Private Company Edition: Westlake Village BioPartners-founded Neuron23 will take the LRRK2 inhibitor NEU-723 for Parkinson’s disease into human testing before the end of 2022. Also, Celsius raised $83m in fresh VC cash and ITM added another €33m to its recent €25m equity financing.

Device and diagnostics fundraising slumped in Q2, but there was a substantial uptick in M&A activity. Device financings totaled just slightly over half of the previous quarter, while acquisitions grew almost six-fold, thanks primarily to Becton Dickinson's $23.5 billion play for CR Bard. Financing in diagnostics slid to $1.03 billion, less than half of Q1, whereas the $1.7 billion in M&As (most of that from PerkinElmer's $1.3 billion buy of EuroImmun) was more than double Q1's aggregate.

The new-found interest in – and diagnostic and therapeutic potential of – EEG was described to In Vivo by Electrical Geodesics co-founder Ann Bunnenberg during the 2017 GMTCC in May. Not two months later, Philips had made the Oregon company another of its 2017 M&A conquests.

Philips, a giant of the medical systems and software industry, maintains its strategic direction with organic and external growth. That was illustrated in one recent four-month period in which the group made seven acquisitions, adding to its non-invasive diagnostics portfolio Electrical Geodesics and bolstering its steps in therapeutic medical devices with the acquisition of Spectranetics. But whatever the target, the same ground rules apply.