We saw stories about New England life sciences companies in a range of stages this week: kicking off, shutting down, and growing.

—Cambridge, MA-based biotech Tolerx will be shutting down its operations, after raising a total of more than $150 million from backers like HealthCare Ventures, Skyline Ventures, and Sprout Group. The company’s diabetes drug otelixizumab missed its goals in a pivotal clinical trial earlier this year. Tolerx will be handing the drug over to its partner GlaxoSmithKline and has already begun liquidating its assets through auctions.

—My colleague Arlene took a closer look at Cambridge-based Agios Pharmaceuticals, which just added another $20 million on top of the $130 million already committed in a collaboration deal it had in place with New Jersey-based Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG). The two companies are working to develop cancer metabolism drugs that starve tumors of the enzymes needed to grow.

—Courtagen Life Sciences, formerly called Avantra Biosciences, raised $8 million in new funding.The developer of protein biomarkers for disease detection raised a $7 million round of financing last year.

—Boston-based OvaScience came out of stealth mode, unveiling its technique (licensed from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital) for improving in vitro fertilization. The company, co-founded and funded by Sirtris Pharmaceuticals veterans Michelle Dipp and Christoph Westphal, aims to improve the quality of eggs using a type of stem cell found in ovaries.

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Boston-based OvaScience is emerging from stealth mode with a technology designed to improve in vitro fertilization by rejuvenating tired eggs. Yesterday the company unveiled its technique, which is based on technology it licensed from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. OvaScience co-founder Jonathan Tilly—director of the Vincent Center for Reproductive Biology at MGH—will talk in detail about the company’s science on October 19 at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine annual meeting in Orlando, FL.

OvaScience’s startup team has plenty of experience in the field of rejuvenation. The company’s CEO and co-founder is Michelle Dipp, previously vice president of corporate development at Sirtris—which was famously developing compounds based on the anti-aging supplement resveratrol before it was acquired for $720 million by GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) in 2008. OvaScience co-founder Christoph Westphal was Sirtris’s founder and CEO. Dipp and Westphal are now partners at Longwood Founders Fund, which took part in OvaScience’s $6 million Series A round in July. Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in that round.

What’s more, one of the two key technologies behind OvaScience’s product was developed by none other than David Sinclair, the Harvard scientist who discovered resveratrol’s role in promoting longevity. The compounds that OvaScience licensed from Sinclair’s lab activate mitochondria—tiny power plants in cells that provide the energy for them to divide and grow.

The crux of OvaScience’s technique comes from MGH’s Tilly, who in 2004 discovered a type of stem cell in the ovary that matures into eggs. OvaScience’s approach involves isolating these egg stem cells from the patient, taking mitochondria from those cells, and then injecting … Next Page »

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[Clarification---1/12/10, 1 pm ET] Nadya Suleman, aka the Octomom, grabbed headlines this time last year when she gave birth to octuplets conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF). Now, Molecular Biometrics is grabbing venture dollars for technology that could help other IVF users avoid a similar fate.

The Norwood, MA-based firm raised $12.5 million in a Series B round of venture capital to begin sales of its product that identifies the most viable embryos produced in IVF, according to the company. The technology could help doctors reduce the number of embryos they need to transfer to the mother to produce a successful pregnancy—and fewer embryos should mean fewer women wind up carrying triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, or more babies.

Atlas Venture of Waltham, a new investor in Molecular Biometrics, led the new round of financing, and Atlas partner Peter Barrett has joined the company’s board of directors. The round also included backing from Boston-based venture firm Oxford Bioscience Partners and Safeguard Scientifics (NYSE:SFE), a Wayne, PA, holding company that invests in life sciences and technology firms. Oxford and Safeguard invested in Molecular Biometrics’s $12 million Series A round, which closed in fall 2008. The company, which earlier raised about $3 million in a seed round, has attracted a total of $27.5 million since it was incorporated in 2005.

Jim Posillico, president and CEO of Molecular Biometrics, said in an interview that the new financing will enable his firm to begin shipping its “ViaMetrics-E” system for sales in the IVF market in Europe next month. The firm will sell the system, which consists of a near-infrared spectroscopy device and single-use test cartridges, through distributors. The firm also plans to use the capital to ramp up an ongoing clinical trial of the product in order to gain the FDA’s permission to sell it in the U.S., hopefully by the first or second quarter of 2011, Posillico said. Molecular Biometrics will also use some of the new funds to produce its products through contract manufactures.

The potential global market for the IVF product—which is one of multiple uses for the firm’s technology—is believed to be hundreds of millions of dollars, said Atlas’s Barrett. “It’s a significant opportunity,” he said, “and all the thought leaders that we talked to said that anything you can provide an increased chance of a pregnancy, people will be willing to pay for it.” [Clarification: This paragraph was changed to clarify the estimated global market for the company's IVF product, which Barrett says is  hundreds of millions of dollars, not $100 million, as we first quoted him saying.]

Atlas was drawn to Molecular Biometrics’s technology for the reproductive market because it allows doctors to test the nutrient solution in which an embryo is grown before being transferred to the mother, meaning that no cells from the embryo itself are required to gauge whether it is likely to lead to a pregnancy. The system also includes disposable test cartridges, giving the company the potential to receive recurring revenue from sales of the cartridges used in each spectrometry machine it sells (an example of the battle-tested “razor-razorblade” business model).

Another big plus is that the firm could be the first company in years to come out with a new way to test the viability of embryos used in IVF. Posillico explained that fertilization labs typically examine … Next Page »

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Molecular Biometrics has raised $12 million in a Series A round of venture capital from Boston-based Oxford Bioscience Partners and Safeguard Scientifics. The cash will be used to support development of ViaMetrics, a diagnostic tool to help doctors identify which embryos created through in vitro fertilization have the greatest chance to become viable embryos. The company is currently headquartered in Chester, NJ, although it plans to move to the Boston area in early 2009.

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