Private Company Edition: The €740m ($806.5m) Gilde Healthcare Venture&Growth VI Fund will back companies in Europe and North America. Among recent financings, VectorY raised a €129m ($138m) series A round, EyeBio expanded its series A to $130m and MBrace raised an $85m series B.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to provide $2.2 million in funding over the next five years for the development of three innovative "co-robot" projects: an affordable hand-worn device to help the visually impaired grasp objects, a smart-walker to increase mobility in the elderly and a social-robot companion for children. The hand-worn device, which can detect a small object and help the blind user maintain alignment with the object while approaching it, has a global market potential of nearly $20 billion.

The latest medical device regulatory and reimbursement news from Elsevier Business Intelligence’s “The Gray Sheet.” This month we cover CDRH’s plans to expand its Medical Device Epidemiology Network and the potential impact of the JOBS Act on life sciences start-up companies.

What do the French impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and South African heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard have in common? They both depended on extreme manual dexterity in their chosen careers. How remarkable, then, that they both suffered from the debilitation condition, rheumatoid arthritis.