China’s huge Ping An insurance group is continuing to build its investments in healthcare through a major new Hong Kong-based fund that will seek overseas technologies alongside the company’s steadily expanding interests in innovative drugs.

Derived from Strategic Transactions, Informa’s premium source for tracking life sciences deal activity, the Venture Funding Deals column provides a comprehensive monthly review of emerging life science companies that have received venture funding, including companies within the In Vitro Diagnostics, Medical Devices, and Pharmaceuticals sectors. This month’s column covers deals announced August through September 2015.

Derived from Strategic Transactions, Informa’s premium source for tracking life sciences deal activity, the Medical Device Deals Update column is a survey of recent medtech M&A, alliance, and financing activity. This month’s column covers deals announced August-September 2015.

Despite the in silico research ideals of many genomicists, no one has yet found a way around the basic requirement for using human tissue in gene expression studies-a broad array of it, well characterized, from healthy and diseased patients, and from world populations at large. That's why start-ups, drug discovery firms and others are creating a new resource: biorepositories--banks of tissue samples and data to serve the diagnostic, pharmaceutical and tissue engineering industries. As providers of services and products to research-based companies, these companies believe they are operating in a market that ranges from $500 million to $5 billion.