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Meebo, the site that lets users send instant messages from a single page — across various IM platforms — is trying to raise $25-$30 million at a nose-bleed valuation of between $200 million and $250 million, I’m hearing from multiple sources. This is quadruple its valuation from its previous round of between $60-$70 million last year, and a big bet that its fast-growing user base is worth something.

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Mountain View, Calif.- based Meebo has hired a San Francico bank, Montgomery & Co to shop the deal. We’ve heard that two, possibly three, larger strategic investors — and these may include Facebook and MySpace — have expressed interest, though things are moving quickly, and one of them may have backed off.

I’m quite ready to eat my hat, if this funding happens. I wrote last week that the market had changed considerably over the past few months, and that Meebo wouldn’t be able to raise money at the stratospheric rates it might have done last year — because of the evaporation of interest from hedge funds. That analysis hasn’t changed. But there’s apparently still interest from some strategic investors. If Meebo pulls this off, its a great story, an even greater one than Bebo selling itself to AOL last week for $850 million. Note: Bebo was represented by Montgomery & Co. rival bank Allen & Co., which also represents other consumer-facing startups like Digg and Slide.

However, the value is surprisingly high because Meebo is a mere messaging service that hasn’t proven yet that it can make good money. The site’s core service lets you chat across competing instant message services, including AIM, Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger and Microsoft messenger, but other companies also offer that service. The company is now starting to focus on making money. In the past year, it has started relationships with a number of music labels and other partners, and also works with video advertising service company VideoEgg. It’s hard to predict the value of Meebo’s business model, especially in the short-term where advertising and other forms of making money in social site like social networks — or Meebo — has come harder than some expected.

Of course, this also comes at a time when the consumer economy has taken a hit, resulting in even large banks like Bear Sterns getting sold for far less than their previous values. Some investors remain quite skeptical about Meebo.

On the other hand, Meebo has some things going for it. It has attracted 29 million monthly unique users worldwide. While other chat services abound, Meebo has done an especially good job at executing to make its service very simple to use. It has rolled out other compelling products too, such as Meebo rooms (like the one we embedded beneath the article), which has been growing quickly, as well as its smaller developer platform. In fact, Meebo won “best consumer startup” at The Crunchies award ceremony in January: An important factor was that its rooms grew to more than 20 million users since the service launched last May.

More generally, there may also be more competition — if not consolidation — among instant messaging services. We’ve heard that Facebook is working on its own IM service, we’ve also heard that Facebook has looked at buying AIM from AOL, although this sounds highly unlikely considering that Facebook likes to create products rather than buy them. And, now that AOL is integrating Bebo’s social network with AIM, this sounds even more ludicrous.

The banker, Montgomery, has requested that all offers be in by Wednesday, and has told investors it has several parties interested at a valuation of $200 million. We’ve heard different things about who is interested. We’ve heard that at least one, possibly two, of the strategic investors isn’t interested in sharing the investment, preferring instead to buy Meebo entirely. We haven’t confirmed that. Montgomery is reportedly holding out for a separate venture investor, in order to help set the price of the round, at which the strategic investor or investors would also invest.

Eric Eldon contributed to this article.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Gene-silencing developer Santaris raises €20M (PDF release)
• Consumer-driven healthcare manager RedBrick Health prescribed $15M (release)
• Cardiac Dimensions takes in $36M for heart-valve device (release)
• TcLand Expressions gets €8.2M for biomarkers (PDF release)
• TheraQuest Bio gets $3M for pain drugs (release)
• Brain-software maker NeuroTrax visualizes $1.5M (VentureWire)
• ActivBiotics selling off assets after clot-busting drug failure (release)
• Nanostart buys stake in Singapore’s Curiox, a drug-discovery tech firm (release)
• Respiratory biotech Altair Thera gets additional funding (VentureWire)
• Specialty pharma Prometheus Labs files for $100M IPO (Edgar)
• Sirtris co-founder David Sinclair joins Lux Capital as venture partner (PDF release)

Gene-silencing developer Santaris raises €20M — Denmark’s Santaris Pharma, a developer of gene-silencing drugs, raised €20 million ($30 million) (PDF) in a third financing round. Investors included Gilde Healthcare Partners, BankInvest, Novo, LD, Forbion Capital Partners, Global Life Science Venture, Sunstone Capital, Seventure, Omega, Innovation Capital and members of the Company’s board and management. Gilde contributed €7.5 million to the round.

