VentureBeat

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Antibody-discovery startup Adimab raises new funding (release)
• Lung-device maker Spiration gets $19M (release)
• Sample-prep startup Protein Discovery pulls in $10M (release)
• Inogen takes in $13M for portable oxygen device (VentureWire)
• Healthcare IT concern Medaptus raises $11M for expansion (VentureWire)
• Contract lab Synexis raises $14M (peHUB)
• Medical-device VC firm BioStar Ventures takes in $24M of $80M fund (peHUB)
• Halsa Pharma gets $250K for “natural” obesity-control treatment (release)
• Diagnostics provider Lab21 acquires NPTech (peHUB)
• Galil Medical names Martin Emerson CEO (release)

Antibody-discovery startup Adimab raises new funding – Lebanon, N.H.-based Adimab, a biotech working on new ways to discover antibody drugs, has raised a second round of funding. The company didn’t disclose the size of the round.

Adimab, which raised $6 million last July, is one of several startups looking to design new antibody drugs in bioengineered yeast cells, as we wrote at the time. (Alder Biopharmaceuticals, which raised $40 million in January, is another.) The technique promises to be much faster — and freer of patent restrictions — than current methods. When Adimab completes its current manufacturing facility in the second quarter, it claims it will be able to produce a panel of human antibodies against a particular target in just 90 days, instead of the year or more traditional methods can require.

Investors included Polaris Venture Partners and SV Life Sciences, who also invested in the company’s first round.

Lung-device maker Spiration gets $19M – Spiration, a Redmond, Wash., medical-device startup, raised $18.5 million in a seventh funding round. Investors included Versant Ventures, Olympus Medical Systems, New Enterprise Associates, New Leaf Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Investor Growth Capital and Three Arch Partners.

Spiration has now raised a total of $97 million. It is developing a set of one-way valves for emphysema that can be implanted in the lung’s airways via a minimally invasive procedure. These valves are designed to shunt air away from diseased portions of the lung and redirect it to healthier areas. The company said the funding would support commercialization of its device in Europe and to complete studies for regulatory approval in the U.S.

Other startups working on similar technology include Emphasys Medical, Pulmonx and Broncus Technologies.

Sample-prep startup Protein Discovery pulls in $10M – Knoxville, Tenn.-based Protein Discovery, a biotech with new laboratory technology for protein identification, raised $10 million in a third funding round. Investors included Santé Ventures, Memphis Biomed Ventures, the Southern Appalachian Fund, and the Nashville Capital Network.

The startup is developing technology that aims to “simplify” the process of preparing biological samples for protein analysis. The details are probably too much for anyone who’s not a lab technician themselves, but feel free to check out the company’s explanation if you dare.)

Inogen takes in $13M for portable oxygen device – Inogen, a Goleta, Calif., medical-device maker, raised $12.6 million in its fifth funding round, VentureWire reports. Investors included Accuitive Medical Ventures, Arboretum Ventures, Avalon Ventures, Novo A/S, Numenor Ventures and Versant Ventures.

The company makes and sells portable oxygen-delivery systems for patients suffering from a lung problem called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The product has been on the market for several years, and Inogen says it believes it might take several more before it’s in a position to be acquired or to go public.

Adimab, a Lebanon, N.H., biotech startup developing a “platform” for the discovery and commercialization of yeast-derived antibodies, raised $6 million in a first funding round (hat tips to the In Vivo Blog and VentureWire). The company was founded by Darthmouth’s Tillman Gerngross — who co-founded GlycoFi, a biotech acquired by Merck last year for $400 million — and MIT’s Dane Wittrup. Both researchers are chemical engineers with a longstanding interest in protein expression and engineering.

The concept behind Adimab is kind of intriguing, although it’s also complex and limited to solving a particular set of business-process issues — which, when you think about it, is just about what you’d expect a pair of engineers to come up with. The problem, at heart, is that monoclonal antibodies are a pain for many pharmaceutical companies to work with, due to the fact that discovering them and preparing them for use as drugs involves a variety of disparate technologies, many of them owned by a hodgepodge of other companies and institutions. Working out licensing agreements to acquire rights to all these technologies is possible, but still something of a headache.

As I understand it from an interview Gerngross gave to In Vivo, Adimab plans to address this problem by developing its own bottom-up system for discovering new antibodies and moving them along the development process. (The company’s name, which it prefers to capitalize as “ADiMaB,” is a mash-up of several of these development steps: Antibody Discovery, Maturation and Biomanufacturing.) Ideally, this yeast-based “platform” would yield antibodies that aren’t tied down by the web of intellectual property that covers many of today’s antibodies, making a potentially attractive fit for the first Big Pharma company that comes along. In fact, Gerngross seems explicitly mercenary about his intentions, telling In Vivo that “we’re building a business that will service pharma better than anyone else and [one] that could very quickly trigger an acquisition.”

Which is great so far as it goes, I suppose, although it’s hard to get too worked up about a new company when one of the co-founders seems to want it to disappear into some big-company bureaucracy as quickly as possible. The technology behind Adimab, however, is pretty interesting, involving as it seems to fairly recently developed techniques for forcing yeast cells to produce human antibodies (a 2006 Wittrup paper describing this technique of “yeast surface display” is here). Although since this also sounds a lot like what GlycoFi was doing, it will be interesting to see how Adimab’s approach differs.

In addition to the advantages described above, yeast-based production of human antibodies would presumably also be considerably faster and more efficient than current techniques, which generally involve mouse antibodies that require additional “humanizing” so they aren’t eliminated by the immune system when used as drugs. Of course, the technology is still at an early stage, and to the best of my knowledge, no yeast-derived antibody has even been tested in humans as an experimental therapeutic, much less turned into a functioning drug. (As always, if you know otherwise, please let us know in comments.)

Adimab’s first-round investors are SV Life Sciences and Polaris Venture Partners.