VentureBeat

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Defibrillator maker Cameron Health takes in $14M (VBLS exclusive)
• Miramar Labs gets $20M for “aesthetic” devices (VBLS exclusive)
• Nellix raises $6.5M for aneurysm grafts (VBLS exclusive)
• Vessel-clog remover Chestnut Medical pulls in $7.8M (VBLS exclusive)
• Consumer genetics tester DNA Direct receives $7M (PDF release)
• Precision Thera again prowling for venture funding (VentureWire)
• Cancer-drug maker ChimeraCore raises $4.3M (VentureWire)
• Kai Sensors pulls in $2.2M for radar-based sensors (VentureWire)
• ProNAi raises $6M for DNA drugs, seeks $20M more (VentureWire)

(NOTE: Items on Cameron Health, Miramar Labs, Nellix and Chestnut Medical went up over the weekend as separate items; click the links above for details.)

Consumer genetics tester DNA Direct receives $7M – Talk about hiding your light under a bushel. The San Francisco startup DNA Direct, which offers a-la-carte gene tests directly to individuals over the Internet, announced on Feb. 27 that it raised $7 million in a second round (PDF link) of funding.

Oddly, though, I haven’t seen the announcement picked up anywhere. I only learned of it from DNA Direct’s own in-house blog, which I happened across while searching for something else entirely.

In any case, Lemhi Ventures and private investors from the startup’s first round provided the funding. The company said it will use the money to help expand its efforts to “integrate” its genetic tests into doctors’ offices and clinics. DNA Direct’s first project in that regard is a Web-based guide to prenatal genetic testing called Prenatal Primer, which pregnant women can access after a referral from their doctor.

Precision Thera again prowling for venture funding – Surprise, surprise — Precision Therapeutics, the Pittsburgh cancer-diagnostics company that lost both an IPO and a potential merger in short order, is apparently once again looking for venture funding, VentureWire reports. No kidding. As I noted earlier this month, Precision had more debt than cash and a still-significant burn rate as of last Sept. 30, and things can’t have gotten much better since then.

The VentureWire story doesn’t offer many additional details, except for the fact that Precision CEO Sean McDonald hopes to close the deal by this summer. McDonald won’t even say how much the company is looking for, however, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Existing investors in the company are also close-mouthed about its fundraising prospects.

For what it’s worth, McDonald also hinted that Oracle Partners, a hedge-fund affiliate of the presumably now-unwinding blank-check company that was going to acquire Precision, may be involved in the funding.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• France’s TxCell raises €11M for cell therapy (release)
• Healthcare IT firm TriHealix takes in $7M (release)
• Healthcare-software provider Anodyne Health acquires Piedmont Healthcare (release)
• CEO, CFO resign at inhaled-drug biotech Topigen (release)

France’s TxCell raises €11M for cell therapy – TxCell, a French cell-therapy biotech, raised €10.5 million ($16 million) in a second funding round. Investors included Auriga Partners, AXA Private Equity, Bioam Gestion, CDC Innovation and Seventure.

The biotech is developing a patient-specific cell therapy for the gastrointestinal autoimmune condition Crohn’s disease. Its technique involves isolating specific regulatory immune cells known as Tr1 cells, which help tamp down inflammation, from a patient’s blood. After selecting only Tr1 cells that respond to a particular biochemical stimulus (technically, a particular antigen) and reinfusing them into the patient, doctors would then activate the cells locally — here, presumably, in the gut — by administering the trigger antigen and thus “downregulating” the immune response that’s causing problems.

Healthcare IT firm TriHealix takes in $7M – Norwalk, Conn.-based TriHealix, a healthcare IT provider focused on payment processing and consumer accounts, raised $7 million in a third funding round. Lemhi Ventures led the funding.

The TriHealix system integrates financial and medical information by tying together doctors and hospitals with insurers and patients. In theory, at least, the idea is to give patients a single card that handles both insurance and payments and may even provide a line of credit to handle deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses. This approach is also supposed to free consumers from having to fill out reimbursement forms, as their medical information is forwarded directly to their insurer.

Healthcare-software provider Anodyne Health acquires Piedmont Healthcare – Venture-backed Anodyne Health, an Alpharetta, Ga., developer of “revenue-cycle management” services for doctors and hospitals, agreed to acquire Charlotte, N.C.-based Piedmont Healthcare Management Group. The companies’ release is here.

The firms didn’t announce financial terms. Anodyne’s technology is designed to streamline the process of billing insurers and patients for medical services. Piedmont does much the same thing, only with a particular focus on emergency-room care. Anodyne is backed by Brook Venture Partners and Frontier Capital.