VentureBeat

updated
Airwalk Communications is part of a wave of companies developing “femtocell” technology, which lets your cell phone run on your home WiFi networks (update: the company only works on CDMA networks, not WiFi), and allows you to route calls over your land-line too. The Richardson, Texas company has just finished raising $25 million in a second round of financing.

Deploying femtocell access points is expected to be a major trend this year and next. Airwalk faces competition from a range of players, including Ubiquisys, based in Swindon, UK, and backed by Google, among others.

Others competitors include RadioFrame Network and Airvana, not to mention large companies Alcatel-Lucent, Sony Ericsson and Samsung. Airwalk hopes to go to market in early 2009.

Airwalk has now raised $33 million in total. The latest round was led by Sevin Rosen Funds. Other investors include Alta Berkeley Venture Partners, Duchossois Technology Partners and TL Ventures.

Here’s our earlier coverage of Ubiquisys, which has now raised $37 million.

Femtocell technology is just one of the alternatives to fixed-mobile convergence, a trend toward a world where you can call over both your fixed or cell line, whatever is cheaper. Most competing technologies, however, require a new (dual-mode) handset, whereas Femtocell doesn’t. It can be used with existing devices (cellphone) and operate on local home networks, and be hooked up with the home’s land-lines or through VoIP. Carriers would sell the technology to consumers, pitching it as a way they can lower mobile subscription costs. Sprint already is testing femtocell in some areas. The femtocell technology also promises to improve transmission of IPTV and high-bandwidth services.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Acorn Cardio raises $22M for heart-failure device (bizjournals.com)
• Agile Therapeutics raises $5.6M for women’s health (release)
• Polyheal draws $1M for wound healing (Globes)
• MatrixBio receives seed funding for cancer diagnostics (release)
• Pacira Pharma names David Stack as CEO (release)
• VivoMetrics appoints Howard Baker as CEO (release)

Acorn Cardio raises $22M for heart-failure device – St. Paul, Minn.-based Acorn Cardiovascular, a device maker investigating a device that would restrain the expansion of failing hearts, raised $22 million in a new funding round. Investors included Cardinal Partners, Thoratec, SightLine Partners, Credit Suisse and New Enterprise Associates.

Acorn’s device, which it calls the CorCap, is a polyethylene mesh wrap that wraps around the heart, theoretically slowing or stopping the expansion that often occurs as hearts weaken and tire. The company sells the CorCap in Europe, but last year an FDA advisory panel recommended against approval of the device, throwing Acorn’s future into doubt until it reached an agreement with the FDA to conduct a new 50-patient trial. We previously covered Acorn’s travails and its primary venture competitor, the Sunnyvale, Calif., startup Paracor Medical, in this post.

Agile Therapeutics raises $5.6M for women’s health – Agile Therapeutics, a Princeton, N.J., specialty pharma focused on new contraceptives for women, raised $5.6 million in an extension of its fifth funding round, bringing the total for that round to $17.6 million. Investors in the round include the Hillman Company, ProQuest Investments, TL Ventures and Novitas Capital.

Agile’s lead product candidate is a low-dose estrogen patch for contraception, which is currently in mid-stage human trials. Agile suggests that the seven-day patch, which delivers steady doses of levonorgestrel and ethinyl estradiol, may help alleviate some side effects associated with high hormone exposure, such as breast tenderness, bloating or weight gain, and nausea.

(UPDATED: See below.)
Is there a better way to combine drugs in cancer chemotherapy? Celator Pharmaceuticals, a Princeton, N.J., venture drug maker that just raised $10 million, aims to find out.

Like Horizon Therapeutics, which we wrote about here, Celator is convinced that combining two existing drugs in a single formulation at the right proportions can yield better results than current treatments. Although many chemo drugs are already used in combination, the drugs that can be used this way are limited by their side effects. For instance, two chemo drugs that cause severe nausea can’t be used together, because each would have to be given at a less-than-optimal dose in order not to completely debilitate the patient.

In addition, Celator is convinced that various chemo drugs — and here we’re talking about traditional “cytotoxic” chemotherapy that typically kills off all cells that divide quickly, including those that line hair follicles or the digestive tract — tend to work either in concert or at odds depending on the balance in which they’re delivered. So by identifying the drugs that work best together when mixed at an optimum ratio, the company hopes to enhance chemo’s tumor-killing power while minimizing side effects.

Sounds great. Does it work? So far, it’s hard to say. Celator’s lead candidate, CPX-1, is a combination of irinotecan and floxuridine at the cleverly derived molar ratio of, um, one to one. That drug is now in mid-stage human trials. The company’s second candidate, a combination of cytarabine and daunorubicin known as CPX-351, is entering a phase I trial against acute myeloid leukemia.

There are a few cautionary notes. In an earlier “phase I” test of CPX-1 in 26 patients, 15 saw their tumors stabilize for at least two months and two experienced tumor shrinkage (see the PDF “poster” on the study here). Of course, like most early-stage trials, that test wasn’t randomized, controlled or blinded — every patient got the drug — which pretty strongly limits the conclusions you can reasonably draw from it. It certainly doesn’t support the company’s claim in its press release that “over 70 percent of cancer patients in the trial showed a clinical benefit.” For the record, 17/26 is 65 percent, not 70 percent; you can only get to the 70 percent figure by ignoring the data for three patients whose cancer wasn’t “evaluated,” including one who lived less than two weeks after getting the drug. It’s also kind of dicey to claim “clinical benefit” for a drug when you can’t answer the question, “Compared to what?” — which this trial most certainly wasn’t designed to address.

Still, it’s early days for this sort of combination-drug work, and Celator’s investors certainly seem game to tag along. Investors in this follow-on to the company’s $40 million second funding in 2005 included Domain Associates, Quaker BioVentures, TL Ventures, Ventures West Management, GrowthWorks Capital, the Business Development Bank of Canada, and Hearthstone Investment.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger has more here.

UPDATED: Added some additional thoughts on Celator’s claim of “clinical benefit” in its phase I trial.

UPDATE REDUX: Celator’s PR rep lodged a factual objection to the original lead sentence, so I’ve tweaked it.