VentureBeat

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• PowerVision pulls in $20M for intraocular lenses (VentureWire)
• Heart device maker Mitralign raises $24M (release)
• LifeOnKey, electronic medical-record IT firm, draws $5M of $10M round (Globes)
• Merrion Pharma withdraws IPO filing (Edgar)
• Hi-Tech Pharmacal acquires Midlothian Labs for $5M (release)
• Anti-infective developer Calixa receives $15M (VW)

PowerVision pulls in $20M for intraocular lenses — Belmont, Calif.-based PowerVision, a device company developing implantable intraocular lenses, raised $20 million in a second funding round, VentureWire reports. Investors included Advanced Technology Ventures, Frazier Healthcare Ventures and J.P. Morgan Partners.

Although PowerVision’s Web site seems to be offline, the VW report says the company is working on fluid-controlled lenses designed to treat presbyopia, an age-related far-sightedness in which the eye loses its ability to focus on nearby objects. The PowerVision lenses apparently respond to natural muscular forces in the eye, which presumably squish around liquid in the lens to alter its shape and thereby change focus.

The new funding should carry PowerVision a third of the way through its clinical trials, which it expects to begin in late 2008 or early 2009. The company previously raised $9 million in late 2004.

Heart device maker Mitralign raises $24M — Mitralign, a Tewksbury, Mass., developer of minimally invasive methods for repairing the heart’s mitral valve, raised $24 million in a third funding round. Investors included Medtronic, Johnson and Johnson Development Corp., Oakwood Medical, Palisades Capital, Accelerated Technology Partners, Forbion, Giza, Oxford Biosciences and Triathlon Medical Venture Partners.

Mitralign is yet another device startup hoping to treat heart failure by repairing the mitral valve, which regulates the flow of blood through the heart’s left chambers. The company doesn’t seem to have divulged much about its particular technological approach yet, but we previously covered two other startups with similar aims, eValve and Cardiosolutions, here and here.

LifeOnKey, electronic medical-record IT firm, draws $5M of $10M round — LifeOnKey, a Baltimore, Md., startup offering technology to support electronic medical records, raised $5 million as part of an expected $10 million financing round. Medica Venture Partners provided the funding.

Formerly known as Global Medical Networks, LifeOnKey offers individual patients an electronic medical record that integrates their health information and access it via the Internet or mobile devices such as cellphones. The company claims to have a million subscribers in Israel and Europe, and plans to quintuple that number in 2008.

Unlike Microsoft’s HealthVault, which we reviewed here and here, LifeOnKey charges individuals to store their medical info. A basic plan starts at $50 a year, plus a $5 registration fee and another one-time $20 fee to activate a USB key-based security system. Premium plans that regularly collect, scan and incorporate paper-based medical info, among other things, cost an unspecified additional amount.

I haven’t had a chance to see what the service itself looks like, but I hope to take a closer look before long. In the meantime, there’s another major difference with the similar Microsoft service — LifeOnKey pledges to adhere to the privacy protections laid out by the federal healthcare law known as HIPAA.

Featured companies: Aryx Therapeutics, FlowCardia, Graftcath

FlowCardia raises $30M for artery roto-rooters — Sunnyvale, Calif.-based FlowCardia, a medical-device maker building catheter systems that bore holes in blood clots, raised $30 million in a third funding round. Investors included Gilde Healthcare Partners, Life Sciences Partners, Hambrecht & Quist Capital Management, New Science Ventures, Frazier Healthcare Ventures, JP Morgan Partners, Pappas Ventures, Rockport Venture Partners and Gold Hill Capital. The funding is intended to speed commercialization of the company’s “recanalization” device, which essentially busts through clots that totally block arteries.

Aryx aims to raise $86M in IPO for rejiggered drugs — Aryx Therapeutics, a Fremont, Calif., biotech company that derives ostensibly safer versions of existing drugs, filed to raise up to $85.3 million in an initial offering. The company uses a technology that reengineers these current drugs so they aren’t broken down by the same metabolic pathway in the liver, which is subject to “traffic jams” that can boost drug levels in the blood and lead to side effects.

Aryx’s first candidate is a reengineered form of cisapride, an acid-reflux (read: heartburn) drug better known by the brand name Propulsid, which was withdrawn from the U.S. market after it was linked to heartbeat irregularities. Aryx is also at work on a redone version of warfarin, a blood thinner usually administered to people at risk of blood clots. (See our recent coverage of FDA’s decision to include pharmacogenomic information on the warfarin label that might alleviate side effects here.)

GraftCath aims for $10M to develop better dialysis catheter — Eden Prairie, Minn.-based GraftCath, a medical-device company working on alternative to central venous catheters for kidney-dialysis patients, aims to raise $10 million in a fourth financing round by October, VentureWire reports (subscription required). The news service didn’t name any investors in the round.

From VentureWire:

To initiate dialysis, doctors must create an entranceway into the bloodstream. This can be done by joining an artery to a vein to create a fistula, or by using a graft to connect the artery and vein. Both methods provide adequate blood flow for dialysis, but fistulas are preferred because they use a patient’s own vessels and are less susceptible to infection and to becoming narrowed or occluded.

[When] patients aren’t eligible for fistulas or grafts… [they typically receive a] central venous catheter over the long term for their access point. These catheters put patients at a higher risk for blood-borne infection than either fistulas or grafts. These blood-borne infections, or bacteremias, are dangerous to patients and costly to hospitals. According to a study published in May in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the mean cost of catheter-related bacteremia is estimated to be $23,451 per hospitalization.

GraftCath claims its device reduces the risk of bacteremia, although VentureWire’s explanation isn’t terribly clear. Supposedly the device is safer because it’s implanted under the skin, although it clearly has to exit somewhere, since otherwise there’s no way to hook up the patient to a dialysis machine, which clears the blood of toxins in people whose kidneys are failing. The company doesn’t have a Web site that might explicate things, either.