VentureBeat

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• OptiMedica takes in $16M for eye-treatment lasers (release)
• Genome analyzer BioNanomatrix raises $5M (release)
• Heart diagnostic startup Aviir gets another $1.5M (VBLS exclusive)
• Pharmaca, integrative-pharmacy chain, draws $20M (release)
• LifeWatch, cardiac-monitoring device maker, withdraws IPO (IPOhome)
• Jerry DeVries, Steven Whitlock join PTV Sciences as venture partners (VentureWire)

OptiMedica takes in $16M for eye-treatment lasers – OptiMedica, a Santa Clara, Calif., medical-device maker, raised $16 million in a third funding round. Investors included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Alloy Ventures and DAG Ventures.

The startup makes and sells an eye-treatment laser system called Pascal — the acronym stands for “pattern scan laser” — which is approved for treating of retinal diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and other conditions involving the abnormal growth of blood vessels that can leak and obscure vision. The laser works by “photocoagulation,” which simply means it burns and fuses tissue at the point of focus — sealing off blood vessels, for instance, healing tears in the retina or even reattaching a retina that’s come loose.

Genome analyzer BioNanomatrix raises $5M – This item is now a standalone post here.

Heart diagnostic startup Aviir gets another $1.5M – Palo Alto, Calif.-based Aviir, a biotech focused on heart diagnostics, raised an additional $1.5 million as a follow-on to its second funding round, the company’s chief operating officer, Avi Kulkarni, said. The money is an equity investment related to a still-undisclosed partnership with a large pharmaceutical company, he told me.

Aviir is still in stealth mode, as we noted last year when we first wrote about its use of Stanford technology for detection and monitoring of cardiovascular disease. Kulkarni did offer a few additional details, telling me, for instance, that the company’s name is actually an acronym that stands for “atherosclerotic venous inflammation and insulin resistance.”

That, plus the fact that Aviir is working on what Kulkarni said is a “multiple biomarker panel assay” for heart disease, suggests to me that the company plans on measuring the levels of various proteins, probably from blood, in order to get a more precise picture of stressors such as inflammation and insulin resistance that might lead to heart problems. (”Insulin resistance” is an interesting choice, since that’s the cause — or the effect, perhaps — of type 2 diabetes, which is also linked to heart trouble.)

Aviir raised $11.5 million of a planned $25 million round last September, it disclosed in an SEC form now available online (PDF link) via the California Department of Corporations. The remainder of that round will become available when the company hits unspecified milestones.

For a look at the sort of thing Aviir is probably working on, check out this 2007 paper from Physiological Genomics, in which a research team from Stanford and Aviir detail the use of inflammatory proteins known as chemokines to identify patients with atherosclerosis. On the more whimsical side, a self-described friend of the company’s founders describes what he knows about Aviir on his blog, and also posts a odd homemade video “commercial” that suggests the company will be predicting lifetime disease risks for infants.

Featured companies: Aveo Pharmaceuticals, Aviir, deltaDot, Origen Therapeutics

Heart-diagnostic maker Aviir raises $11.3M — Palo Alto, Calif.-based Aviir, a biotech developing cardiovascular diagnostics based on Stanford research, raised $11.3 million of an expected $25 million second funding round, PE Hub reports. The news is presumably from one of those paper-based SEC filings that are supposed to be digitized before long.

Investors include Bay City Capital, Aberdare Ventures and New Leaf Ventures. Aviir hasn’t said much about its technology beyond the fact that its tests are designed to provide “accurate diagnosis and prognosis” of heart disease and that it expects to reach the market next year. That’s ridiculously fast for anything that needs to move through clinical trials, so chances are good that Aviir is aiming for some sort of “home-brew” strategy in which it will conduct the tests itself instead of selling kits and reagents to clinical laboratories around the country. Home-brew tests are regulated less strictly by the FDA.

DeltaDot, biological tool maker, raises £3M — The London maker of tools for identifying and separating biomolecules drew in £3 million ($6.1 million) (PDF link) from investors in a fourth funding round, bringing the total raised in that round to £6 million. Investors included FF&P Private Equity, Imperial Innovations, NPI Ventures, Sitka Health Fund VCT and London Technology Fund.

DeltaDot, which spun out of the Imperial College of Science, Medicine and Technology, uses technologies from high-energy physics to measure the ultraviolet-light absorption of molecules and then applies signal-processing algorithms to identify them.

Aveo Pharma raises $5M in broader deal with OSI Pharma — Cambridge, Mass.-based Aveo Pharmaceuticals, a biotech developing targeted cancer drugs, raised $5 million in equity and received another $10 million in cash as part of a broader development partnership with publicly traded OSI Pharmaceuticals. The deal will also include payments for future milestones and royalties, if any, although the companies didn’t estimate their potential value.

The alliance is aimed at developing drugs that target a cellular process known as “epithelial-mesenchymal transition,” a natural stage of cellular development mimicked by tumor cells as they spread, or metastasize, throughout the body. See our previous coverage of Aveo here.

Origen receives $2M grant for chicken-based antibodies — Burlingame, Calif.-based Origen Therapeutics, a company focused on developing biotech products from genetically engineered chickens, received a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The funding is intended to spur development of human polyclonal antibodies — which attack a variety of different protein targets instead of a single one, the way monoclonal antibodies do — that can be produced by chickens and deposited in eggs for harvesting. The first goal of the program will be to develop therapies for antibiotic-resistant hospital infections, which represent a growing threat to patients.

From the Origen press release:

Most antibody therapeutics today, such as the cancer treatments Avastin® and Herceptin® and the anti-infective Synagis®, are monoclonal antibodies that attack a single antigen target on a cell or viral surface. In contrast, when the human immune system produces antibodies against disease, it makes polyclonal antibodies capable of recognizing and attacking different antigens on the same cell, enabling that disease target to be simultaneously attacked at many different points. Thus the ability to produce fully human polyclonal antibodies on a commercial scale for use as therapeutics could take antibody-based therapies to a new level of efficacy by more closely mimicking the full potential of the natural human immune response. Until now, the production of safe and effective polyclonal antibody treatments has been hampered by the lack of an appropriate system for the development and production of such antibodies.