[Updated 12/9/11 at 11:45 am. See below.] LifeImage, a Newton, MA-based startup that develops technology for sharing digital medical images via the Internet cloud, has taken in $8 million in new equity-based funding, according to a document filed with the SEC.

In January LifeImage boosted its Series B financing to $12 million, with money from Stamford, CT-based Galen Partners and Princeton, NJ-based Cardinal Partners. The company’s earlier investors include Long River Ventures, Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation, and Partners Innovation Fund. The newest round of financing came from 13 investors, according to the SEC filing.

LifeImage was started in 2008 with the aim of giving physicians across different locations the ability to share and access diagnostic medical images, which previously lived on CDs in individual hospitals.  In 2010 LifeImage and Hokpinton, MA-based data storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC) announced that they were partnering on a cloud-based storage system, with LifeImage’s software running atop EMC’s “Atmos” cloud storage and computing system.

The company could not comment on the financing at this time, but said it will be issuing an update next week. [Updated at 12/9/11 at 11:45 am]

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Patients who arrive in the emergency room complaining of abdominal pain often have to undergo a type of endoscopy—an invasive and sometimes dangerous test— so doctors can determine if the problem is in the pancreas. Taking an MRI scan is a safer alternative, but the resulting images often aren’t sharp enough to make a proper diagnosis.

Enter Repligen (NASDAQ: RGEN). The Waltham, MA-based company is in the final stages of applying for FDA approval for synthetic human secretin (SecreFlo), a hormone-based drug that’s designed to enhance MRI images of the pancreas. The FDA has granted the product fast-track status, meaning it has vowed to hand Repligen its verdict within six months of receiving the application. Even though Repligen is pursuing other opportunities, CEO Walter Herlihy is counting on the imaging product to boost Repligen’s profile as a commercial player. “The hormone is very specific for the pancreas, and that opens up the potential for exciting applications,” Herlihy says.

Repligen initially tried developing secretin more than five years ago to treat autism, but clinical trial results were disappointing. So scientists there started looking into a different capability that they knew the hormone possessed: It stimulated the ducts in the pancreas to fill with water, which made them appear bright enough in MRI images for physicians to make a diagnosis and come up with a treatment plan for abdominal problems.

The company is applying for FDA approval in pancreatitis, an inflammatory condition, which it estimates is at least a $100 million-a-year opportunity in the U.S. and Europe. Repligen is also examining the hormone’s utility in other pancreatic diseases. The market opportunity could double if the product is approved for the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, Herlihy says. Proper imaging “is a critical point in the treatment of this cancer,” he says. “If a surgeon can get the tumor out early, it greatly increases the chance of the patient having a good outcome.” Repligen has recently initiated a trial in pancreatic cancer, with the goal of eventually applying to the FDA for a label expansion.

For the fiscal year ending in March, Repligen broke even on sales of $27 million—more than half of which came from Opus, a technology platform the company acquired last year when it purchased BioFlash Partners, a Marlborough, MA-based company. Manufacturers of biotech drugs use Opus to simplify … Next Page »

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San Diego’s Actus Medical, which was founded earlier this year with technology for improved mapping of heart arrhythmias, has raised $1 million in initial funding from private investors and Index Ventures, which has offices in Geneva, London, and Jersey. In a statement, Index Ventures says the technology provides cardiologists with instantaneous and precise visualization of areas to be ablated in with atrial fibrillation, ventricular tachycardia, and other arrhythmias.

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By the time you read this, I’ve probably already wrapped up my work as a correspondent for Xconomy, turned in my key to office on Rogers Street in Cambridge, MA, and taken a deep breath in anticipation of my exciting new role as an executive editor for the life sciences group at FierceMarkets.

I’m really not being modest when I say that I don’t expect my departure from Xconomy to qualify as anything close to an event [Editor's note: Ryan is, indeed, being modest---we're going to miss him like crazy!], and Xconomy has a great life sciences reporting team in place with or without me. But I spent about 33 months at Xconomy, mostly covering the biotech and healthcare IT scenes in the Boston area, and I thought a proper goodbye post would be appropriate. It’s also an opportunity for me to brag a bit about some of the cool stories that we did during my stint with Xconomy. (Still, I promise to keep this farewell relatively brief.)

