VentureBeat

(UPDATED at 6:30am PT on Friday: See below.)

Featured companies: DNA2.0, Globus Medical, Inotek Pharmaceuticals, Operon Biotechnologies, PleuraFlow

Globus Medical raises $110M for spinal implants — Globus Medical, an Audubon, Pa., developer of spinal implants, raised $110 million in a fifth financing round. Investors included Clarus Ventures, AIG SunAmerica and other large, institutional private-equity funds.

Some have called this the largest venture-capital funding of the year — by a grand total of $1.65. That’s one dollar and sixty-five cents. No lie. That seems to present a definitional problem of sorts, because there is only one named venture-capital firm in the deal, Clarus Ventures, which is all of two years old and has a grand total of nine companies in its portfolio. In addition, AIG SunAmerica is a veritable smorgasbord of financial services, none of which seem to include venture capital, and Globus itself says the rest of its funding comes from private equity.

Previous financings at Globus consisted of debt and four angel rounds, VentureWire reports (subscription required). Prior to the latest funding, the company had raised $18 million in equity from angel investors and $25 million in debt from Silicon Valley Bank and Bank of America. The company plans to retire that debt this year.

Globus, which was founded in 2003, said the funds would fund clinical trials of “multiple innovative technologies under development.” The company claims to be one of the world’s ten largest manufacturers of spinal implants, with more than $120 million in “annualized” revenues. According to VentureWire, Globus revenues last year amounted to $82 million, a figure that may grow to $120 million this year.

The company also recently settled six lawsuits with Synthes, agreeing to pay $13.5 million to the Swiss medical-device maker and to refrain from soliciting or hiring Synthes employees for a full year. Synthes had sued Globus, which was founded by former Synthes employees, accusing it of misappropriating trade secrets. There’s more detail at the Philadelphia Business Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

UPDATE: Tom Salemi at the In Vivo blog has more on what the deal means for Globus in the spinal-device market. For what it’s worth, he doesn’t think this funding should be considered a venture-capital deal, either.

Inotek receives $19M for cancer drugs — Beverly, Mass.-based Inotek Pharmaceuticals, a biotech that aims to tackle cancer, heart disease and inflammation, raised $19.3 million in a third funding round. Investors included Hercules Technology Growth Capital, Meditor Capital Management, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Care Capital, La Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, MedImmune Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital, and Rho Ventures.

Inotek’s lead drug candidate targets an enzyme in the cellular nucleus that helps repair DNA damage. Disabling that enzyme could make it easier to kill tumor cells.

DNA2.0 strikes artificial-DNA co-marketing deal with Operon – DNA2.0, a Menlo Park, Calif., biotech that bills itself as the largest U.S. provider of synthetic genes, struck an agreement with Huntsville, Ala.-based Operon Biotechnologies under which Operon will co-market DNA2.0’s gene-synthesis services. Meanwhile, it also appears that Operaon will share its nucleic-acid synthesis technology with DNA2.0 to improve DNA2.0’s “speed of synthesis.”

This deal probably isn’t all that huge in and of itself, but DNA-synthesis services are likely to grow in prominence as bioengineers become ever-more versed in techniques for modifying natural genes or even creating new genes from scratch. That’s what the emerging field of “synthetic biology” is all about, and it’s definitely worth watching.

PleuraFlow raises almost $1M for drainage device — PleuraFlow, a Bend, Ore., device startup, raised slightly under $1 million in seed financing, VentureWire reports (subscription required). Investors included the angel group BVC Investor, affiliated with the Bend Venture Conference, and the Cleveland Clinic. PleuraFlow is developing a device to improve pleural and pericardial drainage following heart surgery. The company doesn’t have a Web site.

UPDATE (7:05pm PT): Added items on Globus Medical and Inotek.

UPDATE REDUX (6:30am PT Friday): Expanded Globus item.

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.