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When I got a chance to meet with events web site Eventful back in July to look at their iPhone application, the company informed me it was working on some interesting ways to incorporate advertisements. Today, it revealed those plans: It’s the first cross-platform partner of location-based ad-targeting service 1020 Placecast.

What this means is that Placecast will be in charge of serving up advertisements on Eventful’s webpages and on its mobile site — including the application built for the iPhone. The mobile element is important because Placecast will have access to the device’s GPS chips to serve up ads based on where a user is. Because of this, these ads will demand higher CPMs (cost per mille, or the cost per a thousand impressions) and should be more relevant to the user, the company says.

Since Eventful is all about local events, it makes sense that it would team up with an advertising partner that targeted local areas. This will work on the service’s website as well by utilizing elements such as zip codes and other page content.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based Placecast was founded in 2005. It received funding from Voyager Capital and Onset Ventures.

APX, a Silicon Valley company that certifies carbon and emissions offset certificates, and which is well-placed to support carbon-trading markets when they emerge, has gotten backing from Goldman Sachs in a $14 million investment, VentureBeat has learned.

Carbon trading is a growing business that could someday come to resemble the world’s largest financial markets.

Today’s emissions markets are generally small and fragmented. In regional U.S. energy markets, utilities are already required to buy electricity from alternative energy sources like geothermal, solar or wind. To prove their use of alternative energy, they’re required to file a certificate tracking their acquisition of the energy units. So this is the beginning of a “transfer” regime that could grow into more.

Meantime, carbon offsetting markets that corporations buy credits from are currently voluntary, but in anticipation of future government regulation, they often require similar certifying schemes. However, the source of offsets can vary widely, from alternative energy generation to tree planting projects.

APX acts as part of the intermediary chain between buyer and seller, doing the work of tracking serial numbers on these certificates and the accounts they go into. It’s not glamorous, but having an efficient, scalable back-end will be one of the requirements for building a multi-billion dollar market, as emissions trading may well become.

Such details aren’t always automatically addressed as part of creating a new system. In fact, when California was looking at creating a regional registry in 2006, APX was the only qualified bidder, according to Dr. Reiner Musier, the company’s chief marketing officer.

As today’s small, scattered emissions trading markets grow, they may come to resemble the complex business and regulatory ecosystems of the futures and equities markets, which include various behind-the-scenes businesses similar to APX. Another indicator that some very serious businesses are becoming involved is one of the new investors in the company’s latest funding: Goldman Sachs, a heavyweight in the New York financial markets.

The funding we’re reporting was previously announced by APX as an undisclosed round. It appears to have been about $20 million, although the company may have only raised about $14 million to date (it declined to comment on the amount). Besides Goldman Sachs, previous investors Bechtel Enterprises Holdings, Kinetic Ventures, ONSET Ventures, Technology Partners and Woodside Fund also took part.

APX, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., currently handles tracking for five regional markets in the United States, as well as the Gold Standard, an international carbon trading standard. It makes a small set fee off each certificate that’s traded, and thus its success is relative to the volume of the markets. In the interest of helping these markets develop, the firm also advises newly forming markets on how to set themselves up.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Surgical-device maker Aragon Surgical receives $25M (release)
• Tacere Therapeutics strikes RNAi deal with Pfizer for up to $145M (release)
• Benvenue Medical raises $15M for spine-repair devices (release)
• Genome-association co. Genizon BioSciences draws C$31M (release)
• Contract research organization Inclinix pulls in $10M (release)
• EPocrates, healthcare IT developer, gets strategic investment from Goldman Sachs (release)
• ZyGem closes first funding round (release)
• Onset Ventures names John Ryan partner (release)
• Retired Scripps immunologist Richard Ulevitch joins 5AM Ventures (release)
• SV Life Sciences promotes Darren Black to partner (release)
• Medical-software maker SafeMed appoints Richard Noffsinger CEO (release)
• Artromick, healthcare IT developer, names Williams Shields CEO (release)
• Stem-cell biotech BioE seeks $3.5M (VentureWire, sub req’d)
• Inovise raises $3.4M for heart diagnostics (VW)
• Fairway Medical pockets $1M for medical devices, aims for $10M (VW)
• Cancer-drug biotech Genspera pulls in $650K, looks for $5M more (VW)
• E-trolZ looks for $400K for electrophysiology devices (VW)

