Calcbench, a new startup working out of Cambridge, MA and New York, came to being from an app design challenge put on by the people behind XBRL, a technology standard the SEC requires public companies to use in reporting financial data.

Yes, the terms app challenge and SEC did in fact appear in the same sentence. XBRL, which stands for extensible business reporting language, was developed by the SEC and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) as one of many measures to improve financial transparency among publicly traded companies. But there’s even more that can come of the XBRL use, says Calcbench co-founder Pranav Ghai, who’s based in New York.

“Nobody seems to be using the data once it’s there,” says Ghai.

So the small team at XBRL put out the call to app developers to build tools that analyze the data companies are required to report. “People are reporting the information because they have to, not because they want to,” and this contest is out to bring some more life to the system, says Calcbench co-founder Alex Rapp.

Rapp, who works out of Cambridge’s Dogpatch Labs, had been working on his own startup, Collaborative Reasoning, when he reunited with former college roommate Ghai. Both have backgrounds in the finance world, and decided to take a shot at the XBRL Challenge in August.

The Calcbench app, released Friday, plugs into the XBRL data to access quarterly documents such as earnings statements, cash flow statements, and company balance sheets. Users enter a ticker to access that information for a particular company, and Calcbench’s engine pulls all the information into a more readable, interactive format. (The SEC’s EDGAR system has also begun to display this data more interactively.)

Calcbench also plugs in its own custom calculations such as debt to equity ratios and operating margins to go beyond the information reported in the filing. Users can compare the data to past quarters or past years, and can also compare it to other companies. They can also leave notes on the documents to share with others, a collaboration artifact of Rapp’s previous project, Collaborative Reasoning, which was developing plug-ins for group collaboration on Microsoft Outlook. (That hasn’t yet captured an audience and is on the back burner for now, says Rapp.)

The financial information is already accessible through existing but … Next Page »

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There was a time when most growing companies went to the public stock markets for the capital they needed to keep hiring and growing—but that time ended a decade ago. At no point since 2001 has the number of initial public offerings per year reached even the minimum levels set in the 1990s. (The pre-1999 average was 547 IPOs per year; post-1999, 192 per year.) In fact, some analysts peg the number of jobs lost or not created due to the IPO decline at 22 million—which, perhaps not coincidentally, is roughly the same number of people who are unemployed or stuck in part-time jobs today.

Back in 2008—when, for the first time in three decades, an entire quarter went by without a single IPO—the National Venture Capital Association issued a report calling the IPO decline a “crisis for the start-up community.” The darkest days of the 2008-2009 economic crisis are now behind us, but IPOs haven’t bounced back even to their tepid pre-2008 levels.

So the venture industry has gone back to work. An independent group of venture capitalists, CEOs, lawyers, academics, and investment bankers calling itself the IPO Task Force issued a report today (PDF) that blames the IPO crisis on a series of regulatory changes in Washington, D.C., and calls on lawmakers and regulators to ease the rules that make an IPO such a risky, expensive hassle for young companies.

The IPO Task Force, which is chaired by Scale Venture Partners founder Kate Mitchell (an Xconomist), said it doesn’t want to overturn regulations designed to protect investors, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley rules put in place in 2002 to govern corporate financial reporting and prevent future Enron-like accounting scandals. But it said that that its recommendations would “adjust the scale of current regulations without changing their spirit.” Taking these “reasonable and measured steps,” the task force argues, would “reconnect emerging companies with public capital and re-energize U.S. job creation and economic growth.”

For the venture industry, of course, the unspoken benefit of a new wave of public offerings would be to boost fund returns and unfreeze the enormous amounts of private capital currently locked up in pre-IPO companies.

The task force was formed this spring after the U.S. Treasury Department convened an “Access to Capital Conference” to gather recommendations on how to get more small companies through the IPO process. The group’s four recommendations—which are addressed mainly to the Treasury Department, the SEC, Congress, and the White House—are fairly technical, and it’s hard to boil them down. But here’s a quick overview. (The IPO Task Force summary slides and the full report are embedded below.)

