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TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Antibody-discovery startup Adimab raises new funding (release)
• Lung-device maker Spiration gets $19M (release)
• Sample-prep startup Protein Discovery pulls in $10M (release)
• Inogen takes in $13M for portable oxygen device (VentureWire)
• Healthcare IT concern Medaptus raises $11M for expansion (VentureWire)
• Contract lab Synexis raises $14M (peHUB)
• Medical-device VC firm BioStar Ventures takes in $24M of $80M fund (peHUB)
• Halsa Pharma gets $250K for “natural” obesity-control treatment (release)
• Diagnostics provider Lab21 acquires NPTech (peHUB)
• Galil Medical names Martin Emerson CEO (release)

Antibody-discovery startup Adimab raises new funding – Lebanon, N.H.-based Adimab, a biotech working on new ways to discover antibody drugs, has raised a second round of funding. The company didn’t disclose the size of the round.

Adimab, which raised $6 million last July, is one of several startups looking to design new antibody drugs in bioengineered yeast cells, as we wrote at the time. (Alder Biopharmaceuticals, which raised $40 million in January, is another.) The technique promises to be much faster — and freer of patent restrictions — than current methods. When Adimab completes its current manufacturing facility in the second quarter, it claims it will be able to produce a panel of human antibodies against a particular target in just 90 days, instead of the year or more traditional methods can require.

Investors included Polaris Venture Partners and SV Life Sciences, who also invested in the company’s first round.

Lung-device maker Spiration gets $19M – Spiration, a Redmond, Wash., medical-device startup, raised $18.5 million in a seventh funding round. Investors included Versant Ventures, Olympus Medical Systems, New Enterprise Associates, New Leaf Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Investor Growth Capital and Three Arch Partners.

Spiration has now raised a total of $97 million. It is developing a set of one-way valves for emphysema that can be implanted in the lung’s airways via a minimally invasive procedure. These valves are designed to shunt air away from diseased portions of the lung and redirect it to healthier areas. The company said the funding would support commercialization of its device in Europe and to complete studies for regulatory approval in the U.S.

Other startups working on similar technology include Emphasys Medical, Pulmonx and Broncus Technologies.

Sample-prep startup Protein Discovery pulls in $10M – Knoxville, Tenn.-based Protein Discovery, a biotech with new laboratory technology for protein identification, raised $10 million in a third funding round. Investors included Santé Ventures, Memphis Biomed Ventures, the Southern Appalachian Fund, and the Nashville Capital Network.

The startup is developing technology that aims to “simplify” the process of preparing biological samples for protein analysis. The details are probably too much for anyone who’s not a lab technician themselves, but feel free to check out the company’s explanation if you dare.)

Inogen takes in $13M for portable oxygen device – Inogen, a Goleta, Calif., medical-device maker, raised $12.6 million in its fifth funding round, VentureWire reports. Investors included Accuitive Medical Ventures, Arboretum Ventures, Avalon Ventures, Novo A/S, Numenor Ventures and Versant Ventures.

The company makes and sells portable oxygen-delivery systems for patients suffering from a lung problem called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The product has been on the market for several years, and Inogen says it believes it might take several more before it’s in a position to be acquired or to go public.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Vantia Thera spins out of Ferring, raises £19M (PDF release)
• Third Eye gets $150K for intracranial-pressure monitor (release)
• Diabetes tester Oculir closes doors, returns capital (VentureWire)
• Catalyst Health Ventures raising $60M fund (VentureWire)

Vantia Thera spins out of Ferring, raises £19M – Vantia Therapeutics, a U.K. spinout of Ferring Pharmaceuticals, has launched and raised £19 million ($37.7 million) in a first funding round (PDF link). Investors included MVM Life Science Partners, SV Life Sciences and Novo A/S.

Vantia inherits a collection of traditional “small molecule” drugs from its parent, including two that are already in clinical trials. Both drug candidate target the hormone vasopressin, which among other things regulates the body’s retention of water. One candidate is being tested as a possible treatment for enlarged prostate, the other for painful menstruation.

Diabetes tester Oculir closes doors, returns capital – Oculir Inc., a San Diego startup that aimed to develop a non-invasive glucose-testing device for diabetics, has instead shut down, VentureWire reports. The startup, founded in 2003, was working on technology designed to measure blood-sugar levels using infrared light bounced off the white of the eye. Such testing currently requires diabetics to prick their fingers for a tiny blood sample, often several times a day.

Unfortunately, the technology proved too challenging for the company and its backers. “It turned into a research project, and our venture investors wanted to invest in development, not research,” CEO John Burd told the news service.

