VentureBeat

Are you looking to take a vacation with a specific purpose, say bird-watching? If so, perhaps you should check out TravelMuse, a new vacation recommendation site that launched this week.

The site, which has one of the better looking user interfaces of any travel site that I’ve seen, it set up like a travel magazine. The current “issue” highlights Argentina.

“We want to provide vibrant photos and content that changes every week,” chief executive Kevin Fliess says. “We want it to be like picking up the newest issue of Travel & Leisure.”

This attention to design and user experience may help it compete in the ever-expanding travel website field. Rivals now include NileGuide (our coverage) and Kayak, as well as the big boys, Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz and Hotwire.

The Los Altos, Calif-based company has raised $3.5 million from Azure Capital Partners, California Technology Ventures and angels.

Featured companies: AngioScore, Forsight Labs, Genoptix, Metastatix, Optherion, QLT

UPDATED: See below.

Artery opener AngioScore pulls in $30M — AngioScore, a Fremont, Calif., maker of balloon catheters used to open up clogged arteries, raised $30 million in a fifth funding round. Investors included Telegraph Hill Partners, Psilos Group Management, QuestMark Partners, L.P., UV Partners, California Technology Ventures and Innomed Ventures.

AngioScore’s balloon catheters, which inflate inside blocked blood vessels to restore blood flow, are designed to overcome problems that sometimes occur during traditional angioplasty procedures. Conventional angioplasty can lead to tears and splits in the plaque that lines blocked arteries and can damage arterial walls as well. AngioScore claims its new catheter overcomes this problem by making precise cuts, or “scores,” in the plaque, thereby reducing the chance that it will crack and split unpredictably.

Optherion raises $37M for macular degeneration — New Haven, Conn.-based Optherion, a biotech focused on new treatments for forms of the eye condition macular degeneration, raised $37 million in a first funding round. Investors included Quaker BioVentures, Domain Associates, Johnson & Johnson Development, Purdue Pharmaceutical Products, Pappas Ventures, Biogen Idec New Ventures and GE Healthcare Financial Services.

Optherion is developing drugs that affect the “alternative complement pathway,” an arm of the immune system that may be implicated in two forms of macular degeneration, an eye condition that can lead to partial blindness, and possibly other autoimmune disorders as well. The company was founded in 2005 following discoveries that linked the alternative-complement system to macular degeneration.

Metastatix draws $35M for low-side-effect drugs — Atlanta’s Metastatix, a biotech working on drugs for AIDS, cancer and inflammatory disease, raised $35 million in a second financing round. Investors included Frazier Healthcare, H.I.G. Ventures, the Aurora Funds, CM Capital, SR One, MedImmune Ventures, Georgia Venture Partners, Centrosome Ventures and the State of Georgia.

Metastatix is developing drugs that block a cellular receptor called CXCR4, which is best known as one of the two ways HIV can enter and infect cells. CXCR4 may also be involved in cancer and inflammation. Metastatix says it is particularly focused on drug candidates with the “fewest possible side effects.”

Optical-device incubator Forsight Labs sells unnamed “newco” to QLT for $42M+ — Forsight Labs, an incubator for optical-device companies backed by Morgenthaler Ventures, Split Rock Partners and Versant Ventures, agreed to sell its second, unnamed startup to QLT for $42 million plus milestone payments that could be worth $25 million or more. The startup, known only as ForSight NewCo II, has developed a new type of ocular drug-delivery system that could potentially be used to treat a variety of conditions including glaucoma. The release describing the deal is here.

Diagnostic-services company Genoptix sets IPO terms, aims for $92M — The Carlsbad, Calif., provider of cancer and blood-disease diagnostic services, said it plans to sell up to 5.75 million shares at a price of $14 to $16 apiece, for a maximum possible take of $92 million. The company’s SEC filing is here. We covered the company in some detail at the time of its IPO filing here.

UPDATE: Added items on Metastatix and Optherion.

(UPDATED: See below.)

Ceregene, a San Diego biotech at work on a gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease, has so far raised $28 million in a third funding round and last week struck a development partnership with Genzyme that resulted in a $25 million up-front payment and potential payments of another $125 million plus royalties.

Those are some surprisingly large numbers for gene therapy, the experimental practice of inserting new genes into the human body in hopes that their activity will make up for a defective or malfunctioning natural gene. The technique once served as a poster child for biotechnology’s promise of curing genetic disease, but crashed and burned when early efforts failed or, in a few tragic cases, proved harmful to patients. One infamous trial involving a rare genetic disease led to the 1999 death of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger, after which interest in the field dropped precipitously.

Now enthusiasm for gene therapy may once again — tentatively, at least — be on the upswing. Ceregene’s focus lies in genes that can deliver so-called neurotrophic factors, which are naturally occuring proteins that protect brain, spinal and nerve cells against damage, prevent programmed cell death, and stimulate the growth of new neurons.

While researchers have long considered neurotrophic factors a possible way to treat degenerative neural diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, the proteins themselves don’t make promising drugs — largely because they’re too large to cross the blood-brain barrier. Some researchers have experimented with delivering similar proteins directly into the brain via invasive shunts or catheters, but the results have been unimpressive and the cost and difficulty of the procedure would likely limit its widespread use in any case.

Ceregene’s technology involves adeno-associated viruses that have been modified to carry genes for particular neurotrophic factors and disabled from reproducing naturally. These viruses are designed to carry the genes into at-risk cells — say, dopamine-producing neurons in Parkinson’s patients — and then “install” the carried gene into cellular DNA, where the cell’s own natural machinery will activate the gene and begin to produce neurotrophic factors.

In an early-stage trial involving just 12 Parkinson’s patients, administration of Ceregene’s gene therapy CERE-120 was associated with a 36 percent reduction in symptoms 12 months after the gene-loaded virus was injected into the volunteers’ brains. That trial didn’t have the most rigorous controls necessary to protect against investigator bias and placebo effect, so it’s impossible to draw too many conclusions from it. Ceregene is currently at work on a 51-patient follow-up trial that may produce data by the fall of 2008.

The promising results still intrigued Genzyme, an early pioneer in gene therapy for cystic fibrosis, who two years earlier had bought out much of the gene-therapy business of the struggling biotech Avigen, which also has a gene-therapy treatment for Parkinson’s disease.

Last week, Genzyme agreed to pay Ceregene 50 percent of the late-stage development costs for CERE-120 plus up to $150 million in cash in exchange for all rights to the treatment outside the U.S. and Canada. That’s a fairly hefty sum for a treatment that hasn’t even completed mid-stage trials and which also depends on such a relatively untested technique as gene therapy. Genzyme has other irons in the gene-therapy fire as well; today, Applied Genetic Technologies announced that it received $2 million from the big biotech as a milestone payment for its development of a gene therapy for a particular form of blindness.

Meanwhile, Ceregene has also raised $28.1 million in an open third funding round, VentureWire reports (subscription required). Investors in the round include Investor Growth Capital, Alta Partners, California Technology Ventures, Hamilton BioVentures, MPM Capital and Cell Genesys, Ceregene’s former corporate parent.

UPDATE: Added MPM Capital to the investors list, per Ceregene CEO Jeff Ostrove’s comment.