1. Give “emerging growth companies”—those with revenue of less than $1 billion at the time of an IPO—five years to gradually meet the SEC financial reporting requirements imposed on public companies by Sarbanes-Oxley rules and other regulations. Compliance costs amounting to $2.5 million to $4 million per year are a big deterrent to going public for … Next Page »

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San Diego-based Sequenom (NASDAQ: SQNM) says today it’s making a prenatal test for fetal Down syndrome available in 20 U.S. cities, 2 1/2 years after the company shelved the debut of an earlier Down syndrome test due to “mishandled” research data.

The proprietary test announced today is a laboratory-developed test (LDT) that detects an abnormal chromosome for Down syndrome in the fetal DNA fragments found in a maternal blood sample. A Sequenom-funded study that confirms that the technique is 99.1 percent accurate also is being published in the journal Genetics in Medicine by an independent group of researchers.

A spokeswoman for Sequenom says the test announced today is a “completely new” diagnostic approach that analyzes fetal DNA circulating in the mother’s bloodstream, using next-generation genetic “shotgun” sequencing technology developed by Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN), the San Diego maker of genetic-analysis equipment.

The diagnostic technology that Sequenom shelved in 2009 was based on detecting fetal RNA in maternal blood samples. Following an internal investigation into the mishandled clinical data, Sequenom ousted CEO Harry Stylli, former R&D chief Elizabeth Dragon, and three other employees.

Sequenom says the 20 cities where its MaterniT21 test is now available are part of a phased rollout of the new test, which is intended for pregnant women who are at higher risk for Down syndrome (roughly half of the mental retardation cases in the United States). Out of 4.2 million births in the U.S. each year, about 750,000 are considered high-risk (based mostly on pre-screening or because the mother is 35 or older). Only about one out of five of these high-risk cases, however, undergo amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling, two invasive procedures that can accurately determine Down syndrome but carry a slightly higher risk of miscarriage.

Sequenom is offering a different approach. A doctor would first send a maternal blood sample for the MaterniT21 test to the Sequenom Center for Molecular Medicine in San Diego, a lab certified under federal CLIA regulations just over a year ago.  (The company announced last week it is planning a similar CLIA-certified lab in North Carolina). The physician would receive the results in 8-10 business days, and determine if a higher-risk procedure is warranted. Andy Pollock of The New York Times wrote a thorough account of the technology here.

On Sept. 2, Sequenom said it had agreed to a SEC “cease and desist” order arising from an investigation into Sequenom’s misconduct, which securities regulators began in 2009. That order was focused on claims the company had made about its prior RNA technology, and included no monetary penalties.

The U.S. Attorney filed a criminal charge against Dragon in mid-2010 that alleged she had disseminated materially false information and had made misleading statements concerning tests of Sequenom’s RNA technology. She pleaded guilty, but died in February, before sentencing, according to the company’s last earnings filing.

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Y Combinator unleashed its latest class of startups on the world yesterday at its summer Demo Day in Mountain View. The famed venture incubator, which provides mentorship, networking, investor access, and a modest cash stipend in return for an equity stake in each company, admitted a record 63 startups this time around. That’s up from 43 in the winter 2011 batch, and 34 in summer 2010.

To accommodate all those entrepreneurs, Y Combinator has had to expand, literally. For the second time, the organization has moved the signature orange wall in its common room about 30 feet to the west, roughly doubling the amount of space for work tables—and for Demo Day seating for investors and journalists, which is always at a premium.

Summaries of the YC startups’ pitches start below, one paragraph each. But fear not—you won’t have to wade through 63 paragraphs. That’s because a record proportion of this year’s startups, 33 out of the 63, asked to stay off the record, meaning they haven’t launched their services or they’re not ready to have it known that they took part in Y Combinator. Also, I just couldn’t get through all 30 summaries last night, so I’m dividing up this debrief into two parts. Today it’s A through Mo; tomorrow, Mu through Z.

I’m trying something new this time around. As in the past, each listing contains a link to the company’s website, the names of its co-founders, the tag line provided by each company (when there is one), and my summary. What’s new is the final line—my quick personal take on each startup. The presentations were admittedly brief (about three minutes each), so I’m not ready to form final judgments about any of these companies. But as they say, first impressions matter.