Before I talk about those stories, I want to say thanks to Xconomy. I feel plain lucky that Bob Buderi, Xconomy’s founder and editor-in-chief, called me on my cell phone in late July 2008 to ask me if I was interested in working for his startup media company. I got that call while I was literally carrying my box of personal stuff out of a building on Federal Street in downtown Boston after my last day as the biotech reporter for Mass High Tech, and I was still wondering at the time whether I was crazy for moving with my wife to Vermont, where I would try my luck as a freelancer. Thanks to Bob and Xconomy co-founder and executive editor Rebecca Zacks, I was given a shot to stay on the Boston biotech beat.

In those first few months at Xconomy, I chased down a news tip from Bob and broke a little story about the big $400 million endowment that philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad gave to their namesake research center, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. (The experience told me that my sources still worked, even when I was up in Vermont.) Around the same time, I started working more closely with Luke Timmerman, Xconomy’s National Biotech Editor, who joined Xconomy via Bloomberg several months before my arrival. Luke writes terrifically detailed and compelling news copy at speeds that would rival fictional Clark Kent’s fastest work at The Daily Planet. Luke also never hesitated to share tricks of the trade with me, and I’ll try to never forget those lessons. I learned a bunch from the other editors as well.

I don’t have a “top 10″ stories list or anything to share with you, but I’m very proud to have had the opportunity to be the first reporter to provide what I would call in-depth coverage of many healthcare-related startups in the Boston area. Some examples include stories about KEW Group (most recently), Seventh Sense Biosystems, Life Image, Momelan Technologies, and Vedanta Biosciences. I also got to do some memorable stories that involved big companies such as Biogen Idec (NASDAQ:BIIB), Genzyme, GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK), and Novartis (NYSE:NVS). The only regrets I have are getting beat on certain Boston biotech stories, yet I feel like I did about as much as I could while covering the beat mostly from my home office in a little college town some 200 miles from Kendall Square.

If you’re still reading this nano-memoir, then perhaps you’ll be interested to know that I’ll still be following the Boston biotech scene as well as the life sciences industry in other geographies in my new role at Fierce. I’ll also be in Boston and other major hubs of the biotech industry to cover stories and attend meetings. And I plan to continue to provide Twitter updates under my @ryan_mcbride handle.

So perhaps this isn’t really a goodbye as much as a note of thanks to the editors at Xconomy and to you the audience, with whom I aim to keep in touch through my work at Fierce.

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DFJ Mercury, a Houston-based seed-stage venture firm, has promoted venture advisor Russ Lebovitz to venture partner in San Diego and Houston, according to a report in PE Hub. Lebovitz is the CEO of Marval Biosciences, a DFJ Mercury portfolio company with offices in both Houston and La Jolla, CA, and the founder and chairman of Imagnx, a DFJ Mercury portfolio company based in Houston. Both startups are developing advanced medical imaging technologies.

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Bedford, MA-based Hologic, a provider of diagnostics, medical imaging, and surgical products for women, announced today that it has bought Interlace Medical of Framingham, MA, for $125 million in cash. Interlace, which makes a hysteroscopic tissue removal system, will be integrated into Hologic’s (NASDAQ: HOLX) gynecological surgical products business. The deal also includes two annual contingent payments, which will be a “multiple of the incremental revenue growth over the prior year,” according to the announcement.

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Computer giant Dell announced yesterday that it plans to acquire Wallingford, CT-based InsiteOne,a provider of data storage, archiving, and disaster-recovery software and services for medical imaging. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) didn’t reveal how much it paid for the Connecticut company, but said InsitetOne’s cloud-based software that works across vendors will be rolled into Dell’s Unified Clinical Archive product, to help healthcare professionals better access and share images regardless of the technology they use.

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Quick, name a semiconductor company in the Boston area that’s been getting lots of venture financing lately. OK, well, you already read the headline, so that one doesn’t count. My point is, there haven’t been too many of those—until today.

SiOnyx is the Beverly, MA-based semiconductor materials company that is working on commercializing so-called “black silicon.” This is essentially silicon that is much more efficient at absorbing light at certain wavelengths (and producing electricity) because it has been treated by just the right combination of laser pulses and chemicals. That means black silicon could potentially be used to make ultra-sensitive image sensors for digital cameras, night-vision goggles, and medical imaging equipment, as well as much more efficient solar cells. As my colleague Wade reported almost exactly two years ago, SiOnyx thinks it can revolutionize these fields, in part because its advanced technology can piggy-back on conventional silicon-based manufacturing processes.