Tacere Therapeutics strikes RNAi deal with Pfizer for up to $145M — San Jose, Calif.-based Tacere Pharmaceuticals, a biotech developing new drugs based on the gene-silencing technique known as RNA interference, struck a partnership deal with Pfizer that could be worth up to $145 million. The company’s release is here.

The deal involves Tacere’s leading drug candidate for hepatitis C. Known as TT-033, the drug consists of short stretches of RNA designed to trigger cellular mechanisms that shut down the activity of specific genes — an exciting but so far still unproven approach. In this case, TT-033 aims to shut down three separate parts of the hepatitis C genome, theoretically not only inactivating the virus, but also preventing the development of resistant viral strains.

Tacere is already co-developing TT-033 with Oncolys BioPharma of Japan, and in fact has deep Japanese roots, as the company also received its founding capital from Hokkaido Venture Capital of Sapporo, Japan. (Our coverage of the Oncolys deal is here.) The Pfizer deal appears to be complementary to Tacere’s previous agreement, as the Big Pharma will receive worldwide rights to TT-033 excluding Asian nations. Pfizer will fund all future development of the drug, and will make milestone payments to Tacere as development proceeds. TT-033 has not yet entered human testing.

Surgical-device maker Aragon Surgical receives $25M — Aragon Surgical, a Palo Alto, Calif., developer of surgical instruments, raised $25 million in a second funding round. Investors included Bay City Capital, Integral Capital Partners, Delphi Ventures and Onset Ventures.

Founded in 2005, Aragon develops tools and instruments intended to speed surgical procedures and to improve their safety. The company is working on two major classes of devices — “electrosurgical” instruments, which use electric current to stop bleeding, remove growths and cut tissue, and tools that improve the speed and safety of minimally invasive surgeries known as laparoscopies. Last September, Aragon launched its first product, the LapCap, which guides a needle used to inflate a patient’s abdomen with gas in order to reduce the risk of inaccurate placement and injury.

Benvenue Medical raises $15M for spine-repair devices — Mountain View, Calif.-based Benvenue Medical, a developer of minimally invasive devices for spine surgery, raised $15 million in a second funding round. Investors included Three Arch Partners, Versant Ventures and De Novo Ventures.

Benvenue is developing spinal implants designed for the treatment of spinal compression fractures and degenerative disk disease via spinal fusion. The company’s Web site is a stub, and it doesn’t seem to have described its technology in much detail yet.

Stem-cell biotech BioE seeks $3.5M — St. Paul, Minn.-based BioE, a provider of stem-cell products for the drug and biotech industries, hopes to raise $3.5 million in a first funding round, VentureWire reports (subscription required). The company has so far raised $30 million from angel investors, and disclosed its plans in a regulatory filing. The funds will allow the company to commercialize lines of “multi-lineage” progenitor stem cells and a system for processing and freezing of umbilical-cord blood stem cells.

Inovise raises $3.4M for heart diagnostics — Inovise Medical, a Portland, Ore., developer of cardiac diagnostics, raised $3.4 million in convertible notes, VentureWire reports, citing a regulatory filing. The company is in the midst of fundraising for a sixth financing round. Inovise makes a non-invasive cardiac monitoring system called Audicor that records and analyzes sounds emitted by a beating heart.

Fairway Medical pockets $1M for medical devices, aims for $10M — Fairway Medical Technologies, a Houston incubator that develops a variety of medical devices, raised $1 million from angel investors and is looking to draw another $5 million to $10 million in a first institutional round later this year, VentureWire reports. Founded in 1992, Fairway Medical in-licenses medical devices and ushers them through the development process.