Aisle50

Chris Steiner, Riley Scott, George Korsnick

“Groupon for groceries.”

The founders of Aisle50 argue that newspaper circulars are losing their effectiveness and that large food manufacturers are looking for new ways to promote their products, including e-mail and the Web. Whereas the incumbent digital coupon provider, Coupons.com, simply reduces an entire circular to a few Web pages, Aisle50 crafts a single, custom page for each promoted product and features one discount per grocery chain at a time. When a member buys the currently featured product via credit card at the Aisle50 website, a matching credit is applied to his or her store loyalty card. The startup is currently working only with the Lowes Food chain in North Carolina, but will soon add hypermarket chain Meijer. A “giant pot of money” is waiting to migrate from paper coupons to digital platforms, the startups says, and it wants to become “the premier way for food manufacturers to market their product.”

My take: Reminiscent of YC S10 startup Anyleaf, which is also out to kill the supermarket circular, but Aisle50 has the Groupon twist. Y Combinator seems to return to certain themes again and again, as if searching for the right solution.

Bushido

Sean Grove, Kevin Zettler

“An app store for the cloud.”

To get their Web or mobile apps distributed, developers have to worry about lots of things outside their areas of specialty, such as hosting, authentication, and billing. Bushido says it can take an app written using the Rails programming framework and “wrap” it in a software package that takes care all of that, liberating developers to focus on their software. Over time, the startup says it will accumulate “all the apps, all the users, and all the data,” giving it an understanding of a “data graph” that will be as powerful as Facebook’s social graph.

My take: Probably the brashest and most cryptic pitch of the day. The company clearly hopes to bask in the glow of Heroku, the Ruby on Rails hosting service that was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2008 term.

Can’tWait

Eric Florenzano, Eric Maguire

If the names Eric Florenzano and Eric Maguire sound familiar, it’s because these are the same two Erics who worked with Leah Culver to launch Convore, a YC W11 company that specializes in IRC-style group chat. That probably makes them the first startup founders to participate in two consecutive terms at Y Combinator. This time around, they’re going after the movie business—specifically, trailers. The startup’s iPhone app (coming soon to Android) lets users browse and watch movie trailers, share their favorites with friends, and set reminders so they won’t miss out when the movies hit theaters. Florenzano calls it “the best marketing platform Hollywood could hope for” and predicts studios will pay the startup handsomely to feature their trailers. In the future, the company plans to take on video games, consumer electronics, and other product categories where pre-orders are prevalent.

My take: It will be interesting to see what company Florenzano and Maguire start for YC W12.

… Next Page »

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Startups usually relish disruption. For a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, there’s no brighter badge of honor than being able to say that your company reinvented a product category, sweeping away older competitors’ business models in the process.

But these days, many of the disruptors are being disrupted, as the traditional system of incentive-based stock options for startup employees comes under strain. Part of the turmoil is coming from within, in the form of employees and former employees who own options or stock and are itching to see some financial rewards, even if their companies haven’t yet achieved a traditional “exit” in the form of an acquisition or public offering. And part is coming from outside, in the form of businesses building new marketplaces where employees can turn their shares into cash.

The emergence of a so-called secondary market for employee shares is an increasingly vexing issue for many startup CEOs, who say it’s interfering with their ability to attract and retain talent. But by the time this is all over, these executives and their boards may well be forced to rethink the way they keep employees loyal, the way they govern stock ownership, or both. Today we’ll take a close look at one of the companies behind this change, New York-based broker-dealer SecondMarket.

The story starts with options, which are traditionally doled out to employees of early-stage companies as a form of deferred compensation. These options, which typically vest over the course of four years, are supposed to incentivize employees to stick around and work harder by dangling the prospect of a big payoff if the company eventually gets acquired or goes public. When options vest, it means employees have the right to buy a specified amount of stock, typically at a low price called the exercise price. The presumption is that they can make money once a company is sold or goes public by buying shares at the exercise price and immediately selling them at a higher market price. Employees who leave a company typically must exercise their vested options within 90 days or lose them.