Oculir raised $7.3 million back in December 2005 from Onset Ventures, CHL Medical Partners, Canaan Partners, Three Arch Partners, Shepherd Ventures and Windamere Venture Partners. It now plans to return an undisclosed sum to its investors — a fairly clear sign that Oculir’s VCs demanded that the company wind down its operations.

Catalyst Health Ventures raising $60M fund – Catalyst Health Ventures, a Newton, Mass., VC firm, hopes to raise a $60 million second fund, VentureWire reported. The fund will invest in medical-device, diagnostics, instrument and drug-screening startups.

Catalyst had pulled in $3.5 million of a planned $25 million as of Feb. 14. The firm intends to focus on early-stage companies and is looking to invest in six or more startups, often with initial investments of $2 million to $3 million.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Affinergy gets $3M in grants for biological “linkers” (release)
• Specialty pharma EUSA raises $50M, spends $23M for public biotech Cytogen (release)
• Calderome takes in $12M for cancer diagnostics (peHUB)
• Pulse Health raises $2M for handheld free-radical device (release)
  
• LifeMasters takes in $15M for wellness, disease-management programs (release)
• Dubai Techno Park launched $300MVC fund for life sciences, other sectors (release)

Affinergy gets $3M in grants for biological “linkers” – Affinergy, a Duke University spinout in Research Triangle Park, N.C., received grants worth more than $3 milllion to support development of biological “linker” molecules with potential uses in coatings for medical devices and the development of new therapeutics. The grants were awarded by the federal National Institutes of Health through its small-business innovation research program.

The startup is developing biological molecules that can selectively bind various substances to particular surfaces. Such linkage molecules could, for instance, attach healing growth factors to surgical meshes or other implanted biomaterials or help target drugs at particular cell-surface proteins. The company hasn’t described its goals in much detail, although it said one of the grants is for work aimed at accelerating a patient’s natural healing process.

Specialty pharma EUSA raises $50M, spends $23M for public biotech Cytogen – In today’s man-bites-dog news, the venture-backed specialty pharma EUSA Pharma agreed to acquire the publicly traded biotech Cytogen for $22.6 million. The EUSA release is here; Cytogen has its own release here.

In one sense, the news isn’t terribly surprising, as Cytogen effectively put itself up for sale last November when it announced it was “reviewing strategic alternatives.” The twist here is that EUSA is taking the biotech private — a sign of just how far Cytogen’s fortunes have fallen since the heady days of the 1999-2000 biotech bubble, when its stock almost touched $200 a share. EUSA, which has offices in Doylestown, Pa., and Oxford, England, is offering 62 cents a share, a 35 percent premium over Cytogen’s closing price yesterday of 46 cents.

On the business front, however, it’s hard to say that the combination will be much more exciting than either company has been individually. Both EUSA and Cytogen traffic in a range of largely unrelated drugs for pain and cancer treatment.

EUSA raised $50 million to finance the cash transaction, for working capital and to restructure Cytogen. Investors included TVM Capital, Essex Woodlands, 3i, Goldman Sachs, Advent Venture Partners, SV Life Sciences, NeoMed and NovaQuest.

Calderome takes in $12M for cancer diagnostics – Calderome (no Web site), a South San Francisco, Calif., developer of cancer diagnostics, has taken in $11.9 million of a $23 million first funding round, peHUB reports. (peHUB identifies the company as located in Menlo Park, Calif., but two Calderome job postings on Biospace indicate its headquarters are actually in South San Francisco.)

In fact, I’m loving job listings at the moment, because the company also advertised one of those positions on Craigslist here. According to that listing:

Calderome, Inc. is an early stage cancer diagnostics company addressing the emerging opportunities in personalized medicine. The Company’s strategic vision is to develop a novel molecular cytology approach to improve the diagnosis of cancer, saving patients thousands of unnecessary surgeries every year. The company has spent the last year validating its business model with key stakeholders: physicians, patients and payers and has recently closed a significant round of private equity financing with premier venture capital investors….

In other words, it sounds very much like the company is developing a cell-based diagnostic, possibly involving a test that can pick up tumor cells that circulate in the bloodstream, that can help diagnose cancer without the need for invasive biopsies. That’s merely speculation, however.

Investors in the round include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, TPG Biotechnology Partners and Versant Ventures.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Allegro pulls in $4M for lung-cancer molecular diagnostics (release)
• Ocular bandage developer I-Therapeutix raises $6M (Mass High Tech)
• NanoBio gets last of $30M for skin-infection drugs (release)
• Cayenne Medical raises $15M for sports medicine (release)
• Aridis Pharma seeks $10M for oral-form drugs and vaccines (VentureWire)
• Neurosurgical device maker Nfocus Neuro acquires StarFire Medical (release)

Allegro pulls in $4M for lung-cancer molecular diagnostics – Boston’s Allegro Diagnostics, a biotech developing molecular diagnostics for lung cancer, raised $4 million in a first funding round. Investors included Kodiak Venture Partners, Catalyst Health Ventures and Boston University.