Santaris is pursuing an “antisense” strategy for turning off particular disease-related genes using synthetic strands of nucleic acid, which bind to and deactivate the messenger RNA molecules that are crucial to gene activity. (Technically, the mRNA plays a key role in the manufacture of a gene’s protein or proteins, which in disease states are often either malformed or overproduced. The drug molecule is a complement to the mRNA’s nucleic-acid sequence, which in DNA chemistry makes it an “antisense” molecule.)

Whereas biotechs working on antisense drugs have traditionally used strands of DNA — often chemically modified to improve their durability and cell-penetrating abilities — to block gene activity, Santaris has produced what it claims is a unique RNA analogue that it calls a “locked nucleic acid.” (The company goes into detail here.) The Santaris molecule, which combines LNA and DNA, is supposed to bind RNA in three dimensions, presumably boosting its binding ability and therefore potency.

Santaris is first targeting chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and says its drug candidate has already demonstrated initial safety and efficacy in an early-stage human test. The company has several other candidates in preclinical development, as well as two other molecules it licensed to Enzon Pharmaceuticals, one of which has also begun human testing against cancer.

For a more detailed look at antisense, see our coverage of Excaliard Pharmaceuticals, a biotech that licensed a slew of technology from antisense pioneer Isis Pharmaceuticals, here.

Consumer-driven healthcare manager RedBrick Health prescribed $15M — RedBrick Health, a Minneapolis healthcare company promoting “consumer-oriented” plans that shift much of the financial responsibility for medical care to individuals, raised $15 million in a second funding round. Investors included Fidelity Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Versant Ventures.

RedBrick aims to help companies set up consumer-directed healthcare plans, which are also known as “defined contribution” schemes in that they limit the financial exposure of employers, who simply make regular contributions to employee “health savings accounts.” These plans, obviously, put the financial onus on individuals, who pay for their own medical care out of these accounts, in contrast to traditional “defined benefit” plans in which individuals pay premiums for comprehensive health coverage. In theory, these consumer-oriented plans should hold down healthcare costs by making individuals more “responsible” users of medical care; in practice, sick patients are often in a terrible position to be good medical “consumers,” and the plans have have proven generally unpopular to boot.

That hasn’t slowed RedBrick or its backers. The company will use the funding to continue expanding its efforts to sell and manage consumer-directed healthcare plans, which RedBrick somewhat misleadingly insists on calling “consumer-owned” healthcare. (Such plans usually couple health-savings accounts with a high-deductible insurance plan.) The company recently announced deals with several new client companies, although none are exactly what you’d call high profile firms — their ranks include the Ridgeview Medical Center in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which is switching its employees to a RedBrick-supported plan, and Welch Allyn, a medical-device manufacturer in Skaneateles Falls, N.Y., which is doing likewise.

Cardiac Dimensions takes in $36M for heart-valve device – Cardiac Dimensions, a Kirkland, Wash., developer of heart-valve devices, raised $35.5 million in a fourth financing round. Investors included Johnson & Johnson Development, Lumira Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, West River Capital, Montgomery & Co., Frazier Healthcare Ventures, Interwest Partners, MPM Capital, and Polaris Venture Partners.

Cardiac Dimensions is working on an implantable device designed to reshape the heart’s mitral valve, which in heart-failure patients sometimes weakens and allows blood to swish backward through the heart’s chambers. We’ve covered several other startups working on mitral-valve devices, including Evalve and Cardiosolutions.