Plenty of Microsofties, Googlers, Yahoos, and alums of other public technology companies have grown rich on their options—and the investments they pour back into the startup ecosystem are part of what makes Silicon Valley go around. But for companies that are still privately held, there’s a growing flaw in the system. Back in the 1990s, when incentive-based stock option packages became common, it was reasonable to expect that a company would achieve some kind of an exit—either an acquisition or IPO—within the four-year time frame, making the notional value of employees’ options very real. But over the last decade, that timeline has been stretched out dramatically, thanks to a myriad of factors that make going public far less attractive. So employees and alums of even extremely successful pre-IPO companies like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, and Yelp are being asked to sit on their stock for much longer.

In classic entrepreneurial style, a few financial firms are now trying to relieve some of the pressure by connecting startup employees and alums with outsiders who’d like to buy their shares. Secondary markets are hardly a new invention: firms like San Francisco-based Industry Ventures have spent at least a decade in the business, typically offering limited partners in venture capital funds a way to cash out before the funds mature. But the idea that startup employees should also be able to sell their shares on the secondary markets is entirely a product of the Facebook era—and the two companies pushing the concept hardest are SecondMarket and its main competitor, San Bruno, CA-based SharesPost.

I’ve spent some time recently speaking with executives at SecondMarket and learning how their business works. There’s been a lot of fuss around the company in the tech and business media; it’s often been cast as a bull in a china shop, upsetting the mechanisms startups use to … Next Page »

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Kalamazoo, MI-based Metabolic Solutions Development, a developer of drugs to treat Type 2 diabetes, raised another $6.8 million in equity-based financing, according to a July 29 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Twenty-three investors participated in the sale. Most of the financing is being used for expenses related to converting the company to an LLC structure, CEO Stephen Benoit said.

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Initial public offerings and acquisitions surged for venture-backed companies during the fourth quarter of 2010. The results suggest a recovery in the overall pace of “liquidity events” since the capital crisis of 2008, which triggered a painful economic recession throughout the U.S. and elsewhere.

Most of the IPO activity was driven by Chinese companies going public on U.S. exchanges, according to a report by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). But there are signs of overall improvement as the post-IPO performance of venture-backed companies strengthened, along with acquisition values in 2010.

The report counted 32 venture-backed IPOs with a total value of nearly $3.6 billion during the last three months of 2010—almost three times the 12 IPOs that took place during the full year in 2009. Of those 32 deals, 17 were ventures based in China, including SinoTech Energy, a Beijing-based provider of enhanced oil recovery services that raised almost $168 million on the Nasdaq exchange.

Altogether, the report counted 72-venture-backed IPOs for full-year 2010—a six-fold increase over 2009. Another 42 venture-backed companies have currently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering, according to the report.

In a statement from the NVCA, president Mark Heesen says, “In 2010 we moved from ‘abysmal to viable’ in the venture-backed IPO market. The number of offerings has improved in large part due to Chinese venture-backed companies going public on U.S. exchanges. We would like to see U.S. company IPOs grow at this pace in the coming year.”

The report also counted 88 venture-backed M&A deals during the fourth quarter, which was a decline from the 111 M&A deals reported during … Next Page »

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Webfilings, which has offices in Los Altos, CA, and Ames, IA, has collected $5.1 in equity-based funding in a round that could total as much as $12.5 million, according to a regulatory filing with the SEC. Some 33 investors participated in the round; their identities have not been disclosed. The company, whose software helps businesses manage regulatory filings with the SEC, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the funding.

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The big news came with a guilty plea by Sequenom’s former R&D chief, but it’s just the beginning. In pleading guilty, Elizabeth Dragon agreed to cooperate with a continuing criminal investigation of wrongdoing in the company’s development of a prenatal diagnostic test for Down syndrome. Our weekly wrap-up begins here.