Allegro is commercializing gene-expression tests based on technology developed by two BU researchers, Jerome Brody and Avrum Spira. The company’s Web site and release don’t describe its technology in further detail. Allegro says the funding will allow it to begin human testing of its diagnostic.

Ocular bandage developer I-Therapeutix raises $6M – I-Therapeutix, a Waltham, Mass., device maker focused on using hydrogels as “liquid bandages” for ocular surgeries, expects to close a $6 million second funding round this month, Mass High Tech reports. Investors included Versant Ventures, SV Life Sciences, Pinnacle Ventures and angel investors.

Founded in 2006, I-Therapeutix plans to begin clinical trials of its hydrogel sealant in cataract surgery in the second quarer of this year. The product, called I-Zip, will be compared to ordinary corneal bandages. Ultimately, the startup plans to develop the hydrogel as a mechanism for delivering drugs directly to the eye.

Aridis Pharma seeks $10M for oral-form drugs and vaccines – Aridis Pharmaceuticals, a San Jose, Calif., drug and vaccine developer, aims to raise up to $10 million in a first funding round, VentureWire reports. The company was founded in 2003 by former executives of Aviron, which was acquired by MedImmune in 2002.

Aridis is working to stabilize drugs and vaccines that would otherwise require injections so that they can be delivered via inhalation or swallowing. Its lead candidates include a rotavirus vaccine, an antibody for cystic fibrosis and a new type of antibiotic.

Neurosurgical device maker Nfocus Neuro acquires StarFire Medical – Nfocus Neuromedical, a Palo Alto, Calif., device maker focused on treating hemorrhagic stroke, acquired StarFire Medical, a developer of minimally invasive devices for treating problems in the blood vessels serving the brain. The companies didn’t divulge financial details.

StarFire makes and sells balloon catheters for treating brain-vessel fistulas and aneurysms, both blood-vessel defects that can lead to uncontrolled bleeding. Nfocus makes a different type of device for treating these defects, although it doesn’t appear to have disclosed much about its particular approach.

NanoBio gets last of $30M for skin-infection drugs – NanoBio, an Ann Arbor, Mich., biotech developing new anti-infective drugs, raised the final $10 million of a $30 million equity funding that appears to be the company’s first. Perseus provided the funding. NanoBio’s lead compounds address herpes cold sores and nail fungus.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Q Thera takes in $15M for neural stem-cell treatments (release)
• Stroke clotbuster Concentric Medical withdraws IPO (IPOhome)
• Avera recaps with $9M to relaunch human tests of GI drug (VentureWire)
• Tissue repairer Nerites raises $5.7M (release)
• Semafore Pharma aims for $7.5M to launch new cancer-drug trials (VentureWire)
• Triage Wireless gets $6.7M for “cuffless” blood-pressure monitors (peHUB)
• MAKO Surgicals prices IPO, falls in first day of trading (WSJ)
• ImmunoCellular acquires assets of Molecular Antibody Technology (release)

Q Thera takes in $15M for neural stem-cell treatments – Q Therapeutics, a Salt Lake City biotech working on neural stem-cell treatments for neurological conditions, has received the first portion of a $15 million second funding round. Investors in the round included vSpring Capital, Invitrogen, Epic Ventures, Toucan Capital, University of Utah Research Foundation, Salt Lake Life Science Angels and Q management.

Q is taking aim at diseases such as multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy that result when the protective myelin sheath that protects nerve fibers and the spinal cord deteriorates, often for little-understood reasons. The company is developing neural stem cells that can produce new glial cells, which in theory should be able to regenerate the damaged myelin. (Irritatingly enough, the company insists on calling its product “Q cells.”) The company aims to begin clinical trials in transeverse myelitis, a paralyzing form of MS, next year.

Stroke clotbuster Concentric Medical withdraws IPO – Concentric Medical, a Mountain View, Calif., developer of medical devices for removing stroke-causing blood clots, withdrew its proposed IPO. The company becomes the eighth life-science startup to abandon an IPO this year.

Concentric, of course, cited “unfavorable market conditions” as the reason for its withdrawal. The device maker, which is still unprofitable, reported working capital and cash and short-term investments of $20.3 million at the end of June and has been burning cash at a rate of about $7 million a year, so it’s not necessarily in dire straits. Concentric, in fact, today announced it had arranged a $15 million line of credit with Horizon Technology Finance, giving it an additional cushion.

