Hot off the heels of a $45 million series B financing raise, Activ Surgical Inc. has completed the first clinical trial evaluating its Activinsights augment reality (AR)-based software suite and Activsight imaging module. The safety and feasibility study, carried out with The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston) is the first of several trials the Boston-based company is planning in 2021.

A more than 20-year uneasy biopharma romance between two Swiss giants will be ending as Novartis AG plans to sell its stake in Roche Holding AG back to Roche for about $20.7 billion. Roche described it as a “disentanglement of the two competitors” that will allow it to regain “full strategic flexibility.” Basel, Switzerland-based Novartis currently owns about one-third of Roche, whose shareholders get the final say-so when they vote yea or nay at the company’s Nov. 26 extraordinary general meeting. Novartis was very clear about how it views its stake in Roche, as the company said it “does not consider the financial investment in Roche as part of its core business and therefore not a strategic asset” and that it’s time to “monetize our investment.”

Allara Health Inc. officially launched its diagnostic test for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) this week, but word of mouth has already established a waitlist of more than 10,000 women. The diagnostic tool evaluates a full panel of hormonal and metabolic markers, which are used with patient-reported symptoms, to diagnose the increasingly common condition.

Jubliee Biotech Co. Ltd. is hoping to get FDA clearance with Jubiwatch, its smartwatch and medication management platform. “We aim to obtain FDA pre-submission between April and June 2022, and hopefully hit the U.S. market at the end of 2023,” Sung Kyoung Lee, CEO at Jubliee Biotech, told BioWorld.

The U.S. CMS waded into controversy with two final rules calendar year 2022, drawing fire from device makers and doctors who allege that cuts in rates for physicians will hamper beneficiary access. Software developers working in the telehealth space will find much to cheer, however, given that some telehealth services that were covered during the COVID-19 pandemic will be covered after the pandemic has passed.

TORONTO – Trillium Health Partners has received a C$1 million (US$810,000) grant from TD Bank Group to help accelerate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) at a newly developed health care lab. The AI Deployment and Evaluation (AIDE) lab will determine if machine learning models developed by industry and academia work well outside the data sets upon which they were trained.