—The former chief of research and development at San Diego’s Sequenom (NASDAQ: SQNM) pleaded guilty yesterday to conspiring to commit securities fraud. Elizabeth A. Dragon, who joined Sequenom in 2006 after 16 years at Roche Molecular Diagnostics, admitted in federal court that she had lied to investors about the sensitivity and accuracy of a prenatal genetic test the company was developing for Down syndrome. Dragon, who has agreed to cooperate with a continuing criminal investigation, also settled a civil suit filed yesterday by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

—San Diego’s DexCom (NASDAQ: DXCM) says it will comply with changes sought by the FDA in the way it labels certain biomedical devices used to monitor blood sugar levels. In a warning letter sent to the company, the FDA says DexCom should have disclosed that its sensor wires sometimes fracture, leaving wire splinters under the skin of some users.

—James Sweeney, who started CardioNet (NASDAQ: BEAT) in San Diego and led its $425 million IPO in 2008, says his advice to startup CEOs about initial public offerings is “to avoid going public at all costs.” Sweeney, who now heads San Diego’s PatientSafe Solutions, talked about IPOs, reverse mergers, and other corporate exits during a meeting of the San Diego Venture Group.

—In a small step for gene therapy, San Diego-based Celladon says its gene therapy treatment for healing patients with advanced heart failure didn’t appear to cause any serious side effects and was more effective than a placebo in a study with 39 patients. The biotech hasn’t yet disclosed exactly how effective its treatment is.

—Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) made an undisclosed equity investment in San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics, the startup co-founded by genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter. Life Technologies makes many of the laboratory instruments and materials that Synthetic Genomics and other biotechs use to sequence the genomes of different organisms.

—Life Technologies also disclosed that it has acquired a 74 percent ownership stake in Germany’s GeneArt, one of five small companies around the world that specialize in synthesizing custom-ordered genes for use in biomedical research.

—Luke profiled Blue Heron Biotechnology, which is the Bothell, WA, biotech that Craig Venter recently turned to in making the first bacterial cell with an entirely synthetic genome. Like GeneArt, Blue Heron is among the five small biotechs that specialize in synthesizing custom-ordered genes for use in biomedical research.

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Elcelyx Therapeutics of San Diego has raised $1.2 million of a planned $2.2 million equity offering, according to an SEC filing. The document says the company’s president is Alain D. Baron, entrepreneur in residence at Morgenthaler Ventures in Menlo Park. Morgenthaler partner Ralph “Chris” Christofferson is an Elcelyx board member, according to the filing.

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Sequenom has maintained for months that it “mishandled” clinical test results of a noninvasive prenatal test for Down syndrome, but one of its partners is now accusing the company of committing fraud by having “deliberately doctored” the data.

New York-based Xenomics said in October that it is suing San Diego-based Sequenom (NASDAQ: SQNM), for as much as $300 million, but today it offered more explanation. Xenomics now says it was “purposely misled” by Sequenom, based on preliminary results of an ongoing internal investigation. Xenomics, which makes technology for collecting urine samples, entered into a licensing agreement with Sequenom in October 2008.

Sequenom is already facing investigations from the FBI and the SEC, and a litany of shareholder lawsuits over what it has publicly described as “mishandling” of clinical trial results for a non-invasive prenatal test to see whether a developing fetus has Down syndrome. Sequenom made a big splash in September 2008, and claimed it would become the “Google of molecular diagnostics.” Based on a trial of 400 pregnant women, the company said it technology, which tests a sample of the mother’s blood, was 100 percent accurate at predicting whether a fetus has Down syndrome. The results were said to have been verified with the gold standard, and more invasive tests, known as amniocentesis and CVS. The market for such a test was thought to be huge, because there are about 4.2 million live births in the U.S. every year, and about two-thirds get tests for Down syndrome, a chromosomal abnormality that causes mental retardation.

But Sequenom said in April that the data for its test wasn’t reliable anymore, and an internal investigation followed. By September, the board fired CEO Harry Stylli, as well as Elizabeth Dragon, the head of R&D, and three other employees. Two other company officers resigned. But, citing the need to cooperate with ongoing investigations by federal authorities, the company didn’t describe in detail what went wrong.

Xenomics was more blunt in its assessment today.

“Xenomics preliminary investigations prior to the discovery process leads the company to believe that Sequenom’s Down Syndrome data were deliberately doctored in order to create an extremely robust data set. This announcement also fraudulently induced Xenomics into granting Sequenom an exclusive license to its non-invasive transrenal urine testing technology for fetal testing.”

