VentureBeat

Featured companies: Aryx Therapeutics, BioForm Medical, Health Market Science, Hypobaric Therapeutics, Mobile Medical International

UPDATED: Expanded items on BioForm, Aryx, Hypobaric and Mobile Medical.

Medical aethetics co. BioForm Medical prices IPO below range, raises up to $92M — BioForm Medical, a wrinkle-treatment maker based in San Mateo, Calif., priced its IPO below its expected range of $9 to $11 a share, reducing its maximum take from the offering to $92 million from $127 million. (See our earlier coverage here and here.) The company priced the offering at $8 a share, although investors pushed up the price 55 cents, or 6.89 percent, in subsequent regular trading.

BioForm makes a wrinkle-fill product called Radiesse, which the FDA approved last December. The offering values the company at $356.8 million. See BioForm’s latest pre-offering SEC filing here.

Aryx discounts IPO price, raises up to $58M for safer drugs — Aryx Therapeutics, a Fremont, Calif., specialty pharma focused on producing safer versions of existing drugs, discounted its IPO price to $10 a share, considerably lower than its estimated $14 to $16 range. The offering stands to raise a maximum of $57.5 million, a far cry from the $92 million the company expected just about two weeks ago. (See our coverage here.)

The offering values Aryx at $175.4 million. The company’s shares dropped 19 percent, or $1.90, in their first day of trading.

Hypobaric Therapeutics raises $7.5M for dialysis device — Carmel, Calif.-based Hypobaric Therapeutics raised $7.5 million from management and individual investors, VentureWire reports (subscription required). The medical-device maker is developing a less-invasive process for kidney dialysis, although it hasn’t disclosed much about its approach. Hypobaric’s management says it is still investigating the feasibility of its approach in animal studies.

Mobile Medical raises $3.5M for mobile surgery units — Mobile Medical International, a St. Johnsbury, Vt., maker of mobile surgery systems, raised $3.5 million in a first funding round, VentureWire reports. Brook Venture Partners provided the funding.

Mobile Medical makes mobile-surgery units for the military, hospitals and other government agencies. The funding will be used to expand sales and marketing.

OTHER HEADLINES OF NOTE:

• Mobile Medical raises $3.5M for mobile surgery units (VW)

Featured companies: Angstrom Medica, Asuragen, Aryx Therapeutics, HistoRx, MiMedx, Pioneer Surgical, Transfusion & Transplantation Technologies, Tolerx, Vivo Ventures

UPDATED: Expanded Aryx and XDx items.
UPDATE REDUX: Expanded Tolerx item, moved XDx to a separate post.

Aryx sets IPO range, seeks $92M for redesigned drugs — Fremont, Calif.-based Aryx Pharmaceuticals, a specialty pharma focused on producing safer versions of existing drugs, set its IPO range and now seeks to raise as much as $92 million. That’s a bit more than the $85.3 million the company originally estimated when it first filed.

Aryx reengineers existing drugs, many with safety problems, in order to revive them or to sidestep complications. It now plans to offer up to 5.75 million shares at a price of $14 to $16 per share. Our previous coverage of the company and its strategy is here.

Map Pharmaceuticals, another specialty pharma that went public earlier this month, has seen its shares rise 22 percent since its offering, so the prospects may be good for Aryx as well. The seemingly bottomless investor appetite for specialty pharma — mostly companies that buy or re-engineer existing drugs instead of discovering new ones — stands in sharp contrast to the experience over in biotech.

The most recent biotech IPO, that of Targanta Therapeutics, fared badly, with shares now down 16 percent. Next up is Bioheart, which we’ve covered here and here, and whose star-crossed IPO is still scheduled for this week.

Tolerx gets $70M, plus a possible $680M, from GSK for diabetes drug — Cambridge, Mass.-based Tolerx, a venture-backed biotech focused on diseases of the immune system, struck a major alliance with GlaxoSmithKline to develop and commercialize an antibody drug that might be effective against diabetes. The companies’ joint release is here.

Tolerx will receive an upfront payment of $70 million, which will be a mix of equity and advance R&D funding. The company may also get an additional $155 million in future development costs, up to $350 million in milestone payments and up to $175 million in sales milestones. Tolerx will also be able to co-market the drug, called otelixizumab, for treating type 1 diabetes in the U.S., and will earn double-digit royalties on worldwide sales of the drug.

