VentureBeat

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Stent maker IDev Tech raises $25M (VentureWire)
• Xytis gets $15M for brain-injury drugs (VentureWire)
• Diagnostic maker Iris Biotech plans to go public, launch breast-cancer test (Edgar)
• RiverVest Venture Partners raises $75M life-science fund (release)
• Concentric Medical names Maria Sainz CEO (release)

[Note: I'm a little sad to announce that this will be my last life-science briefing at VentureBeat, although with luck, it won't be the end of my time here. Starting Monday, I'll be blogging regularly on the drug industry and healthcare over at BNET Industries, a new CNET venture, so drop by if you can. (Preparing for that move is the main reason non-briefing posts have been scarce recently.) I still hope to post here occasionally as well, since covering below-the-radar startups has been a blast, and I'm not ready to give it up quite yet.

It's been a great year -- my first VentureBeat post was on April 3, 2007 -- and I want to thank Matt for the opportunity to join you here, and all our regular readers and commenters for your time and your insights. As journalists, we're only as good as our sources and readers, and you guys have helped in countless ways to make me look much smarter than I really am. --D.P.H.]

Stent maker IDev Tech raises $25M – IDev Technologies, a Houston medical-device startup, raised $25 million in a third funding round, VentureWire reports. The company is developing a new type of stent for use in propping open the liver’s bile ducts .

The company’s existing investors, a group that includes Bay City Capital, Heron Capital, PTB Sciences and RiverVest Venture Partners, provided the funding. IDev had previously raised $24 million, according to VW.

Xytis gets $15M for brain-injury drugs – Irvine, Calif.-based Xytis, a biotech focused on disorders of the central nervous system, raised $15 million in an extension of its second funding round, VentureWire reports. Its backers included Atlas Venture, CDC Innovation, Sanderling Ventures and Ventech.

The company says it was founded in 2005 from the merger of Xytis Pharmaceuticals and Remergent. (Sounds more to me like Xytis swallowed Remergent, but they’re free to describe it however they’d like.) Its lead drug candidate, XY2405, blocks a cellular protein called the Bradykinin B2 receptor, a signaling molecule thought to promote inflammation.

Xytis is testing the drug as a potential treatment for traumatic brain injury; the molecule is currently in mid-stage, phase II trials. The company is also testing an antidepressant in early-stage trials.

Xytis raised half the money last August, then received the second $7.5 million in April, the company told VentureWire. It has previously raised $24.5 million in its current incarnation, and its “predecessor companies” pulled in $6.5 million.

Diagnostic maker Iris Biotech plans to go public, launch breast-cancer test – Santa Clara, Calif.-based Iris Biotechnologies, a developer of molecular diagnostic tests, is preparing to go public, VentureWire reports. The company plans a small offering on the OTC Bulletin Board — if I’m reading its latest SEC filing correctly, its existing shareholders will raise about $1.1 million, with no proceeds headed to the company  — and hopes to launch a breast-cancer test later this year.

Iris plans to use chips to measure gene activity in breast cancer, with the hope of predicting the odds that a surgically removed tumor will recur and, eventually, helping patients and doctors customize cancer treatment from an early stage. The company claims that it will be competitive with Genomic Health and Agendia, two companies with similar tests for predicting breast-cancer recurrence.

There’s something a little odd about Iris’ disclosures in the SEC forms, though. Iris doesn’t describe its technology, the genes it will test or how it settled on them in any detail, and spends almost as much time talking about its database of patient information and related computer technology as it does about its tests. While it may consider some or all of that information a trade secret — and disclosure requirements may well be looser for such a small offering — it’s still kind of unusual for a startup to ask outside investors to put up their money essentially on faith.

Featured companies: 23andMe, APT Pharmaceuticals, Hyperion Therapeutics, Isis Biopolymer, Virogenomics

UPDATED at 10:30am PT.

APT Pharma raises $22M for transplant and heart drugs — Burlingame, Calif.’s APT Pharmaceuticals, a specialty pharma currently focused on a drug to fight organ-transplant rejection, raised $22 million in an extension of its first funding round. Investors included Versant Ventures, Great Point Partners, Vivo Ventures and Charter Life Sciences.

APT, which acquires its drug candidates instead of developing them itself, has raised a total of $30 million to date. Its lead candidate is an inhalable form of the immunosuppressive drug cyclosporine, called Pulmoniq, which is intended to prevent rejection and improve survival in lung-transplant patients.

23andMe reveals size of first funding round — PE Hub reports that Google-backed 23andMe has raised $8.9 million, citing a regulatory filing. Apparently, however, this isn’t new funding. When the personal-genomics startup (see our coverage here and here) announced its funding back in May, all we knew was that Google had invested $3.9 million, with unspecified participation by Mohr-Davidow Ventures and New Enterprise Associates bringing the round to somewhere around $10 million. I’m now told that the $8.9 million figure is just the total of that first round, which also included participation of some angel investors.

Hyperion Therapeutics drums up $15M in debt — The South San Francisco specialty pharma pulled in $15 million in debt financing from Comerica Bank and Life Sciences Capital. Hyperion, which raised $40 million in equity just a month ago (see our coverage in the first item here), in-licenses drug candidates from other companies and runs them through clinical trials.

The company also announced a slate of senior executives, many of them from Ucyclyd, a Medicis Pharmaceutical unit with which Hyperion recently concluded a licensing deal. Hyperion’s lead drug candidates address a gastrointestinal disorder and liver disease.

Drug-delivery company Isis Biopolymer draws $1.5M — Isis Biopolymer, a Warwick, R.I., device maker focused on a new drug-delivery technology, raised $1.5 million in seed funding, VentureWire reports (subscription required). GP Bullhound of London provided the funding.

Isis is exploring ways of using electrophoresis, a low-level electric current that can theoretically drag large, charged drug molecules across barriers like skin, as a new way of delivering drugs without needles via a patch-type device — one the company tells VentureWire is “more of a Band-Aid than an iPod.” The company has launched a $5 million first round of fundraising, and expects to begin human trials of its patch early next year.

Virogenomics gets $2M grant for bio-sensor work — NIST awarded Tigard, Ore.-based Virogenomics a $2 million grant to develop a system that tests for a variety of biological molecules at once, the company said. A closer read of the company’s press release suggests that it is developing a kind of protein chip — essentially a way of scanning for the presence of particular proteins in a sample such as blood serum — that relies on some sort of microelectronic “transducers” to signal detection.

At least from this description, it’s not really clear why this sort of technology would warrant a NIST grant, as any number of companies are developing similar-sounding protein chips. Virogenomics is something between a biotechnology firm and an incubator; the company says it licenses promising technologies and develops them in-house until it can spin them off into new startup companies. (Virogenomics strikes me as a pretty odd name for this sort of tech-development outfit, unless it’s a failed biotech that later developed a new purpose, although that’s just a guess.)

Conatus Pharmaceuticals, a San Diego developer of drugs for inflammation and liver disease, closed a $22 million private placement that brings its first round of funding to $27.5 million. Investors included Aberdare Ventures, Advent Venture Partners, Bay City Capital, and Gilde Healthcare Partners.

Conatus was founded by former executives of Idun Pharmaceuticals in mid-2005 after Pfizer acquired their company. The funding will support mid-stage clinical trials of its lead compound, CTS-1027, for liver disease. The first trial, in hepatitis C patients, is expected to begin by the end of this year. Conatus licensed CTS-1027 from Roche last November.