Sequenom says there wasn’t fraud, only data mishandling, according to today’s Xenomics statement. A spokesman for Sequenom, citing pending litigation, declined to comment.

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San Diego’s life sciences news picked up a bit last week amid fresh signs of the area’s growing prominence in the laboratory tools and diagnostics sectors.

—Carlsbad, CA-based Helixis, a startup maker of genetic analysis technology from the Caltech labs of Nobel Laureate David Baltimore and Axel Scherer, raised $1.8 million from unidentified investors, according to a regulatory filing. The amount is in addition to the $5.5 million the company reported raising in July. Helixis is developing products that attempt to make real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) technology more accessible to the average researcher.

—Enigma Diagnostics CEO John McKinley told Bruce the UK-based medical diagnostics startup plans to close its current U.S. office in San Francisco and make a new office in San Diego its U.S. headquarters. McKinley estimated Enigma would have 30 employees in San Diego—“the diagnostics center for the U.S.,” as he put it—by mid-2010. The company has developed a desktop-size instrument based on advances in PCR (polymerase chain reaction) technology, which McKinley says can identify certain pathogens in less than 45 minutes.

—Sequenom, the San Diego-based maker of laboratory tools and diagnostics, disclosed that it agreed to accept a $1 million payment from Ibis Biosciences, a unit of Abbott Laboratories, to settle a patent infringement lawsuit. As part of the deal, Sequenom (NASDAQ: [[ticker: SQNM]]) granted Ibis a non-exclusive license to three mass spectrometry-based patents. Sequenom, meanwhile, remains under investigation by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission for “mishandling” experimental data in a clinical trial of its prenatal test for Down syndrome.

—Senomyx (NASDAQ: [[ticker: SNMX]]), the San Diego company using biotechnology to develop proprietary flavor enhancers and blockers, said S6973, a compound it has been developing to enhance the intensity of sucrose, was designated as Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) under federal regulations that govern food additives. The GRAS designation allows the company to begin commercialization of the sweetness enhancer, which enables foodmakers to reduce sugar in foods and drinks by as much as 50 percent and still provide an equivalent sweet taste, according to Senomyx.

—San Diego-based Ligand Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker: LGND]]) agreed to pay $3.2 million to acquire ailing Metabasis (NASDAQ: [[ticker: MBRX]]), a developer of treatments for diabetes and high cholesterol. Ligand committed $8 million to finance Metabasis’ drug development programs within the next 42 months.

—The Burnham Institute for Medical Research made two key hires to support its translational research efforts. Paul Laikind, the co-founder of Gensia Pharmaceuticals, Viagene, and Metabasis, became the institute’s senior vice president of business development and chief business officer to help cut deals with biotech and pharma companies. Michael R. Jackson, formerly senior vice president of drug discovery at Johnson & Johnson, is now Burnham’s first-ever vice president for drug discovery and development, charged with translating Burnham discoveries into drug candidates primed for clinical testing.

—San Diego’s Arena Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker: ARNA]]) is talking up the safety profile of its experimental obesity drug as it prepares to compete against experimental treatments from San Diego-based Orexigen Therapeutics (NASDAQ: OREX) and Mountain View, CA-based Vivus (NASDAQ: VVUS), both of which produced greater weight loss in clinical trials. None of the drugs have yet been approved by the FDA. Arena CEO Jack Leif told Luke that the company’s drug, lorcaserin, improved diabetic and cardiovascular health markers in clinical trial subjects. He also challenged the notion that lorcaserin is a subpar obesity treatment. “This is not a wimpy weight-loss drug,” Leif said.

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Optherion, a New Haven, CT-based developer of diagnostics an drugs for eye and kidney diseases, has raised $5 million in a planned $9.5 million convertible notes and warrants offering, according to an SEC filing. The company writes in the filing that the notes and warrants can be converted into capital stock under certain conditions. Colin Foster, president and CEO of Optherion, was not immediately available for comment this morning. Optherion turned heads when it announced a $37 million Series A round of financing in October 2007 to develop a treatment for age-related macular degeneration.