Today the company is announcing a $12.5 million Series B financing round that includes new investors Crosslink Capital in San Francisco and Seattle-based Vulcan Capital, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s venture firm. Strategic partner Coherent, a laser company in Santa Clara, CA, also has signed on as a new investor in SiOnyx, and existing investors Polaris Venture Partners and Harris & Harris also participated in the round. The $12.5 million represents the completion (and sum total) of the financing round that Xconomy first wrote about in June.

“When we last talked about the company, we were vague about the application areas,” says SiOnyx CEO Stephen Saylor. “It’s a platform technology, and you want to evolve it and see where the value is.” (More on this in a minute.)

The SiOnyx technology is based on research from physicist Eric Mazur’s group at Harvard University. In the late 1990s, Mazur’s team first developed (and coined the term) black silicon in a series of experiments that used sulfur gases and femtosecond lasers—which emit sharp pulses of light that last only a millionth of a billionth of a second—to roughen up the surface of silicon wafers (see photo below). After discovering how well the resulting material absorbed photons, and delving deep into its atomic properties, the team decided to start a company.

SiOnyx was incorporated in 2005, and the following year, it gained an exclusive license from Harvard to commercialize its process. In 2007, the startup raised $11 million in venture capital from Harris & Harris, Polaris, and RedShift Ventures. It also has raised an undisclosed amount of non-dilutive financing from government sources and partners, Saylor says, which brings the company’s total funding to more than $35 million.

So where is the first big commercial market? Try camera phones taking pictures in low lighting—at night or in a dark bar or restaurant. And other applications like night-vision cameras, next-generation automotive sensors for detecting driving hazards, security and surveillance, and medical imaging devices. The basic idea, as Saylor explains, is that black silicon gives you performance in the dark comparable to what a conventional image sensor can do in daylight. That’s partly because the material is much better at absorbing photons in the near-infrared part of the spectrum than conventional silicon detectors.

“We’re going where [others] are blind, and we enable you to see,” Saylor says. “There is no other way to deliver this kind of performance.”

The question, then, is whether SiOnyx can scale up its capabilities fast enough to … Next Page »

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Danvers, MA-based Photo Diagnostic Systems, a new medical imaging startup, has raised $5 million in equity funding, according to a regulatory filing. The news was first reported by Mass High Tech. The MHT article reports that Bernard Gordon, a founder of Analogic (NASDAQ: ALOG) and NeuroLogica, bought the assets of Photo Detection Systems (now defunct) and invested in the new company through the Gordon Charitable Remainder Trust. Photo Diagnostic Systems, which has a staff of about 15 people, is developing a portable PET (positron emission tomography) scanner, according to the report.

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There are three reasons Michigan can feel good about a recent $8 million venture capital investment in Detroit-based medical imaging company Delphinus Medical Technologies.

1. It is an investment in a Michigan company;
2. The investment comes from an all-Michigan VC team;
3. It is an investment in Michigan-grown technology developed in one of the state’s premier research institutions—one that deals with real-life cancer cases every day.

Delphinus Medical’s breast-cancer-detection technology, SoftVue, has been undergoing development at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit for the past 10 years. Unlike mammography, it does not use radiation or compression to image the breast to detect early stages of breast cancer.

Instead, the breast is submerged in warm water and surrounded by an ultrasound ring that emits sound waves, detects the waves that are reflected off the breast tissue, and measures the speed and attenuation of the waves that pass through the tissue. (Conventional ultrasound devices rely on reflected soundwaves alone.)

The Delphinus system then employs sophisticated computer algorithms to translate the ultrasound data into detailed, three-dimensional images of the tissue.

According to Delphinus CEO Bill Greenway, the system not only avoids the discomfort and radiation associated with traditional mammography but can also help differentiate between different types of cancers and avoid unnecessary biopsies.

“Detecting cancer earlier, particularly in breast cancer, is really not the Holy Grail anymore,” Greenway says. “The thing that really is necessary today is to detect and be able to differentiate between those cancers which are aggressive and potentially will cause great harm to the woman versus those that really won’t.”