The company makes and sells a catheter-based device that can be snaked through a patient’s blood vessels to the brain in order to physically “grab” and remove stroke-causing blood clots. Although Concentric won approval for the device in 2004, sales have grown more modestly — in part, perhaps, because Concentric hasn’t undertaken the clinical studies necessary to demonstrate the usefulness of its technique compared to other treatments, and has no plans to do so. (The company listed this point as a risk factor in its SEC filings.) What’s more, the Concentric device can sometimes damage blood vessels in the brain; in one of two studies, almost ten percent of patients suffered a cranial hemorrhage.

Our previous coverage of the company is here.

Avera recaps with $9M to relaunch human tests of GI drug – Avera Pharmaceuticals, a San Diego specialty pharma developing drugs against a variety of conditions, recapitalized with a $9 million “first” funding round, VentureWire reports. Such a recap usually amounts to a restart for a company, which in this case was prompted by a halted clinical trial of a drug for irritable bowel syndrome and overactive bladder.

Investors in the recap included all participants in the company’s previous funding round: Aisling Capital, SV Life Sciences, Aberdare Ventures, BioAsia Investments, H.I.G. Ventures, Montreux Equity Partners, Bay City Capital, BTG PLC, Frazier Healthcare Ventures, InterWest Partners, St. Paul Venture Capital and Windamere Venture Partners. The company declined to provide a valuation to VentureWire, but it’s almost certainly suffered a “down round,” or it wouldn’t be recapitalizing.

Avera shut down mid-stage trials of its drug, known as AV608, last year after animal testing turned up potential toxicity issues. The company has since redesigned the drug to eliminate a compound it called a “non-active metabolite,” and hopes to resume studies later this year. Avera had raised more than $72 million prior to the recap.

Biotechnology owes its birth as an industry to the discovery of recombinant DNA, which allowed researchers to make particular proteins by tinkering with cellular genomes. Inserting the gene for human insulin into a bacterial cell, for instance, turns it into an insulin factory. The same goes for any number of other biotech drugs, which by and large are produced in living but genetically altered cells.

Although cellular production first made it possible to make industrial levels of some proteins, the process isn’t without flaws. Some proteins can’t be produced at all in certain cells, while others end up missing particular sugars or other molecules that hang on protein “branches” and affect their function. For another take on some of these problems, see our July story on Coda Genomics, one biotech with a new take on resolving some of these issues.

A different approach involves the audacious step of doing away with the cell altogether. Fundamental Applied Biology is one company taking this tack by trying to replicate a cell’s protein-production system in a vat, a technique that — if it works — could make it possible to produce a novel variety of therapeutic and industrial proteins safely and with much greater efficiency.

Although it sounds conceptually straightforward, this is a vastly complicated task, which is one reason no one yet produces biotech therapeutics this way. FAB’s own description of its technology isn’t terribly illuminating, and neither is this 2005 Stanford publication that purports to explain the work of Stanford professor Jim Swartz, who developed the techniques now in use at FAB. I’m scheduled to speak with the company later this afternoon, though, and I’ll update with what I learn.

At this point, my guess is that such “cell-free” protein production is a long way from practical use in the biotech industry, although it may prove itself in various non-medical industrial applications much sooner. Among the neat tricks supposedly possible with this sort of system is the production of proteins using artificial amino acids (the modular building blocks of proteins), which could have any number of unexpected properties.

FAB just raised $21 million in a second funding round. Its investors included SV Life Sciences and Alta Partners. FAB also just named Daniel Gold, formerly a vice president at Human Genome Sciences, as its new CEO.

Featured companies: Atritech, Avalon Partners, Ensemble Discovery, Hyperion Therapeutics, LifeBond, ReShape Medical, SafeStitch, Trophos, UltraShape

Hyperion Therapeutics raises $40M against GI and kidney disease — Hyperion Therapeutics, a South San Francisco, Calif., specialty pharmaceutical company, raised $40 million in a second funding round. Investors included Sofinnova Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates and WRF Capital.

Hyperion, which buys the rights to test and market drug candidates from other companies, said the proceeds will allow it to complete a licensing agreement with Medicis Pharmaceutical’s Ucyclyd subsidiary, build out its management team and advance its clinical trials. The company’s two leading candidates address a genetic disease called urea cycle disorder, in which toxic ammonia builds up in the blood stream, and hepatic encephalopathy, a neurological complication of cirrhosis.

Atritech raises $22M for clot-prevention device — Plymouth, Minn.-based Atritech, a developer of a device designed to prevent dangerous blood clots, raised $22 million in a fourth funding round. Investors included SightLine Healthcare Vintage Fund, Prism Venture Partners and other existing investors.

