VentureBeat

Publisher and television broadcaster Meredith agreed to acquire Healia, a consumer-oriented search engine focused on health information. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Healia will remain based in Seattle.

From Meredith’s release:

In the coming months, the Healia technology will be integrated into Meredith’s existing Web sites. In addition, Meredith and Healia will expand the functionality of Healia.com and will offer the technology through licensing and distribution agreements with select health organizations, consumer Web sites, employers and other premier partners.

This is Meredith’s fourth acquisition bolstering the company’s online services and capabilities in the last year. Previously, the company acquired online marketing service firms O’Grady Meyers, Genex and New Media Strategies. Additionally, the company has redesigned its flagship Web site – Better Homes and Gardens.com – and launched its first broadband video channel – Better.tv. Next month, Meredith will launch a new parents portal – Parents.com – as well as its second broadband channel, Parents.tv.

Amgen suddenly has a voracious appetite for startups. In its second deal this week, the biotech giant acquired Cambridge, Mass., biotech Alantos Pharmaceuticals for $300 million in cash. (The release is here.)

Founded in Heidelberg, Germany in 1999, Alantos changed its name from Therascope in 2003 and moved to Cambridge in 2004. The company develops traditional “small molecule” drugs — that is, therapies that can be delivered as pills rather than shots — for a variety of conditions; its lead candidate is a novel type of diabetes drug called a DPP-IV inhibitor now in early-stage trials. Should it succeed, that drug seems likely to face significant competition; Merck’s DPP-IV inhibitor Januvia is already on the market, and several other pharmas and biotechs are pursuing their own.

According to VentureWire (subscription required), Alantos’ backers included Oxford Bioscience Partners, SV Life Sciences, Heidelberg Innovation, Ventech and ABN Amro. It has raised a total of $47 million, making this a nice payday for the company’s European investors.

Following Amgen’s $420 million acquisition of Ilypsa, that makes $720 million the big biotech has dropped on startups this week — a substantial sum by any measure. Last fall, Amgen also acquired Mountain View, Calif.-based Avidia for up to $380 million, so that’s well over $1 billion it has committed to startup acquisitions over the past nine months.

The mini-spree marks a recent departure for the biotech, which over the past five years has tended to acquire other public biotechs with marketed or late-stage products such as Immunex, Abgenix and Tularik. It suggests that Amgen is feeling some pressure to refill its pipeline, although since the payoff is still likely some time away, it likely isn’t related to the company’s recent problems with its anemia-drug franchise or its new colon-cancer drug Vectibix.

Biotech powerhouse Amgen agreed to acquire Santa Clara, Calif.-based Ilypsa, a developer of drugs to treat complications of kidney disease, for $420 million in cash, roughly ten times what the company had raised in venture capital. The company’s release is here.

The high price could mean Amgen had to win a bidding war for Ilypsa, since one of the startup’s main investors was none other than the venture arm of Amgen archrival Johnson & Johnson.

Ilypsa has focused on drugs that can help prevent mineral buildups in the blood that result when the kidneys’ filtering system starts to go awry. The company’s lead drug candidate, ILY101, is designed to prevent dangerously high blood levels of phosphorus, a condition known as hyperphosphatemia, by binding to phosphorous in the digestive tract and preventing its absorption into the body. ILY101 is currently in mid-stage human testing. Other candidates in Ilypsa’s pipeline include similar binders for potassium and sodium.

Amgen, whose best-selling drugs are a family of anemia treatments often used in place of blood transfusions in kidney patients, has shown off-and-on interest in treatments for other complications of kidney disease. In 2004 it launched Sensipar, a drug it licensed from NPS Pharmaceuticals in 1996 that treats elevated levels of parathyroid hormone and calcium in kidney patients. Annual sales of the drug, however, haven’t yet topped $100 million.

Ilypsa, formerly known as Symyx Therapeutics, had previously raised $46 million in venture capital, according to VentureWire (subscription required). That includes what the company originally described as an $8 million first round in 2003 and a $36 million second round in mid-2005.

From VentureWire:

Sprout invested in a $10 million Series A round in 2003 alongside 5AM Ventures. The company went on to raise a $36 million Series B round in 2005, that included Sprout, 5AM and new investors CMEA Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Johnson & Johnson Development Corp., Mediphase Venture Partners and U.S. Venture Partners.