Cancer-drug biotech Genspera pulls in $650K, looks for $5M more — Santa Monica, Calif.-based Genspera, a biotech focused on cancer drugs, raised $650,000 in a seed round and aims to close another $5 million in funding later this quarter, VentureWire reports. The company plans to list its shares on the Nasdaq over-the-counter bulletin board following the financing. Genspera is working on cancer drugs using technology licensed from Johns Hopkins University.

E-trolZ looks for $400K for electrophysiology devices — North Andover, Mass.-based E-trolZ, a developer of electrophysiology measurement devices, raised $400,000 in a follow-on to its first $1.2 million funding round, VentureWire reports. The company is developing components that measure various physiological signals and which can be integrated into other medical devices.

An implantable and odd-looking microtelescope from a Saratoga, Calif., device maker could be one of the next big things in treating a common form of blindness — assuming that patients are willing to endure arduous surgery in order to obtain their new bionic eyes.

Age-related macular degeneration — a progressive loss of sight related to physical changes in the central retina, also called the macula — is the leading cause of blindness among elderly Americans, now affecting more than 1.75 million people, and potentially almost three million by 2020 (PDF link). Until recently, AMD patients had little choice but to accept the steady loss of vision as their macula deteriorated.

Over the past few years, biotech companies have made some headway against the “wet” form of AMD, in which abnormal vessels in the retina leak blood and fluid that distorts vision. In particular, two drugs from Genentech, Lucentis and Avastin, appear to block the growth of those blood vessels and, for the first time, appear to improve vision in many AMD patients. (Avastin, however, isn’t approved for AMD, although at these doses it is roughly a hundred times cheaper than Lucentis. Genentech is, of course, doing all it can to keep patients on Lucentis.) Now that those drugs have been proven to work, new experimental treatments for wet AMD are everywhere — see, for instance, our coverage here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Not everyone responds to the existing drugs, however, and they don’t work at all in people with the “dry” form of AMD (a group that accounts for close to 90 percent of all AMD patients). Which is where a transplanted Israeli medical-device firm called VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies and its implantable microtelescope come in.

Both forms of AMD typically first degrade “central vision” — essentially, your ability to see whatever you’ve focused your eyes on. While many AMD patients retain some peripheral vision, losing central vision in both eyes makes it all but impossible to drive, read or perform many other daily activities. That characteristic of the disease, however, is what drove Isaac Lipshitz and Yossi Gross to found VisionCare in the mid-1990s, with the goal of developing an implantable device that might restore vision even without addressing the underlying cause of AMD.

Lipshitz designed a tiny but powerful telescope that acts like a telephoto lens, essentially enlarging images by a factor of three. That, in turn, “spreads” central vision across a wider swathe of the retina, allowing healthy retinal cells to interpret images that previously would have been restricted to their damaged macular counterparts (see graphic below).

The only catch, of course, is that you have to have this microtelescope implanted in your eye, which is not a particularly easy procedure. Surgeons must essentially lift up the cornea by one edge in order to wedge the four-millimeter-long telescope underneath it. A recent study in the Archives of Ophthalmology outlined two years of surgical experience with the device, noting that the procedure frequently damaged the endothelial cells that line the outer surface of the eyeball, and in a few cases required a complete corneal transplant.

Those risks, however, may well be worth it for patients who otherwise risk permanently losing much of their sight. In a year-long clinical trial involving 217 patients who had the device implanted in one eye, 90 percent of the subjects gained the ability to see an additional two lines on an eye chart. After a year, two-thirds of the volunteers experienced a doubling in their visual acuity (equivalent to a three-line gain on the eye chart), and 25 percent gained five lines of vision. Those patients recently completed a two-year followup, and VisionCare — now headquartered in Saratoga — expects the FDA to approve the implant by the end of this year.