Atritech’s device, which it calls the Watchman system, is essentially a tiny mesh basket designed to be implanted in the opening to the heart’s left atrial appendage, a small pouch on the top of the heart. That pouch is often the source of blood clots in patients with atrial fibrillation, a condition in which the heart’s upper chambers beat too fast. Ideally, the implanted basket will catch clots that threaten to escape into the bloodstream, where they could cause a stroke.

The funding will allow Atritech to finish enrolling patients in a late-stage trial of the Watchman device, which is being tested against a blood thinner typically given to prevent clots from forming.

UltraShape gets $15.1M for “body contouring” — UltraShape, an Israeli developer of ultrasound systems designed to break down fat cells for cosmetic purposes, raised $15.1 million in a fifth funding round. Investors included Meritech Capital Partners, Israel Seed Partners and Polaris Venture Partners. The company’s non-invasive device isn’t approved for use in the U.S.

Trophos raises $11.6M for neurological drugs — Trophos, a Marseille, France, biotech focused on developing new drugs for neurological conditions, raised $11.6 million (€8.5 million) in a third round of funding. Investors included OTC Asset Management, CM-CIC Capital Privé, Society General Asset Management (SGAM), Viveris Management, Turenne Capital Partners, Blue Medical and the Association Française contre les Myopathies.

Trophos develops drugs that it believes will promote the survival of neurons threatened by degenerative neurological diseases such as Huntingdon’s disease. Its leading candidates target neuropathic pain and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

SafeStitch goes public in reverse merger, raises $4M in debt — SafeStitch, a Miami medical-device maker without a Web site, went public in a reverse merger with the defunct firm Cellular Technical Services. The company will list its shares on the American Stock Exchange. As part of the deal, SafeStitch raised a $4 million line of credit from the Frost Group, a private-equity firm, and also takes control of $3 million in cash held by CTS. The company makes devices for minimally invasive gastrointestinal surgery.

NationsHealth acquires Diabetes Care & Education for $3M — NationsHealth, a Sunrise, Fla., provider of medical products and insurance-related services, acquired Diabetes Care & Education, a provider of insulin pumps and related supplies for diabetics. NationsHealth will pay $3 million, $2.5 million in cash and $500,000 in unregistered common stock.

Obesity-device maker ReShape Medical pulls in $3M — ReShape Medical, a Lake Forest, Calif., developer of minimally invasive medical devices to treat obesity, raised $3 million in a follow-on to its first funding round, PE Hub reported, citing a regulatory filing. Investors included New Leaf Venture Partners and SV Life Sciences. The company was previously known as Abdominis, and has now raised a total of $8 million.

Avalon Ventures raises $84 million in eighth fund — Avalon Ventures, a La Jolla, Calif., venture-capital firm specializing in life-science and wireless-technology companies, raised $84 million in an eighth fund, VentureWire reports (subscription required), citing a regulatory filing. Avalon previously raised $75 million for its seventh fund, which closed in 2005.

LifeBond gets $1.5M for new surgical bandages — LifeBond, a Jerusalem-based device company, raised $1.5 million. Investors included GlenRock Israel and the Zitelman Group.

LifeBond is developing a bandage that exudes a sticky gel when it comes into contact with blood, presumably creating a barrier that minimizes blood loss.

Ensemble Discovery , a Cambridge, Mass., biotech, named former Pfizer vice president Michael Taylor as its CEO. Ensemble is developing new drugs and tests based on large, repetitive molecules called macrocycles.

Ensemble raised $17 million in a first funding round in 2004, and in February VentureWire reported that the company was closing a second round in the “tens of millions.”

When news that the brand-new startup Ophthotech had raised a $36 million first round broke on Monday, it was clear that the venture amounted to a kind of do-over for officials of the late, unlamented Eyetech Pharmaceuticals. Eyetech, you might recall, burst onto the scene with a rocket-science aptamer-based blindness drug called Macugen and a flashy $157 million IPO, then proceeded to get its head handed to it by even better rocket science from Genentech, and eventually sold itself ignominiously to OSI Pharmaceuticals for a lower share price than its IPO (a deal that apparently worked out even less well for OSI).

I didn’t write any of this at the time, however, and in the meantime several others have made a number of interesting observations about Ophthotech’s emergence, not to mention noting some eerie historical parallels. Fred Cohen at Pharma’s Cutting Edge offered this acerbic interpretation:

OSI is now divesting its eye business. As part of the divestiture, OSI has licensed its apatemer targeting PDGF (a related angiogenic peptide) to newly formed Ophthotech. Ophthotech has also licensed development and marketing rights to Archemix’s aptamer targeting the C5 component of complement (an inflammation factor). As you’ll read, Ophthotech is staffed largely by former Eyetech execs. It’s a chance for them to do it all over again. Perhaps this time around they will not sell out the early public-market investors by dumping the firm below its IPO price, while reserving a tidy sum for themselves.

