VentureBeat

Featured companies: Ganeden Biotech, Glenveigh Medical, Lab21, Lead Therapeutics, Navigenics, Pacific Data Designs, PharMEDium Healthcare, Sloning BioTechnology, VistaGen

UPDATED: Expanded items on Lead Therapeutics, Glenveigh Medical and Sloning BioTech, and moved the Navigenics news to a separate item here.

Lead Therapeutics raises $17M for China-based work in cancer and immunology — San Bruno, Calif.-based Lead Therapeutics, a drug-development startup that plans to do most of its research and development in China, raised $17 million in a first funding round. Investors included Pappas Ventures, ProQuest Investments and Mustang Ventures.

We’ve previously noted a few biotech startups with strong connections to China, although for the most part these have tended to be companies founded by Chinese expatriates who raise much of their funding from Asian sources. (See, for instance, our coverage of AutekBio here and of MicuRx here.) Lead Therapeutics, by contrast, raised much of its money from traditional U.S. venture firms and will be run by a GlaxoSmithKline veteran, Peter Myers, although unsurprisingly enough, several of the company’s other executives appear to have ties to Asia. (See a list here.)

Lead Therapeutics says it has “several” drug-discovery programs going in infectious disease and cancer, but hasn’t disclosed any details to the best of my knowledge.

Glenveigh Medical to pull in $10M for spinning out a device maker — Glenveigh Medical, a Durham, N.C., holding company focused on technologies for obstetrics and fetal care, said it will raise $10 million in a first funding round in order to spin out a new medical-device company, VentureWire reports (subscription required). The spinout company, still unnamed, will develop several medical devices with an eye toward launching two of them by early 2009.

One of the devices, called a pelvic pack, is designed to control heavy bleeding that can result from obstetrical procedures. Another is an implantable plug designed to control fluid loss and prevent infection in cases where the cervix tears prematurely during pregnancy. A third device is a meter designed to measure the onset of labor and related issues via changes in the cervix itself.

Sloning BioTech receives €4.7M for DNA synthesis — Munich-based DNA synthesizer Sloning BioTechnology said it raised €4.7 million ($6.8 million) in a fifth funding round. Investors included LBBW Venture Capital, HBM BioVentures, KfW Bankengruppe and Deutsche Effecten-und Wechsel-Beteiligungsgesellschaft.

Sloning is one of several companies making a business out of generating customized strands of DNA for customers in the nascent field of “synthetic biology,” which involves making artificial genes for industrial purposes. (See also our coverage of DNA2.0 here.) The company claims that its particular method is the only one capable of generating any sequence of DNA “letters,” or nucleotides; for biochemical reasons, other methods are sometimes limited in their ability to produce particular nucleotide sequences.

Navigenics raises $25M, launches personal-genomic pre-orders — See our in-depth story here.

OTHER HEADLINES OF NOTE:

• Navigenics raises more than $25M, launches personal-genomics business (release)
• PharMEDium Healthcare raises undisclosed sum of private equity(PE Hub)
• U.K.’s Lab21 appoints Graham Mullis as CEO (release)
• Pacific Data Designs draws undisclosed sum in private equity (PE Hub)
• Ganeden Biotech pulls in $12M for probiotic dietary supplements (release)
• VistaGen gets $1.2M grant for CNS drug studies (release)

Featured companies: CeraPedics, Lab21, Incisive Surgical, Orasi Medical, Transoma Medcal, ZyGem

(UPDATED: Expanded items on Transoma, Lab21 and Orasi.)

Medical-device maker Transoma files for $75M IPO — St. Paul, Minn.-based Transoma Medical, a developer of implantable wireless diagnostic sensors, filed to raise $75 million in an initial offering. The company is currently focused on the markets for heart patients and general biomedical research.

Transoma received FDA “clearance” for its first product on Oct. 1. That device, called the Sleuth ECG system, records, analyzes and transmits electrocardiogram data for patients at risk of irregular heartbeats. The company anticipates expanding its use to a broad range of cardiovascular conditions, and also sells the technology for data collection in test animals during preclinical drug and device trials. (If the technology eventually makes its way to human tests, it will certainly be interesting to see how trial participants react to the notion of being “wired for sound” this way.)

Diagnostics firm Lab21 raises £2M in debt — Lab21, a U.K. biotech that makes a variety of genomic and other diagnostic tests, raised £2 million ($4.1 million) in venture debt, VentureWire reports (subscription required). The company declined to say who provided the funding. Lab21 had previously raised £10 million in equity from Merlin Biosciences.

The company also recently licensed a coronary heart-disease test from Ark Therapeutics Group. Terms of that agreement weren’t disclosed.

Lab21 was considering a £2.5 million third funding round in April, and told VentureWire it is still looking into that and the possibility of an IPO, although the company would like to boost its valuation first. It has previously raised £10 million in equity from Merlin Biosciences. “We’re still considering the IPO route, even though everyone knows the IPO market isn’t the greatest right now,” CEO Jerry Walker told VentureWire. “The next step is to get revenue from the coronary [diagnostic] product, which will come to market early in the new year.”

Orasi Medical raises $2.4M for Alzheimer’s diagnostic — It’s a big day for companies based in St. Paul, Minn. (Incisive Surgical, headlined below, makes the third such in today’s news). Orasi Medical, a University of Minnesota spinout that’s developing a diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease, raised $2.4 million, according to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal. (There’s no release that I can find.) Investors included PrairieGold Venture Partners, CentreStone Ventures and individuals.

Orasi is apparently still pretty quiet about its strategic direction — its Web site is barely a stub. It does, however, point the curious to mainstream-press articles such as this one (PDF) in the Economist, which describes University of Minnesota neuroscientist Apostolos Georgopoulos and his work studying the magnetic fluctuations of the human brain for possible clues to the onset of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia. It’s not too hard to connect the dots from there.

OTHER HEADLINES OF NOTE:

• Skin stapler Incisive Surgical raises $6M (PE Hub)
• CeraPedics raises $14.5M for regenerative bone implants (release)
• New Zealand’s ZyGem, an enzyme maker, hires new CEO in the U.S. (release)