So, while the SoftVue’s broader application could eventually be as a screening tool to replace mammograms, the most-compelling—and near-term—application is its boosting accuracy in the diagnostic phase, possibly helping women avoid unnecessary, painful, and costly biopsies.

It’s what has Michael Gross, managing director for investor Beringea, excited about Delphinus. Beringea, with offices in Farmington Hills, MI, co-led the startup’s financing last month.

“From a market perspective, that’s what gets us excited because you can see how you can cut significant costs out of the system with a more-accurate, noninvasive diagnostic technology,” Gross says. “And it’s better for the patients because nobody wants to have a biopsy when they don’t need one.”

What really sealed the deal for Gross, who did the due diligence for Beringea, was … Next Page »

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It’s been a big two days for LightLab Imaging. Good Morning America featured the Westford, MA, firm’s coronary imaging technology on national television today. And St. Jude Medical, the cardiac devices powerhouse, revealed late yesterday that it has bought the small firm for about $90 million in cash.

St. Paul, MN-based St. Jude (NYSE:STJ) is buying LightLab from Goodman Co., the Japanese medical devices firm that has owned LightLab since 2002. With much of its core technology from MIT, LightLab has developed a so-called optical coherence tomography (OCT) catheter—which uses infrared light to capture detailed images of tissues—to diagnose cardiovascular disease.

The FDA gave the LightLab permission to begin selling the system in the U.S. this month, and St. Jude expects its new acquisition to add $20 million to its revenue stream in second half of this year. Before garnering FDA clearance, LightLab had received permission to sell the system in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and other parts of the world.

In December, Massachusetts officials highlighted LightLab as a source of jobs growth in the state, granting $188,951 in tax incentives to the firm as part of Gov. Deval Patrick’s $1 billion initiative to grow the life sciences sector in the commonwealth. The good news for the state is that St. Jude plans to continue LightLab’s operation in Westford and has no “big layoff plans,” said Amy Nesbit, a spokeswoman for LightLab.

LightLab CEO David Kolstad, in an interview Tuesday unrelated to the buyout, said that the company has committed to adding 29 new workers under the terms of its tax incentives from the state. The company currently employs about 70 people, he said. Nesbit said today that the company plans to apply for another round of state tax incentives this year to support its hiring plans. Kolstad is expected to transition from his chief executive role to a vice president position at St. Jude, she said.

LightLab launched in 1998 to apply some of the OCT discoveries from the labs of MIT professor James Fujimoto and those of his colleagues, including Eric Swanson, to coronary imaging. Fujimoto and Swanson are now technical advisors for the firm, Kolstad says.

St. Jude says it expects to wrap up its buyout of LightLab by the end of June.

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Digirad (NASDAQ: DRAD), a medical imaging company based in Poway, CA, says it got regulatory approval to market Ergo, a new nuclear imaging camera system for hospitals. Digirad CEO Todd Clyde tells the San Diego Union-Tribune that what sets the solid-state camera apart is its field of view and its portability, which means patients won’t have to be wheeled from their hospital rooms to get scanned.

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The state of Michigan is continuing its focus on using tax incentives to convince companies to locate here, or stick around, and a few technology companies are among the latest beneficiaries. The Michigan Economic Growth Authority recently approved tax breaks for the following tech companies.

Ash Stevens: The Detroit-based life sciences research company will receive $710,019 in state tax credits over seven years. The company says it will spend $14.9 million to expand its facility in Riverview, MI, creating at least 60 new jobs.

fortu PowerCell: The German-Swiss-based battery manufacturer plans to invest $623 million in a new battery-cell manufacturing plant in Muskegon, MI. The state approved tax credits valued at $12.6 million over 10 years to encourage the company to continue its Michigan expansion.

Materialise USA: The subsidiary of a Belgium-based company, which specializes  in 3-D medical image processing, plans to invest $12.5 million in a Plymouth Township, MI, facility with help from a state tax credit valued at $563,000 over seven years.

Oasis Advanced Engineering: The Auburn Hills, MI-based R&D company specializes in software and embedded electronics for combat vehicles. The company is looking to invest $7.5 million in an expansion. Oasis received a state tax credit valued at $1.4 million over seven years.