VisionCare had raised roughly $46 million as of Jan. 2005, according to this VentureWire story (subscription required). The company is backed by Boston Scientific and a variety of VC firms, including Onset Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital, Three Arch Partners and Infinity Venture Capital.

For more background, see this recent Scientific American article, this item at MedGadget, and this historical piece published by the nonprofit Israel21C.

Aragon Surgical, a Palo Alto, Calif., medical-devices maker, said the FDA cleared its LapCap product for use in general surgery. Aragon, which doesn’t seem to have a Web site, gained ownership of the LapCap when it acquired VeriSure, another device maker, in March.

The LapCap is designed to ease the initial steps of minimally invasive, or laparoscopic, surgery, in which surgeons must pass a needle into the abdomen in order to blow in gas that will expand the abdominal cavity. The LapCap guides this needle into the proper location, helping to avoid inadvertent needle-related injuries. The device was previously only cleared for use in gynecologic laparoscopies.

Aragon is backed by Delphi Ventures and Onset Ventures.

CardioMind, a secretive Sunnyvale, Calif., developer of stents designed to prop open blocked arteries, raised $33 million in a third round of funding, VentureWire reports (subscription required). From the VentureWire story:

CardioMind, with 30 employees, is developing small-diameter drug-eluting stents and delivery devices for cardiovascular and neurological indications and has been largely operating in stealth mode for the past five years.

SV Life Sciences and De Novo Ventures led the round, joined by InterWest Partners, Latterell Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures and Onset Ventures.

CardioMind had previously raised $20 million in two financing rounds, according to VentureWire.

Despite recent concerns over the safety of drug-eluting stents, which are coated with a substance designed to prevent growth of scar tissue that can reblock arteries, new stent companies have continued to get a warm welcome from investors. Menlo Park, Calif.-based Xtent, for instance, raised $76 million in a February IPO. In May, Devax, a Lake Forest, Calif., stent developer, filed to raise up to $85 million in an IPO.

Pegasus Biologics, an Irvine, Calif., maker of flexible-but-strong tissue substitutes designed to speed muscle-tendon repair or wound healing, raised $20 million in a third round of funding.

Despite the word “biologics” in its name — a term that is often synonymous with protein-based biotechnology drugs — Pegasus isn’t a drug company. Nor is it strictly a medical-device maker. Instead, the company has devised “bioimplants” made from equine pericardium — horse heart, in other words — that surgeons can use to help stitch together damaged tendons or other wounds. (Technically speaking, a “biologic” is any product derived from living organisms, and so covers everything from protein drugs pumped out by genetically engineered bacteria to actual human or animal tissue. It’s just that you don’t tend to see as much of the latter as the former.)

Currently, Pegasus sells one type of bioimplant for tendon and ligament repair, and a second for use in wound healing, particularly in diabetic ulcers. Each consists of a cell-free collagen matrix intended to provide a “scaffold” for the regrowth of surrounding tissues. The company is also currently developing a bioimplant for repair of the dura mater, the outermost membrane surrounding the brain and spinal cord, and another intended for use in reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL, an easily injured ligament in the knee. Generally speaking, Pegasus considers its bioimplants an attractive alternative to other animal-derived biologic tissue or to human tissues, whether patient-derived or procured from cadavers.

Onset Ventures led the funding round, joined by fellow new investor Affinity Capital Management and existing investors Three Arch Partners and Frazier Healthcare Ventures. Pegasus previously raised $10 million in a mid-2005 second round.

Leslie Bottorff, an Onset general partner, will join the Pegasus board, as will Gary Restani, president of medical-robotics company Hansen Medical. Onset normally invests in earlier-stage companies, but Bottorff told me that Pegasus was attractive because it was sitting on a “largely untapped” market for surgical-repair bioimplants. Bottorff said that competing animal-tissue products are generally stiffer and more difficult for surgeons to work with, and that human tissue always carries the risk of transmitting disease or producing an inflammatory immune reaction.

Bottorff said the current financing should carry Pegasus to profitability, after which it might be a good candidate for an initial offering or potential acquisition.