Those are some mighty impressive numbers for a drug that hasn’t yet begun late-stage trials more than two years after Tolerx first reported positive mid-stage data. Otelixizumab is an antibody that sticks to a surface protein on immune cells called T cells, presumably in a way that then tamps down misfiring immune responses. In that earlier test, 80 patients newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes — in which T cells attack insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas — received two to four-hour infusions of either otelixizumab or placebo for six days. Those who received the drug required less insulin and appeared to retain more of their beta cells over the next 18 months.

If those results hold up, otelixizumab would be one of the first treatments to slow the course of type 1 diabetes. That study, however, was relatively small, and some critics have warned that anomalies in the data might have skewed the results.

OTHER HEADLINES OF NOTE:

• HistoRx raises $6M to for new diagnostics (release)
• MiMedx, orthopedic implant maker, draws in $3.8M (VentureWire, sub req’d)
• Transfusion & Transplantation Technologies raising $5M for blood analysis (VW)
• Spinal-device maker Pioneer Surgical acquires Angstrom Medica (release)
• Biology services provider Asuragen inks cancer pact with Merck (release)
• Vivo Ventures adds James Huang as executive in residence (release)

Featured companies: Aryx Therapeutics, FlowCardia, Graftcath

FlowCardia raises $30M for artery roto-rooters — Sunnyvale, Calif.-based FlowCardia, a medical-device maker building catheter systems that bore holes in blood clots, raised $30 million in a third funding round. Investors included Gilde Healthcare Partners, Life Sciences Partners, Hambrecht & Quist Capital Management, New Science Ventures, Frazier Healthcare Ventures, JP Morgan Partners, Pappas Ventures, Rockport Venture Partners and Gold Hill Capital. The funding is intended to speed commercialization of the company’s “recanalization” device, which essentially busts through clots that totally block arteries.

Aryx aims to raise $86M in IPO for rejiggered drugs — Aryx Therapeutics, a Fremont, Calif., biotech company that derives ostensibly safer versions of existing drugs, filed to raise up to $85.3 million in an initial offering. The company uses a technology that reengineers these current drugs so they aren’t broken down by the same metabolic pathway in the liver, which is subject to “traffic jams” that can boost drug levels in the blood and lead to side effects.

Aryx’s first candidate is a reengineered form of cisapride, an acid-reflux (read: heartburn) drug better known by the brand name Propulsid, which was withdrawn from the U.S. market after it was linked to heartbeat irregularities. Aryx is also at work on a redone version of warfarin, a blood thinner usually administered to people at risk of blood clots. (See our recent coverage of FDA’s decision to include pharmacogenomic information on the warfarin label that might alleviate side effects here.)

GraftCath aims for $10M to develop better dialysis catheter — Eden Prairie, Minn.-based GraftCath, a medical-device company working on alternative to central venous catheters for kidney-dialysis patients, aims to raise $10 million in a fourth financing round by October, VentureWire reports (subscription required). The news service didn’t name any investors in the round.

From VentureWire:

To initiate dialysis, doctors must create an entranceway into the bloodstream. This can be done by joining an artery to a vein to create a fistula, or by using a graft to connect the artery and vein. Both methods provide adequate blood flow for dialysis, but fistulas are preferred because they use a patient’s own vessels and are less susceptible to infection and to becoming narrowed or occluded.

[When] patients aren’t eligible for fistulas or grafts… [they typically receive a] central venous catheter over the long term for their access point. These catheters put patients at a higher risk for blood-borne infection than either fistulas or grafts. These blood-borne infections, or bacteremias, are dangerous to patients and costly to hospitals. According to a study published in May in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the mean cost of catheter-related bacteremia is estimated to be $23,451 per hospitalization.

GraftCath claims its device reduces the risk of bacteremia, although VentureWire’s explanation isn’t terribly clear. Supposedly the device is safer because it’s implanted under the skin, although it clearly has to exit somewhere, since otherwise there’s no way to hook up the patient to a dialysis machine, which clears the blood of toxins in people whose kidneys are failing. The company doesn’t have a Web site that might explicate things, either.