VentureBeat

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Stent maker IDev Tech raises $25M (VentureWire)
• Xytis gets $15M for brain-injury drugs (VentureWire)
• Diagnostic maker Iris Biotech plans to go public, launch breast-cancer test (Edgar)
• RiverVest Venture Partners raises $75M life-science fund (release)
• Concentric Medical names Maria Sainz CEO (release)

[Note: I'm a little sad to announce that this will be my last life-science briefing at VentureBeat, although with luck, it won't be the end of my time here. Starting Monday, I'll be blogging regularly on the drug industry and healthcare over at BNET Industries, a new CNET venture, so drop by if you can. (Preparing for that move is the main reason non-briefing posts have been scarce recently.) I still hope to post here occasionally as well, since covering below-the-radar startups has been a blast, and I'm not ready to give it up quite yet.

It's been a great year -- my first VentureBeat post was on April 3, 2007 -- and I want to thank Matt for the opportunity to join you here, and all our regular readers and commenters for your time and your insights. As journalists, we're only as good as our sources and readers, and you guys have helped in countless ways to make me look much smarter than I really am. --D.P.H.]

Stent maker IDev Tech raises $25M – IDev Technologies, a Houston medical-device startup, raised $25 million in a third funding round, VentureWire reports. The company is developing a new type of stent for use in propping open the liver’s bile ducts .

The company’s existing investors, a group that includes Bay City Capital, Heron Capital, PTB Sciences and RiverVest Venture Partners, provided the funding. IDev had previously raised $24 million, according to VW.

Xytis gets $15M for brain-injury drugs – Irvine, Calif.-based Xytis, a biotech focused on disorders of the central nervous system, raised $15 million in an extension of its second funding round, VentureWire reports. Its backers included Atlas Venture, CDC Innovation, Sanderling Ventures and Ventech.

The company says it was founded in 2005 from the merger of Xytis Pharmaceuticals and Remergent. (Sounds more to me like Xytis swallowed Remergent, but they’re free to describe it however they’d like.) Its lead drug candidate, XY2405, blocks a cellular protein called the Bradykinin B2 receptor, a signaling molecule thought to promote inflammation.

Xytis is testing the drug as a potential treatment for traumatic brain injury; the molecule is currently in mid-stage, phase II trials. The company is also testing an antidepressant in early-stage trials.

Xytis raised half the money last August, then received the second $7.5 million in April, the company told VentureWire. It has previously raised $24.5 million in its current incarnation, and its “predecessor companies” pulled in $6.5 million.

Diagnostic maker Iris Biotech plans to go public, launch breast-cancer test – Santa Clara, Calif.-based Iris Biotechnologies, a developer of molecular diagnostic tests, is preparing to go public, VentureWire reports. The company plans a small offering on the OTC Bulletin Board — if I’m reading its latest SEC filing correctly, its existing shareholders will raise about $1.1 million, with no proceeds headed to the company  — and hopes to launch a breast-cancer test later this year.

Iris plans to use chips to measure gene activity in breast cancer, with the hope of predicting the odds that a surgically removed tumor will recur and, eventually, helping patients and doctors customize cancer treatment from an early stage. The company claims that it will be competitive with Genomic Health and Agendia, two companies with similar tests for predicting breast-cancer recurrence.

There’s something a little odd about Iris’ disclosures in the SEC forms, though. Iris doesn’t describe its technology, the genes it will test or how it settled on them in any detail, and spends almost as much time talking about its database of patient information and related computer technology as it does about its tests. While it may consider some or all of that information a trade secret — and disclosure requirements may well be looser for such a small offering — it’s still kind of unusual for a startup to ask outside investors to put up their money essentially on faith.

Social video startup Unknown Vector launched a browser-based version of its uvLayer application yesterday.

I covered the company back in February following the release of its uvLayer desktop-only app (built on Adobe AIR), and I was pretty impressed with it then. The application lets users create “stacks” of videos collected from YouTube and Truveo via simple drag and drop. 

You can also build collections of videos based on a search term, and when you access the video via that search term, you can drag and drop it onto a canvas-like screen (see screenshot below). Multiple videos appear as thumbnail-sized stacks. You can also import friends from Facebook, and an activity label shows you what your friends are watching at any time. By dragging and dropping a video collection on a friend’s buddy icon, you can send videos to friends to watch.

And you can create a playlists, so you can watch multiple videos in sequence without having to go back, search, and hit play.

It was a cool application on the desktop, but the new browser-based version promises to take the company to a broader market.

The company has also added features for video sharing across Instant Messaging platforms AIM and Gtalk, where users login with their credentials on uvLayer and can drag and drop video collections with friends, who then follow the link back to uvLayer.

This is definitely a company to watch. They’re a seven-person team, and have bootstrapped so far. But they seem to be moving fast — after getting significant uptake in international markets, they’ve already translated the application into 13 languages, including Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and French — with even more languages planned. They’ve had help from the Adobe AIR team, which tours Europe and features uvLayer’s desktop app as an example of what can be done with Adobe Air.

And they’ve got big aspirations. Cofounder Mark Gray says the company sees touch-screen applications as the future of computing and wants to be the video interface for that future. When uvLayer first prototyped its desktop app, the company showed it off on touch-screen hardware. So we can expect to see more developments from Unknown Vector on that front.

Gray and the company’s other cofounder, Michael Hoydich, say their next plan is to release a widget that lets users publish video collections to their own websites or blogs as well as a chat interface directly in uvLayer.

For now, the company is not releasing metrics. It’s still developing its business model, but is focused for now on driving new viewers to its application. It may also look to more content acquisition — it only draws from YouTube and Truveo currently — but Hoydich and Gray say they haven’t seen major demand from users so far for additional content sources.

Gray and Hoydich have worked for years in the online industry for companies like Yahoo Geocities and Excite and have founded and led two companies –IndustryNext and Incognito Digital. They’re in talks with early-stage VCs and say they hope to secure an investment in the near future. Their team is based in New York and San Francisco.

David Adewumi, a contributing writer with VentureBeat, is the founder & CEO of http://heekya.com a social storytelling platform billed “The Wikipedia of Stories.”