VentureBeat

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• San Diego’s Ocera raises $36M for gastrointestinal treatments (release)
• Antibody-drug maker Affimed pulls in €20M (release)
• GraftCath, venous catheter developer, gets $12M (VentureWire)
• Ranier Tech takes in £8M for spinal-disc replacements (release)
• NeuWave Medical pulls in $4.5M for microwave cancer treatment (Milwaukee J-S)
• Avalon Ventures closes $150M fund for biotech, wireless and Web media (release)
• Heptares Thera raises more seed funds for nervous-system disease (VentureWire)
• Essex Woodlands gets $800M for new life-science fund, aims for $1B (VentureWire)
• 5AM Ventures names Richard Ulevitch venture partner, promotes two others (release)

San Diego’s Ocera raises $36M for gastrointestinal treatments –Ocera Therapeutics, a San Diego specialty pharma working on treatments for Crohn’s disease and other gastrointestinal complaints, raised $35.5 million in a third funding round. Investors included Montagu Newhall Associates, InterWest Partners, AgeChem Venture Fund, Cross Creek, FinTech, CDIB BioScience, Domain Associates, Sofinnova Ventures, and Thomas McNerney & Partners.

Ocera, founded in 2005, licenses existing drugs from overseas pharmaceutical companies and runs them through clinical trials to win approval in the U.S. and other areas. Its lead candidate, AST-120, is currently marketed in Japan and Korea for the treatment of chronic kidney disease. Ocera, which acquired U.S. and European rights to the drug from Japan’s Kureha, is currently conducting late-stage, phase III trials of the drug in fistulizing Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune condition that can lead to the formation of channels called fistula that can run from the bowels to the skin and other organs.

AST-120 is composed of spherical carbon designed to absorb acids, toxins and other compounds thought to play a role in various diseases. Ocera is also testing the drug as a potential treatment for pouchitis, an inflammation of the small intestine in people who have undergone removal of some or all of the large intestine; irritable bowel syndrome; inflammatory liver enlargement; and drug-resistant gastrointestinal reflux disease. The company has now raised a total of $62 million in venture investment.

ChemoCentryx files for $58M IPO to fund autoimmune, inflammation drug — Mountain View, Calif.-based ChemoCentryx, a biotech focused on new small-molecule drugs that affect a class of biochemical signals known as chemokines, filed to raise $57.5 million in an initial offering. The company’s SEC filing is here.

Founded in 1997, ChemoCentryx believes drugs that interfere with chemokine signaling may be able to defuse runaway immune-system reactions that give rise to various autoimmune conditions, inflammation and even certain cancers. Unlike other autoimmune treatments that tend to suppress significant parts of the immune system, thereby increasing the risk of infection, blocking certain chemokine signals may have much more limited consequences for health.

The company’s lead drug candidate, Traficet-EN, targets a chemokine receptor called CCR9 and is in late-stage human tests against the autoimmune gastrointestinal condition Crohn’s disease. Traficet-EN is also in mid-stage trials against celiac disease. The company also has five other drug candidates, one of which may enter human testing in the first quarter of next year.

ChemoCentryx has an accumulated net deficit of $71.1 million, and expects significant losses for the forseeable future. Its primary shareholders include Techne, Glaxo Group, OrbiMed Associates and affiliates, and HBM BioVentures.

Narcotics and vitamin maker Xanodyne Pharma files for $86M IPO — Newport, Ky.-based Xanodyne Pharmaceuticals, a specialty pharmaceutical firm that describes its focus as “women’s healthcare and pain management,” filed to raise $86.3 million in an initial offering. The company’s SEC filing is here.

We last covered Xanodyne in July when the company raised $25 million as part of a recapitalization — funds that it said it would use to prepare for an IPO. Xanodyne’s currently marketed products consist largely of several narcotic painkillers and lines of prenatal vitamins. The company is also developing two additional painkillers as well as a drug for menstrual blood-loss reduction.

There are a few other interesting details in the company’s S-1, perhaps most notably that Xanodyne’s management has had a lot of turnover recently. Four of the company’s top six officers in 2006 have since resigned, including former CEO William Nuerge, former chief medical officer Michael Giuliani, former marketing vice president Barry Brandstetter, and former chief operating officer Timothy Wright. Giuliani and Brandstetter, in fact, resigned just last month — odd timing for major changes just prior to an IPO filing.

Xanodyne’s S-1 filing is largely silent about this executive-suite turmoil outside a brief note buried in the boilerplate risk-factors disclosure regarding the risk of losing key executive personnel. The company notes that it doesn’t maintain “key person” insurance on any manager, and that its executives are free to resign with three months notice — at which point it specifically cites Giuliani’s resignation last month.

As an aside, Xanodyne seems eager to play down its Kentucky address. The company’s Web site prominently notes that it is a “Greater Cincinnati Based Company,” and it is in fact based just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.