But to really head through the looking glass, you have to turn to the In Vivo blog, where Chris Morrison writes:

SV Life Sciences, HBM BioVentures, and Novo AS have just funded an ophthlamology start-up with a $36 million Series A that will pay for the acquisition of two interesting drug candidates. Didn’t that happen last year? It sure did, in May 2006. The company was Lux BioSciences.

OK, how about this: David Guyer, MD, and Samir Patel, MD, have teamed up as founders of an ophthalmology specialist based on in-licensed aptamer drugs and hope to make headway in the tricky macular degeneration space. SV (then Schroder Ventures Life Sciences) was an early investor. No, no, no, that was way back in 2000. Eyetech, right? Absolutely.

Guyer is now chairman of Ophthotech and Patel is CEO. Morrison goes on to note that Ophthotech has licensed an aptamer against platelet-derived growth factor from none other than OSI, which, of course, originally acquired it from… Eyetech. A second deal brought in more aptamers from Archemix (see our coverage), which bought Gilead Sciences’ aptamer technology in 2001, gaining control of everything but… the aptamer that Gilead licensed to Eyetech, which became Macugen.

Morrison rightly wonders why all the technology and money now flowing into Ophthotech didn’t go to Lux BioSciences instead. The answer, he suggests, may simply be that Big Pharma’s hunger for biotech — and its tendency to pay top dollar — has convinced VCs that they’re better off spreading their eggs among as many baskets as possible.

Or, as Morrison puts it:

Oddly enough, only a few years ago, it would have been a sure thing to keep all these assets under one corporate roof, because the VCs would have been hoping for an IPO exit, and investors like to see multiple clinical projects at IPO hopefuls. Now that M&A is the preferred exit, the assets are siloed. For now.

(UPDATED: See below.)

Featured companies: FoldRx Pharmaceuticals, Ophthotech, Pevion Biotech, Restoration Robotics, Glide Pharma, Reliant Pharmaceuticals, Nanosphere, SurModics, BioFX Laboratories

FoldRx Pharma to receive $22M against cystic fibrosis — Cambridge, Mass.-based FoldRx Pharmaceuticals, a biotech focused on diseases that result from misfolded proteins, will get $22 million over the next five years from an affiliate of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to further its work against the genetic lung disease. The money will be paid as FoldRx meets various developmental milestones, including pushing two experimental drugs into early-stage human trials. The company’s current drug candidates, however, don’t target cystic fibrosis, and instead aim to take on a particular class of diseases known as amyloidosis and Parkinson’s disease.

The Boston Globe and the WSJ Health Blog have more.

Newly formed Ophthotech raises $36M against eye disease — Ophthotech, a newly formed Princeton, N.J., biotech with a focus on eye disease, raised a whopping $36 million in a first funding round. The company, founded by a bevy of former Eyetech Pharmaceuticals officials, is going to follow directly in the former company’s footsteps by taking aim at age-related macular degeneration with aptamers licensed from Archemix (which we wrote about here).

Investors in the round included SV Life Sciences, HBM BioVentures and Novo A/S. (See update below.)

Pevion Biotech gets $29M for vaccines — Pevion Biotech, a Bern, Switzerland-based vaccine developer, raised $29 million (CHF35 million) in a first funding round. Investors included BZ Bank Aktiengesellschaft, BB Biotech Ventures II, CC Private Equity Partners and Bachem Holding. The company is conducting clinical trials of vaccines against malaria, breast cancer and hepatitis C.

Hair-transplant automator Restoration Robotics raises $25M — Restoration Robotics, a Mountain View, Calif., developer of robotic surgery systems for hair transplants, raised $25 million in a second round of funding, PE Hub reports. The company’s Web site is a stub and the linked article doesn’t contain much information, but an April VentureWire store republished at Alta Partners’ site gets to the root of the matter:

Sutter Hill Ventures and Alloy Ventures, for example, have invested in the first and second rounds raised in 2005 and 2006, respectively, by Restoration Robotics Inc., which is testing a robotic device that performs hair transplants. Transplant-surgery outcomes vary according to the surgeon’s skill. Restoration’s robot — which is surgeon-controlled — produces uniform results in half the time, says CEO Jim McCollum. Investors hope this pushes hair transplants into the mainstream. Today, “people think of late-night commercials when they think of hair restoration,” says Sutter Hill Managing Director Jeffrey W. Bird.

Investors in the round include InterWest Partners, Alloy Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures.