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[Updated at 5 pm ET on 7/16/09. Editor's note appended]

We came across a trio of healthcare IT deals this morning, which seems to be a bit more than usual even in New England, so we thought we’d provide a snapshot of each of the deals. This activity could be chalked up to the intense interest among investors and corporations in the expanded use of information technology among U.S. hospitals, clinics, and other stakeholders to improve the economics and efficiency of health care.

Here’s a quick look at each of the three deals involving New England healthcare IT outfits iMedX, Phase Forward (NASDAQ:PFWD), and MedVentive.

—Waltham, MA-based Phase Forward, which recently celebrated its fifth year as a public company, says it’s agreed to fork over $10 million to acquire the interactive voice and Web-response services business from Princeton, NJ-based contract research powerhouse Covance (NYSE:CVD), according to a press release. The deal includes a marketing agreement to provide Phase Forward’s clinical trials data management software to Covance’s customers.

—Waltham-based MedVentive, which provides business intelligence software for health plans, medical centers, and pharmacies, has rallied new and existing investors to complete a $7.25 million Series C round of venture capital, according to a regulatory filing. The financing was c0-led by its new investor Excel Venture Management, of Boston, and a previous backer, HLM Venture Partners, also of Boston, the company said in a press release. Prior investor Long River Ventures also contributed to the financing. Enrico Petrillo, a managing director at Excel, has joined MedVentive’s board of directors.

[The paragraph above was updated on July 16 to include additional information from a press release on MedVentive's  financing. The press release was issued a day after this story was initially posted.]]

—Honestly, I don’t know much about iMedX’ fundraising deal beyond what appears in this regulatory filing. The filing says that the Sheldon, CT-based firm has raised $13.3 million in a new round of financing that involved two investors. Based on what I could glean from the firm’s website, it provides outsourced transcription services for doctors, delivered with its proprietary software and from operations in both the U.S. and India. I left a message for iMedX CEO Venkat Sharma this morning, but he did not immediately respond. Sharma is quoted on his firm’s website saying that the company could be destined for an IPO in India or the U.S.

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Salient Surgical Technologies (formerly TissueLink), of Dover, NH, filed papers with the SEC to withdraw its proposed $86.25 million initial public offering. The maker of medical devices to seal blood vessels during surgery made its initial filing for the IPO in March.

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Looks like Carl Icahn isn’t the only activist investor yanking local life sciences firms’ chains these days. Just a few weeks after a California fund manager called for a sale of cancer-diagnostics firm Exact Sciences (NASDAQ: EXAS), the Marlborough, MA-based firm announced that it’s putting itself on the block. (Seriously, what is it with all the acquisition news the last couple of days?)

In an announcement this morning, Exact said it has hired Boston-based investment bank Leerink Swann to help its board “in its evaluation of strategic alternatives for the business, including, but not limited to, the sale of Exact or merger with another entity.”

Exact’s announcement follows close on the heels of a prodding SEC filing made by Kenneth Luskin, founder of Santa Monica, CA-based Intrinsic Value Asset Management. The filing said that Luskin—whose fund owns 8 percent of Exact’s common stock—had recently “communicated with [Exact] and to members of its board of directors great concerns about serious deficiencies in the management of the [firm].” (The filing doesn’t get more specific on those “deficiencies,” but Exact has been criticized in some quarters for its handling of the regulatory issues surrounding its noninvasive colon-cancer screening test; the test was recently added as an option in American Cancer Society guidelines for screening for the disease.)

Luskin’s filing, dated February 28, went on to say that, “Over the last week, the filing person has come to the conclusion that the sale of the Exact Sciences through a formal auction process, led by mergers and acquisitions team from a highly reputable investment banking firm, is the best and safest way to maximize shareholder value. Therefore, the filer is formally requesting that the board of directors immediately retain an outside investment firm to be charged with selling the company to the highest bidder in a process to be conducted over a period not less than 30 days or more than 90 days.” Reputable investment banking firm? Check. Exploration of a sale? Check. Timeline? Not specified in Exact’s announcement. Exact says it’s not likely to make any more announcements about a potential sale or merger until the board has approved a transaction.