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Bill O’Leary, an IT specialist at a hospital in Montana, got a typical request one evening in January. A physician at another hospital, in this case a pediatric neurologist in Seattle, needed O’Leary to send the doctor a patient’s medical imaging exam. To transfer the digital image a year ago, O’Leary would have spent hours setting up a private Internet connection between his hospital and the physician’s hospital. Or, he could have copied the image onto a CD and mailed it to Seattle within two days.

With the neurologist’s request, however, O’Leary used a third-party service called eMix that allowed him to send the imaging exam over the Web almost as easily as e-mailing the record to the hospital in Seattle. “It’s a lot faster than over-nighting a CD,” says O’Leary, of Kalispell Regional Medical Center.

Online services like eMix are beginning to catch on because of their ability to bridge gaps in hospitals’ ability to share medical images. The company is wholly owned by San Diego-based DR Systems, a provider of radiology software that developed the eMix technology over the past couple of years.

The eMix service addresses one part of a huge problem in healthcare: hospitals have invested big bucks in IT systems that are often unable to easily “talk” to each other or exchange data like electronic health records and digital medical images. A typical solution has been to load medical images onto CDs, which patients can carry to appointments with doctors at separate facilities. But that practice has proven to be ineffective, for example, because the images on CDs are often damaged or unable to be read on other hospital’s computers. When the records aren’t readily available, the imaging exams often need to be redone, which contributes to the estimated $3 billion to $10 billion per year the U.S. healthcare system spends on unnecessary medical imaging, according to Imaging e-Ordering Coalition, a advocacy group formed last year.

There’s been a gold rush of sorts in recent years among healthcare software outfits develop technology that fixes this problem in sharing medical images. Hopkinton, MA-based data storage giant EMC, a major provider of data management hardware and software for hospitals and customers in other industries, is backing a Boston-area startup called LifeImage to develop a service to securely exchange medical images over the Internet. (EMC’s (NYSE:EMC) data-management technology is also used in the data center that supports the eMix service, according to Florent Saint-Clair, a program director for eMix). Seemyradiology.com, a medical image-sharing Web service from the Atlanta-based radiology software firm … Next Page »

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Count Nuance Communications among the Massachusetts-based providers of software for doctors that could benefit hugely from healthcare reforms and technology initiatives emerging from Washington.

Healthcare customers are the biggest market for the Burlington, MA-based company’s (NASDAQ:NUAN) speech-recognition and phone-based products, accounting for about 40 percent of the firm’s $950.4 million in revenue for fiscal 2009. To grow and protect its top market, the company is advocating for the government to adopt standards that would make its technology a key tool that doctors will need to use when they deal with electronic patient records and order diagnostic imaging tests like CT scans.

Nuance’s foothold in the healthcare arena might be fueling rumors that it’s a potential acquisition target, according to a recent Bloomberg News report. For example, the company says there are more than 100,000 physicians who use the company’s speech-recognition software that enables them to dictate patient information directly into electronic health records, including records systems from most major providers such as Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, and General Electric, according to Nuance. Brent Thill, an analyst for UBS, told Bloomberg this month that Nuance is a good takeover target and the healthcare market will become more important as the government streamlines the healthcare system.

Indeed, the federal stimulus package passed in February 2009 allocated $19 billion in incentives to drive adoption of electronic health records systems, which are expected to reduce medical errors and eliminate some wasteful spending. While the government works out standards and regulations for doctors’ use of the subsidized EHRs, Nuance, not surprisingly, has been advocating for guidelines that would make its speech-recognition software an important component of the systems.

Specifically, Nuance has said it wants standards that make comprehensive physician narratives—like those its speech-recognition software is designed to capture for electronic health records—a requirement for doctors’ to qualify for the government incentives. There were no standards for speech-recognition in proposed rules that require healthcare providers to demonstrate “meaningful use” of the records systems before they can get incentive payments. The “meaningful use” criteria haven’t yet been finalized. But the company is hoping that the final definition, expected in June, addresses the need for detailed physician narratives in electronic health records.

“If you look at the meaningful use requirements, one set of them is that healthcare providers have to report active problems with … Next Page »

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On March 2, I reported to Suffolk County Superior Court for jury duty, certain that I’d be let go after my day of service or excused, just like every other time. So it was a bit of a shock to find myself seated, by the end of the day, as Juror No. 14 on a medical malpractice trial that, according to the judge’s prediction, would take until March 23. (She was exactly right, as it turned out.)