Glide Pharma raises $4.6M for needle-free drugs — U.K. specialty pharma Glide Pharma raised $4.6 million (£2.3 million). Investors included Oxford Technology 4 VCT and Oxford Capital Partners. The company is developing drugs that can be delivered via its own needle-free injection system. We’ve written about other startups pursuing similar technology, including StrataGent Life Sciences and Macroflux.

Reliant Pharma refiles for a $400M IPO — Reliant Pharmaceuticals, a Liberty Corner, N.J., specialty pharma that withdrew a planned $300 million IPO in 2005, is going to try again, only with more at stake. The company filed to raise as much as $400 million in an offering, despite the fact that it is on track to lose more than $100 million this year, which would be the third time in four years it has done so.

In the first six months of this year, Reliant reported a net loss to common shareholders of $56.4 million on revenue of $230 million. That net loss would have been only $21.8 million but for preferred-share dividends of $34.6 million in the half. Reliant sells a variety of unrelated second-hand drugs for cardiovascular problems.

Interestingly enough, Reliant made its last charge at the public markets with the famed Ernest Mario at the helm. Mario jumped from Reliant just last week, and is now CEO of the little-known Capnia (see our coverage here).

Nanosphere aims for outsized $100M IPO — Nanosphere, a Northbrook, Ill., developer of nucleic-acid and protein detection and diagnostic systems, filed to raise as much as $100 million in an IPO. As of March 31, the company had an accumulated deficit of $112.6 million. Earlier this year, it submitted its Verigene molecular-diagnostic system to the FDA for approval; Nanosphere intends to market the device to hospital laboratories that currently aren’t equipped to perform such tests in-house.

SurModics snaps up diagnostic-supply company BioFX for up to $22.7M — SurModics, an Eden Prairie, Minn., developer of drug formulations and other biological supplies, agreed to acquire BioFX Laboratories of Owings Mills, Md., for $11.3 million in cash and milestone payments worth up to $11.4 million. The release is here. The acquisition is the second for SurModics this month; it bought out Brookwood Laboraties on Aug. 2 (our coverage is here).

UPDATE (2:37pm PT): Added items on Glide Pharma, Reliant Pharmaceuticals, Nanosphere, and SurModics/BioFX Laboratories.

UPDATE REDUX: Over at Pharma’s Cutting Edge, Fred Cohen notes what I didn’t have time to, which is that Ophthotech essentially amounts to a do-over for the architects of Eyetech’s failure. Check it out.

Although I try to stay on top of events in the life sciences, announcements do sometimes manage to slip through the cracks. Some days, in fact, I end up triaging. Because the roots of this site — not to mention many of its readers — are in Silicon Valley, Bay Area events are a priority. Then come announcements from the rest of the U.S., then Asia, then Europe. Also, smaller or partial fundings tend to take a backseat.

Looking back over my notes — it’s the only way I keep anything straight — I see quite a few of these orphans have piled up. So for the sake of completeness, I’m inaugurating this occasional feature to recap the fundings, mergers and IPOs that got away from me. I’ll put all the details below the fold, so only forge ahead if you’re really interested. RSS subscribers, unfortunately, are going to get the whole thing anyway.

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Adimab, a Lebanon, N.H., biotech startup developing a “platform” for the discovery and commercialization of yeast-derived antibodies, raised $6 million in a first funding round (hat tips to the In Vivo Blog and VentureWire). The company was founded by Darthmouth’s Tillman Gerngross — who co-founded GlycoFi, a biotech acquired by Merck last year for $400 million — and MIT’s Dane Wittrup. Both researchers are chemical engineers with a longstanding interest in protein expression and engineering.

The concept behind Adimab is kind of intriguing, although it’s also complex and limited to solving a particular set of business-process issues — which, when you think about it, is just about what you’d expect a pair of engineers to come up with. The problem, at heart, is that monoclonal antibodies are a pain for many pharmaceutical companies to work with, due to the fact that discovering them and preparing them for use as drugs involves a variety of disparate technologies, many of them owned by a hodgepodge of other companies and institutions. Working out licensing agreements to acquire rights to all these technologies is possible, but still something of a headache.

As I understand it from an interview Gerngross gave to In Vivo, Adimab plans to address this problem by developing its own bottom-up system for discovering new antibodies and moving them along the development process. (The company’s name, which it prefers to capitalize as “ADiMaB,” is a mash-up of several of these development steps: Antibody Discovery, Maturation and Biomanufacturing.) Ideally, this yeast-based “platform” would yield antibodies that aren’t tied down by the web of intellectual property that covers many of today’s antibodies, making a potentially attractive fit for the first Big Pharma company that comes along. In fact, Gerngross seems explicitly mercenary about his intentions, telling In Vivo that “we’re building a business that will service pharma better than anyone else and [one] that could very quickly trigger an acquisition.”