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Regular readers of Xconomy will have noticed that for a while now we’ve been doing (almost) regular roundups of the previous week’s news, focusing on financings, M&A, and other deals. But Boston being such a key hub for life sciences, we thought a separate, bio-centric roundup was in order. So welcome to Life Sciences Wednesday. No promises it will actually fall on Wednesday each week, but it will bring you all the recent news (not just deals news) on biotech, pharma, diagnostics, medical devices, and the like.

—Natick, MA-based Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) revealed in an SEC filing that the U.S. Department of Justice is conducting a civil investigation into whether the firm and other manufacturers promoted off-label uses of biliary stents.

—Regulatory filings, reported by Private Equity Hub, were also the source of the news that Boston-based Mascoma, which is developing genetically engineered bacteria to speed the conversion of cellulosic biomass such as wood chips into ethanol, closed a hefty $50 million Series C funding round. Mascoma itself remained mum, although Xconomy confirmed the story with a source close to the deal, which includes $30 million in equity and $20 million in debt and was evidently inked with General Catalyst Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Vantage Point Venture Partners, Atlas Venture, Pinnacle Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Flagship Ventures.

—Harvard Medical School professor George Church’s Personal Genome Project got an unrestricted gift from Google late last year, according to a Bloomberg report. The grant (the value of which was not disclosed) will go toward the PGP’s $1 billion effort to 100,000 individuals’ genomes.

—Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY) announced what it said was the first evidence that a drug based on RNA interference, or RNAi, is effective in humans. In a Phase II trial, the drug reduced by 38 percent volunteers’ chances of becoming infected with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, when intentionally exposed to the virus.

—After months of lobbying by Governor Deval Patrick, the Massachusetts House finally passed its version of Patrick’s 10-year, $1 billion life sciences bill by a vote of 134 to 13.

—Gearing up for a hoped-for launch of its lead drug candidate next year, Cambridge, MA’s Targanta Therapeutics Corporation (NASDAQ: TARG) yesterday announced it’s hiring a Chief Commercial Officer and a Vice President and General Counsel. The former position will be filled by Mona Haynes, a veteran of Acusphere, Alkermes, and Baxter Healthcare; the latter slot will be filled by Daniel S. Char, who has served as counsel to Idenix Pharmaceuticals and Biogen Idec

—In other personnel news from yesterday, fellow Cambridge biotech Momenta Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: MNTA) announced that it has appointed James M. Roach as Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of Development. Roach previously was a senior manager at Sepracor, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, LeukoSite, and Astra USA.

—Finally, the past week saw a flurry of news about Cambridge, MA’s Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB). Last Wednesday, the FDA posted on its website a letter that Biogen and Ireland’s Elan had sent to physicians alerting them of the risk for liver damage in patients treated with Tysabri, a drug for multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease. The risk had been discussed with the FDA and made public months earlier, but the new attention seemed to cause a little dip the company’s stock. On Friday, shares took about a $2 hit when Biogen priced $1 billion of senior notes. And yesterday there was a somewhat odd story in Reuters that cited an analyst report citing an abstract from an upcoming neurology conference that said that JC virus has been found in two Tysabri users; the virus can cause the deadly brain infection progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) but didn’t in these cases. (You may remember that Tysabri was temporarily pulled from the market a few years back after three of its users contracted PML.) The analyst retracted his report later that day, according to another Reuters story, after the medical association organizing the conference threatened legal action against his bank and others for violating an embargo on the conference materials.

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Verenium (NASDAQ: VRNM), a Cambridge, MA-based biofuel firm, filed a shelf registration statement covering the potential issuance of up to $150 million of stock, debt securities, or warrants. The filing also covers the potential resale of 3 million shares of Verenium common stock by Syngenta (with which Verenium has a strategic alliance) and its affiliates. Verenium was formed just five months ago through the merger of Cambridge’s Celunol and San Diego’s Diversa.

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In the past few days, Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer exercised options worth about $15.4 million on the open market, netting some $9.3 million from the series of transactions, according to a form filed with the SEC today. From the filing, it looks like that leaves Termeer owning some 631,000 shares directly, and no more options. Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) closed today at $75.97, near its one-year high of $76.90.

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