Each month, Start-Up presents a comprehensive review of young, private life science companies that have received venture funding during the month, including companies in the pharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostic and research instrumentation & reagent sectors.

Some Big Pharma have looked at the risk-reward equation for gastrointestinal R&D and they have opted out. But GI still represents a massive opportunity for Big Pharma, both in terms of its traditional primary care strengths and more recent forays into specialist medicine. This combination should open up new doors for GI-focused biotech players, several of which feel they can succeed where pharma has failed in tricky areas like IBS, with next generation drugs. Others have hitched their stars to commercially unvalidated targets, exploring new and potentially lucrative mechanisms of action.

Vicus Therapeutics reinterprets the medical literature to identify generic drugs that could be repurposed and reformulated into patentable combination products to treat disease, with a focus on those conditions that accompany cancer and its treatment.

Denmark's Gastrotech Pharma is harnessing gastro-intestinal hormones such as ghrelin and GLP-1 to develop more effective therapies for irritable bowel syndrome and cachexia.