I won’t dwell here on the irony of being forced to spend most of Mass Mobile Month immobile in the jury box, separated from my laptop and unable to use my cell phone. Being part of the 14-member jury on a three-week civil trial was no more of a hardship for me than it was for the other jurors, so I’m not going to complain. But I do want to share a few observations from the experience—some encouraging, some not. I’ll try to restrict myself mainly to talking about subjects related to technology and medicine, which were the big themes in the case.

The trial, in a nutshell, was about a health emergency that went undiagnosed far too long. The plaintiffs were an elderly church pastor from a Boston suburb and his wife. (I’m not going to use their names.) The pastor had a history of back trouble, but nothing incapacitating. The weekend before Thanksgiving in 2003, he began to experience unbearable back pain, and was taken to the ER of a local hospital (which I also will not name—if you want to go dig up the details, I’m sure there are public records).

Doctors there quickly determined that the pastor had a streptococcal infection in his bloodstream and started him on the appropriate antibiotics. They began a series of tests intended to locate the source of the infection and the pain. But the agony continued, and it wasn’t until five days later, after the pastor had been transferred to a prominent Boston hospital, that its true source was discovered.

An imaging study showed that the infection had taken root in the pastor’s spine in the form of a large epidural abscess, a pocket of pus inside the spinal canal between the bone and the dura, the outer lining of the spinal cord. As soon as the abscess was detected, surgeons operated to drain the pus. But by then it was too late. The abscess had pinched off the pastor’s spinal cord, causing permanent nerve damage. The pastor, now 75 years old, can’t walk on his own and suffers from a range of other disabilities.

The plaintiffs’ attorney was an outstanding Boston trial lawyer and medical malpractice specialist named Gregg Pasquale, of Keches Law Group. I’ve since learned that in the 1980s Pasquale was an assistant district attorney in Middlesex County, where he prosecuted murder cases. His fiery zeal was evident every day in our courtroom. Pasquale argued that the defendants in the case—a radiologist from the suburban hospital and two doctors from the Boston hospital—should have done more to diagnose the pastor’s problem.

One of the many difficulties in the pastor’s case was that the abscess didn’t appear on the standard MRI exam ordered by the ER doctor at the suburban hospital. But Pasquale argued that … Next Page »

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Amicas has changed its tune about its competitor Merge Healthcare’s efforts to buy the Boston-based software firm. After criticizing those efforts last month, Amicas’s board says that Merge’s updated buyout offer is superior to the one it had agreed to accept from the private equity group Thoma Bravo in December.

Milwaukee-based Merge is offering to buy Amicas for $6.05 per share. Amicas, a medical imaging and radiology software outfit, now says that it thinks Merge’s offer is better than Thomas Bravo’s bid of $5.35 per share. Amicas said last month that Merge’s offer of $6.05 per share was “illusory and risky,” but Merge has since secured an agreement with Morgan Stanley to finance the bulk of its proposed acquisition. The board of Amicas decided yesterday that it would give Thoma Bravo a chance to top Merge’s new offer by March 8.

Talk about a last minute change. Amicas had been urging shareholders to approve the Thoma Bravo agreement during a meeting scheduled for Thursday. On February 22 Amicas called Merge’s buyout overtures that day “an eleventh-hour attempt by Merge to insert itself into a process that is well underway, and to disrupt Amicas’s definitive merger agreement with Thoma Bravo, damage Amicas’s operations, and mislead Amicas’s stockholders.” If that was an eleventh-hour move by Merge, then one might think Amicas is delivering their bidders at Thoma Bravo some bad news just several ticks from midnight.

Still, Amicas’s board says it isn’t yet advising shareholders to accept Merge’s proposal over the Thomas Bravo agreement. Effectively, the board is leaving the door open for Thoma Bravo to enrich its previous offer, and it has authorized the company to nix that agreement if the private equity group doesn’t best Merge’s proposal. Amicas has rescheduled the shareholder vote on the buyout proposals to a meeting on March 16.

Amicas’s stock traded up 2 cents at $6.01 per share for the day at 3:13 pm Eastern time.

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When Don Kiepert became chief executive of Lantheus Medical Imaging about two years ago, he says, he took over a business that was looking down the barrel of a generic threat to one of its top-selling products—and whose operations had been largely overlooked by its previous owner, the drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE:BMY).

