips, told BioWorld.

Endologix LLC has begun a controlled launch of its Alto abdominal stent graft in Europe, following the receipt of CE mark approval in August. The next-generation Ovation system for polymer endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) is designed to provide the broadest indications in infrarenal EVAR grafts, including a 7 mm aortic neck length indication.

Fractional flow reserve (FFR) processing of computed tomography (CT) images has gained a substantial body of momentum over the past few years, but a recent study posed the question of whether it can save health care systems from excess spending for stable angina.

Medtronic plc management put an emphasis on being nimble and commercializing novel technology at its investor day this week, and analysts appeared to approve of the message. As Wells Fargo’s Larry Biegelsen noted, Dublin-based Medtronic is moving away from a centralized company that is focused on economic value and margin expansion to one that is more decentralized, emphasizing innovation and topline growth.

Tracking the pandemic in all its manifestations – from symptoms and spread, to viral genomics and repurposing drugs – has massively increased appreciation of the importance of real world data, with significant implications for the future of drug discovery and clinical development, the use of patient data and health care as a whole.

LONDON – Oncimmune Holdings plc has won government funding to apply its autoantibody biomarker technology to develop a COVID-19 immune profiling tool for triaging patients and predicting response to therapies and vaccines in development against the virus. The company will cross reference serum samples from 3,000 COVID-19 patients against its library of 800 SARS-CoV-2 related antigens and peptides to identify autoantibodies that characterize the range of immune responses to the infection.

PARIS – A consortium that includes Therapanacea SAS, GE Healthcare France SAS, Orange Healthcare SA, the AP-HP group of 39 hospitals in the Paris region and the French academic society for thoracic imaging has created a database for COVID-19.

LONDON – Facing down the pandemic, U.K. biopharma had a record summer, raising just over £1 billion (US$1.3 billion) from June to August. That was up from £585 million in the second quarter of 2020, and brings the amount raised in the first nine months to £1.9 billion, putting 2020 on target to beat the 2018 record, when the annual total was £2.2 billion.

PARIS – Bonetag SAS, of Perpignan, France, is developing a universal medical device designed to ensure in vivo traceability for orthopedic knee replacements.