Medella Health has raised $1.4 million to develop a smart contact lens to continuously monitor blood glucose data and transmit the data to a mobile device. Investors include 1517 Fund, Fifty Years Fund, Garage Capital, BDC Capital and others. Medella co-founder and CEO Harry Gandhi was named to Peter Thiel's fellowship program for young entrepreneurs. The startup is hardly alone in this endeavor, as partners Verily and Novartis ($NVS) proclaimed their ambitions in this field a few years ago. More
> Foundation Medicine ($FMI) and AstraZeneca ($AZN) have entered into an agreement to develop a novel companion diagnostic assay for the latter's cancer drug Lynparza. Release
> FDA-approved medical devices often enter the market before safety and efficacy data are released to the public, a report says. "If high quality studies of medical devices are not done and published, it is hard for clinicians to make well informed decisions on their clinical use, and to know what patients, if any, would benefit and to know the risks of the devices," Rita Redberg, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told Reuters. Story
> Using an expandable tube to unblock the bowel before surgery to remove a tumor could lead to fewer bowel cancer patients needing a colostomy bag. Release