Which is great so far as it goes, I suppose, although it’s hard to get too worked up about a new company when one of the co-founders seems to want it to disappear into some big-company bureaucracy as quickly as possible. The technology behind Adimab, however, is pretty interesting, involving as it seems to fairly recently developed techniques for forcing yeast cells to produce human antibodies (a 2006 Wittrup paper describing this technique of “yeast surface display” is here). Although since this also sounds a lot like what GlycoFi was doing, it will be interesting to see how Adimab’s approach differs.

In addition to the advantages described above, yeast-based production of human antibodies would presumably also be considerably faster and more efficient than current techniques, which generally involve mouse antibodies that require additional “humanizing” so they aren’t eliminated by the immune system when used as drugs. Of course, the technology is still at an early stage, and to the best of my knowledge, no yeast-derived antibody has even been tested in humans as an experimental therapeutic, much less turned into a functioning drug. (As always, if you know otherwise, please let us know in comments.)

Adimab’s first-round investors are SV Life Sciences and Polaris Venture Partners.

Accelecare Wound Centers (no link), a Seattle provider of specialized medical care for difficult-to-treat wounds such as diabetic ulcers, raised $10 million of an anticipated $35 million first funding round, VentureWire reports (subscription required). SV Life Sciences and Bain Capital each contributed $5 million, and have together committed another $25 million to the company.

Accelecare is a sort of specialty medical-services company that provides particular forms of treatment to hospitals under contract. According to VentureWire, the company was formed by the acquisition of Amicus Hyperbaric Group, a provider of hyperbaric oxygen therapy — essentially the use of high atmospheric pressures to boost oxygen levels in ways that promote the healing of wounds.

Reading between the lines of the VentureWire story, it looks like this $10 million was used primarily to acquire Amicus, rename the company Accelecare, and relocate its headquarters to Seattle. The Amicus Web site is still up and running, but offers no indication that the company has been sold. Its most recent news involves Lubbock, Tex.-based Amicus agreeing to acquire another hyperbaric-treatment center (PDF) in Houston. VentureWire describes Accelecare as holding 12 contracts to operate wound-care centers for hospitals across Texas.

Accelecare plans to continue expanding by acquiring other wound-care companies, particularly in Texas, Arizona and southern states. This seems sort of an odd business to be running from Seattle, but I guess the Accelecare folks want to think big, partly because there already seems to be a fair bit of consolidation among wound-care companies. From VentureWire:

Another venture-backed company also working with hospitals on wound care and hyerbaric medicine, National Healing Corp., said in March that it acquired Medical Multiplex Inc. The acquisition brought the company’s contracts to 113, the company said at that time. National Healing is backed by Morgan Stanley Venture Partners and Scale Venture Partners, VentureWire records show. Another competitor, Diversified Clinical Services, was formed in April 2006 with the merger of Praxis Clinical Services and Diversified Therapy. That deal involved a $100 million equity commitment from Jordan Company LP, as well as backing from co-investors Bolder Capital and its Edgewater Funds. Diversified Clinical said it had 150 wound care centers at the time.

UPDATE: Out of curiosity, I checked back on the Amicus site a few weeks after this original item posted, and it still offers no indication that the company was bought out by Accelecare or anyone else. Accelecare, however, is now listed on the SV Life Sciences portfolio, and SVLS managing partner Eugene Hill is now listed as a director of the company. Accelecare itself still doesn’t seem to have a Web site, though.

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.

Pittsburgh-based Logical Therapeutics, a developer of drugs for inflammation and metabolic disease, raised $30 million in a second funding round and announced it is moving its headquarters to a location “near Boston.” (What are the odds that the new location might be Cambridge, the hub of biotech and pharma activity in the region?)

Logical has acquired all of its drug candidates from other companies or institutions, including the University of Pittsburgh, which isn’t particularly surprising given that it only has two employees. (It plans to expand to ten by early next year, according to VentureWire.) Its lead compound, LT-NS001, is a “prodrug” of the anti-inflammatory naproxen, better known as Aleve, meaning that the body’s enzymes will convert the drug into naproxen once ingested. Such prodrug forms are often designed to make drugs more effective by improving their ability to pass through the gastrointestinal tract. Other candidates include an oligopeptide for obesity and diabetes and another peptide that blocks tumor necrosis factor, or TNF, a protein that plays a key role in rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory conditions.

SV Life Sciences led the round, joined by Burrill & Co., Novo A/S, Sigvion Capital and Pennsylvania Early Stage Partners. Logical said the funding will allow the company to take LT-NS001 into mid-stage clinical trials.