Kiepert has attacked the first problem, generic competition to the firm’s technetium Tc99m sestamibi (Cardiolite) injections for medical imaging, by securing supply agreements with key customers and investing in marketing the product’s well-known brand. And last month, the North Billerica, MA-based company launched its latest imaging product, gadofosveset trisodium (Ablavar), a contrast agent used in diagnosing cardiovascular diseases, after paying $28 million for certain rights to the technology last May to the now defunct biotech firm Epix Pharmaceuticals, of Lexington, MA.

Yet Lantheus still faces major challenges. While the business’s roots date back to 1956, Lantheus is only a two-year-old company, and its name isn’t as well known among key physicians as Bristol-Myers is. (The company name was changed from Bristol-Myers Squibb Medical Imaging to Lantheus in January 2008, when private equity firm Avista Capital Partners, of New York City and Houston, purchased the business for $525 million from Bristol-Myers in a leveraged buyout.) Generic competition to the sestamibi product has eaten into the company’s revenue stream, but the CEO says that the total number of workers at the company today is about 740, just 10 fewer workers than  when Avista bought the business.

Lantheus does not publicly reveal its financial records, so it’s tough to know exactly how the business is performing. Like many companies purchased through LBOs, Lantheus must use a portion of its revenues to pay down the debt used to finance Avista’s purchase of the business. However, Kiepert says that the company is almost two years ahead of schedule in paying down its undisclosed debts from the buyout. And despite those debts, Avista has supported efforts at the company to invest in brining new products to market.

“We’re investing nearly … Next Page »

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San Diego’s NextImage Medical, Inc., which has developed a Web-based system for scheduling and managing diagnostic imaging services, says it has raised $5 million in Series A funding in a round led by Chrysalis Ventures of Louisville, KY. Liz Griggs founded NextImage Medical last year as a way to provide high-quality, low-cost radiology services, either through insurers, self-insured employers, or direct-to-consumer. A statement from NextImage Medical says Griggs previously was the founder of New Jersey-based One Call Medical, a radiology preferred provider organization (PPO) that was sold in 2003 for $115 million.

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The life sciences news was relatively light over the last week, except perhaps for Sequenom, the medical diagnostics company that has yet to publicly disclose much about its misconduct in handling clinical trial data.

—Sequenom (NASDAQ: SQNM) disclosed that it met with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego in connection with the company’s mishandling of data from a clinical trial for its Down syndrome prenatal test. This latest development came a week after a five-month internal investigation led the company to fire CEO (and San Diego Xconomist) Harry Stylli along with three others. The company said it is cooperating fully with government investigators and the dismissed employees had denied wrongdoing.

—Accumetrics reeled in another $16.5 million from existing investors, including Essex Woodlands Health Ventures and Kaiser Permanente Ventures. As Bruce reported, the company sees a multibillion-dollar market for its diagnostic device that calibrates the right dosage of anti-clotting drugs.

—Transdel Pharmaceuticals (OTC BB: TDLP) saw mixed results from a clinical trial of its topical pain reliever. The cream containing ketoprofen was better than a placebo among patients who used the cream as directed, but had no advantage among patients who applied the cream incorrectly, or failed to follow the study protocol. CEO Juliet Singh told Luke the trial was a success and that the FDA would consider the two sets of data.

—Marval Biosciences, San Diego’s latest virtual biomedical startup, raised $2.5 million in venture financing from DFJ Frontier in Los Angeles and DFJ Mercury in Houston, affiliates of the Silicon Valley firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company is working on next-generation contrast agents for medical imaging.

—LifeModeler of San Clemente, CA had a cameo in one of the biggest science stories of the week. The company’s biomechanical visualization software was used to determine how Ardi, a 4.4-million-year-old hominid fossil, walked and moved. Orthopedic surgeons use the software to plan and practice joint-replacement surgeries,

—Gen-Probe (NASDAQ: GPRO), which uses nucleic acid testing of blood samples to diagnose human diseases, agreed to pay $60 million in cash to acquire Wisconsin-based Prodesse, which is developing sophisticated reagents that can rapidly identify certain types of respiratory viruses, intestinal bacteria, and other infectious microbes.

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