Respiratory Motion, Inc. today announced that it has completed the first close of its Series B Preferred financing round. The Company has raised $5.8 million in the first closing and expects to raise up to an additional $3 million of capital, bringing the round to $8.8 million.
As the healthcare IT market grows, venture capital investors are getting increasingly bullish on startups specializing in verticalized predictive and prescriptive data and analytics solutions for the healthcare sector.
Later this year, doctors in the U.S. will be able to use a gene test to guide thyroid cancer surgery. The test helps determine when patients harbor a particularly dangerous form of the disease, which can require surgeons to do a second operation on top of the initial diagnostic procedure. Knowing that a patient has this particular form of thyroid cancer could enable surgeons to instead do a single, more extensive surgery.
The company behind the test, Veracyte, already sells a unique genetic assay that helps doctors decide whether to perform surgery on thyroid cancer patients at all. Thyroids that are not cancerous are often removed, which means unnecessary surgery and lifelong hormone replacement therapy for some patients.
For Marie Johnson, coming up with a better way to detect coronary artery disease is both a business and a personal mission.
Johnson is CEO of AUM Cardiovascular, a Minnesota medical device company that’s developing a potentially cheaper, simpler, eight-minute test to detect signs of coronary artery disease — the primary cause of heart attack.
A Cambridge biotechnology company launched Wednesday is taking aim at Parkinson’s disease and ALS with a new gene therapy that deliberately infects patients with a virus.
The firm, Voyager Therapeutics, plans to use a class of viruses known as adeno-associated viruses as carriers to deliver vital proteins to the brain. Intentional infection may be counterintuitive, but the viruses used in the therapy are harmless to humans, making them ideal vehicles for moving proteins through the body, without troublesome side effects.
Boston venture capital firm Third Rock Ventures considered Voyager’s research so promising that it invested $45 million to get the company off the ground, an unusually big bet on such an early stage life sciences firm.
For far too long, American health care has been out of reach for many. It certainly doesn’t help that the technology is dangerously out of date.
Most people know the government has been involved in addressing healthcare inequality: Obamacare. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) works to fix that inequality by requiring insurance companies to play by a new set of rules to open access to healthcare — leading to over 10 million newly insured Americans.
Des chercheurs japonais ont annoncé avoir développé une nouvelle méthode pour produire de grandes quantités de vaccins contre la grippe en exploitant le code génétique du vers à soie. Le procédé serait plus rapide et moins coûteux que les méthodes conventionnelles. L'un des composants principaux des vaccins contre la grippe est une protéine particulière qui est présente à la surface des virus et qu'il est nécessaire de produire en grande quantité.
Une étude japonaise vient confirmer les propriétés préventives de l'aspirine contre le cancer. Une vaste équipe de chercheurs japonais a mené une étude pour évaluer l'influence de faible dose d'aspirine sur la récurrence des tumeurs colorectales sur la population asiatique. Les patients ont été opérés par endoscopie et leurs tumeurs ont été excisées, puis certains patients ont reçu un traitement à base d'aspirine de 100 mg par jour pendant 2 ans.
As venture-backed IPO activity for biotech companies hit a fever pitch in 2013 and remain hot in 2014, venture capital investments into the healthcare sector also saw momentum — hitting $6.4 billion across 550 deals last year. While healthcare VC funding and deals tallies fell 2% and 7% on a year-over-year basis, 2013 ended on a strong note, as healthcare VC funding saw its best quarter of the year in Q4 after a slide in Q3.
