VentureBeat

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Stent maker IDev Tech raises $25M (VentureWire)
• Xytis gets $15M for brain-injury drugs (VentureWire)
• Diagnostic maker Iris Biotech plans to go public, launch breast-cancer test (Edgar)
• RiverVest Venture Partners raises $75M life-science fund (release)
• Concentric Medical names Maria Sainz CEO (release)

[Note: I'm a little sad to announce that this will be my last life-science briefing at VentureBeat, although with luck, it won't be the end of my time here. Starting Monday, I'll be blogging regularly on the drug industry and healthcare over at BNET Industries, a new CNET venture, so drop by if you can. (Preparing for that move is the main reason non-briefing posts have been scarce recently.) I still hope to post here occasionally as well, since covering below-the-radar startups has been a blast, and I'm not ready to give it up quite yet.

It's been a great year -- my first VentureBeat post was on April 3, 2007 -- and I want to thank Matt for the opportunity to join you here, and all our regular readers and commenters for your time and your insights. As journalists, we're only as good as our sources and readers, and you guys have helped in countless ways to make me look much smarter than I really am. --D.P.H.]

Stent maker IDev Tech raises $25M – IDev Technologies, a Houston medical-device startup, raised $25 million in a third funding round, VentureWire reports. The company is developing a new type of stent for use in propping open the liver’s bile ducts .

The company’s existing investors, a group that includes Bay City Capital, Heron Capital, PTB Sciences and RiverVest Venture Partners, provided the funding. IDev had previously raised $24 million, according to VW.

Xytis gets $15M for brain-injury drugs – Irvine, Calif.-based Xytis, a biotech focused on disorders of the central nervous system, raised $15 million in an extension of its second funding round, VentureWire reports. Its backers included Atlas Venture, CDC Innovation, Sanderling Ventures and Ventech.

The company says it was founded in 2005 from the merger of Xytis Pharmaceuticals and Remergent. (Sounds more to me like Xytis swallowed Remergent, but they’re free to describe it however they’d like.) Its lead drug candidate, XY2405, blocks a cellular protein called the Bradykinin B2 receptor, a signaling molecule thought to promote inflammation.

Xytis is testing the drug as a potential treatment for traumatic brain injury; the molecule is currently in mid-stage, phase II trials. The company is also testing an antidepressant in early-stage trials.

Xytis raised half the money last August, then received the second $7.5 million in April, the company told VentureWire. It has previously raised $24.5 million in its current incarnation, and its “predecessor companies” pulled in $6.5 million.

Diagnostic maker Iris Biotech plans to go public, launch breast-cancer test – Santa Clara, Calif.-based Iris Biotechnologies, a developer of molecular diagnostic tests, is preparing to go public, VentureWire reports. The company plans a small offering on the OTC Bulletin Board — if I’m reading its latest SEC filing correctly, its existing shareholders will raise about $1.1 million, with no proceeds headed to the company  — and hopes to launch a breast-cancer test later this year.

Iris plans to use chips to measure gene activity in breast cancer, with the hope of predicting the odds that a surgically removed tumor will recur and, eventually, helping patients and doctors customize cancer treatment from an early stage. The company claims that it will be competitive with Genomic Health and Agendia, two companies with similar tests for predicting breast-cancer recurrence.

There’s something a little odd about Iris’ disclosures in the SEC forms, though. Iris doesn’t describe its technology, the genes it will test or how it settled on them in any detail, and spends almost as much time talking about its database of patient information and related computer technology as it does about its tests. While it may consider some or all of that information a trade secret — and disclosure requirements may well be looser for such a small offering — it’s still kind of unusual for a startup to ask outside investors to put up their money essentially on faith.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Aptamer-drug maker Archemix withdraws its $72.5 million IPO (Edgar)
• OraMetrix raises $20M for robotic orthodontic systems (peHUB)
• Microarray maker TeleChem goes public via reverse merger (release)
• BioVascular pulls in $11M for platelet-disease treatments (release)
• Cequent Pharma adds $4.5M for for RNAi drugs (VentureWire)
• CareSeek, online medical-rating service, gets $575K, looks for $5M (VentureWire)
• Satiogen takes in $700K for obesity treatment (VentureWire)
• Dilon Tech appoints Robert Moussa as CEO (release)

Aptamer-drug maker Archemix withdraws its $72.5 million IPO – I’ve expanded this news into a standalone item on the state of the life-science IPO market here.

OraMetrix raises $20M for robotic orthodontic systems – Richardson, Tex.-based OraMetrix, a maker of 3-D robotic systems for orthodontic use, raised $20 million in a new funding round, peHUB reports. The financing is either a third round (as peHUB puts it) or a sixth (as VentureWire reports based on an interview with the company’s CFO). Existing investors, including Rho Capital Partners, Versant Ventures, Brentwood Venture Capital and Star Ventures, provided the cash.

Founded in 1998, OraMetrix makes and sells what it calls the SureSmile system for orthodontic braces. After taking a 3-D scan of a patient’s mouth, an orthodontist can then use the system’s computer modeling to develop a treatment plan. A robotic system then precisely bends the “archwires” that push teeth around.

OraMetrix claims the system shortens the duration of treatment and reduces office visits. The company has sold the system since 2004 and told VentureWire that it has installed SureSmile for more than 200 doctors, but says it needs to roughly double that figure to reach profitability.

Microarray maker TeleChem goes public via reverse merger – TeleChem International, a Sunnyvale, Calif., maker of gene-chip microarrays that is also known as ArrayIt, went public via a reverse merger with Integrated Media Holdings. The companies don’t quite call it a reverse merger, but given that IMH shares have traded at around two cents since September, the company has a shareholder’s deficit of $1.5 million and noted in its latest quarterly filing that there is “substantial doubt” about its ability to remain a going concern, the dots aren’t all that hard to connect.

Technically, IMH acquired TeleChem’s existing shares in exchange for 35 million shares of the merged company, which will undergo a one for 30 reverse split. At yesterday’s IMH close of, yes, two cents, that values the deal at about $21 million.

BioVascular pulls in $11M for platelet-disease treatments – San Diego’s BioVascular, a specialty pharma focused on drugs for fighting blood clots related to heart surgery, raised $10.9 million in a third funding round. Investors included BB Biotech Ventures, Merck KGaA and Domain Associates.

The funds will allow BioVascular to complete early-stage trials of two drugs, saratin for the prevention of clotting in grafted vessels following heart-bypass operations, and BVI-007, a platelet-production inhibitor it acquired last year when it bought out the biotech Revitus.

Cequent Pharma adds $4.5M for for RNAi drugs – Cequent Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge, Mass., developer of drugs based on the gene-silencing technique called RNA interference, added $4.5 million to its first funding round, VentureWire reports. The new cash, provided by existing investors Novartis Option Fund, Ampersand Ventures, Nexus Medical Partners and Pappas Ventures, brings Cequent’s total funding in the round to $13.5 million.

RNAi involves the use of short stretches of RNA that engage ancient cellular mechanisms for silencing the output of particular disease-related genes. RNA, however, doesn’t enter cells easily, so Cequent is working on a way to use genetically engineered, non-disease-causing bacteria that will enter human cells and produce the desired RNA molecules locally. We covered Cequent’s previous funding here.