Redox, a Madison, WI-based startup that develops digital tools that enable healthcare applications to access data from electronic health records systems, says it has raised $9 million from investors.

New York-based RRE Ventures led the Series B financing. Other participants in the funding round included return backers .406 Ventures (in Boston), HealthX Ventures (Madison), and Flybridge Capital Partners, which has offices in Boston and New York. .406 Ventures led Redox’s $3.5 million Series A round, which was announced in late 2015.

Since its inception, biotechnology has been preoccupied with virus filtration, the clearance of invasive and adventitious viruses from biopharmaceutical products. And now, far from waning, virus filtration is set to become even more important. Virus filtration, reports Markets and Markets, constitutes a global market that is growing 12% each

The NIH has awarded MIMETAS and the University of Pittsburgh a prestigious SBIR grant to develop a Liver-on-a-Chip platform for high throughput discovery and development. Accurate prediction of hepatotoxicity is a major problem in the development of new drugs leading to high development costs.  Animal hepatotoxicity testing is expensive, unsuited to high throughput and overall has unreliable concordance with human hepatotoxicity. MIMETAS scientists have teamed up with the University of Pittsburgh Drug Discovery Institute led by D. Lansing Taylor, Ph.D. to develop a liver-on-a-chip platform of unprecedented throughput, predictivity and usability. “We’re extremely happy to be working with Lans and his team on this project”, says Dr. Anthony Saleh of MIMETAS. “Prof. Taylor is a frontrunner in developing in vitro liver cultures and has vast experience with microfluidic techniques." “We were extremely impressed when we learned about the MIMETAS OrganoPlate platform”, commented Prof. Taylor. “It enables High Throughput, 3D co-culture with a vascular and hepatic compartments, as well as ease of handling. There is really no equivalent in the Organ-on-a-Chip space”.

Great news in the happiest season of the year. We've published our 3D neuronal models for drug screening in Nature Scientific Reports and we received a grant with Pittsburg University for liver-on-a-chip. Of course we're looking forward to meet you at the SLAS2017 in Washington and at the ISSCR in Basel. And Christmas would not be Christmas without our warm wishes for the holiday season and the year 2017. We're definitely looking forward to it!

In Africa, the team building Sisu Global Health is stepping up the introduction of its blood transfusion device. In Baltimore, the team is posting fundraising gains.

Sisu recently raised $500,000 from the Camden Partners Exelixis Fund, CMO Katie Kirsch said.

Every year, millions of fish raised in aquaculture die of nervous necrosis virus (NNV). “The disease affects the brain, and the fish lose their vision and balance,” says Vikram Vakharia, professor of marine biotechnology at UMBC. As a result of damage to the nervous system, “the fish just swim in circles,” Vakharia says. His lab is housed at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

Leiden-based biotechnology company Mimetas has received 1.6 million USD funding for development of an organ-on-a-chip model for neurotoxicity. The aim of the project is to improve existing neurotoxicity tests and to reduce experimentation on animals. A panel of experts from BASF, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, Abbvie, NC3Rs and renowned academic institutions has selected the Mimetas solution from a lineup of strong competitors. Mimetas will lead the consortium, which also includes the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences (Utrecht, The Netherlands) and Cellular Dynamics International (Wisconsin, USA).

Rockville, MD, November 19, 2014 – BeneVir BioPharm, Inc. today announced it closed a Series A investment round with Pansend, LLC, an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of HC2 Holdings, Inc. (OTCQB: HCHC). BeneVir’s core technology was licensed from New York University (NYU) and originally developed by Ian J. Mohr, Ph.D., NYU Langone Medical Center.

BeneVir used this core technology to develop a pipeline of cancer immunotherapy drug candidates that affect antigen presentation in both tumor cells and antigen presenting cells. BeneVir’s pipeline consists of oncolytic viruses delivered locally or systemically. Once inside tumors, the viruses selectively destroy cancer cells, evade elimination by the immune system, and activate multiple classes of anti-tumor immune cells. This multi-mechanistic approach builds upon key elements of both oncolytic virus and immune-checkpoint inhibitor approaches to cancer treatment and is designed to block the major methods that tumors use to subvert the immune system. Proceeds of the financing will be used to conduct initial proof- of-concept clinical studies of BeneVir’s lead product, further develop the pipeline, and establish partnerships to test promising combination therapies in a diverse set of metastatic solid tumors.

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Benevir has been accepted into the Hive program and will be taking part in the TEDMED 2014 convention from September 10-12, 2014 in Washington, DC and San Francisco.

BeneVir's cancer therapeutic is designed to induce the immune system to recognize and rid the body of two types of tumor cell. The first type is responsive to current immunotherapies, and many patients experience complete remissions. Tumor cells of the second type have evolved to hide from the immune system and are refractory to current immunotherapies. These tumor cells are ultimately responsible for tumor recurrence and poor clinical outcomes. To our knowledge, there is no technology in development that can induce immunity to both types of tumor cell. We feel we have a unique perspective in the emerging field of cancer immunotherapy and that our technology will exhibit enhanced clinical benefit for a wide range of cancer patients.

Read the full interview after the jump!

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We are pleased to announce that emocha Mobile Health launched its video-based directly observed therapy application, miDOT, in Harris County, Texas. miDOT will be used to bridge the distance between healthcare workers and the tuberculosis (TB) patients that are dispersed across the nearly 1,800 square miles surrounding Houston, which has one of the nation’s highest Tuberculosis rates. The roll-out began in early February after emocha won a competitive bidding process based on a head-to-head pilot with competing technologies.