A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Hansen Medical (Mountain View, California) reported that the underwriters of its initial public offering of 6.25 million shares have exercised in full their over-allotment option, purchasing another 937,500 shares of common stock.

Including the over-allotment shares purchased, the offering totaled 7,187,500 shares of common stock at the public offering price of $12 a share, resulting in net proceeds to Hansen of about $80.2 million.

All of the shares in the offering, priced in mid-November, were offered and sold by Hansen.

The underwriters were Morgan Stanley & Co. and J.P. Morgan Securities as joint bookrunners, and Thomas Weisel Partners and Leerink Swann & Co., as co-managers.

Hansen, founded in 2002, develops products and technology using robotics for the accurate positioning, manipulation and control of catheters and catheter-based technologies. Its Sensei robotic catheter system and disposable Artisan control catheter are under review for FDA clearance to guide catheters for mapping the heart anatomy.

In other financing news:

• Aushon BioSystems (Burlington, Massachusetts), which provides microarray-based tools, instrumentation and services for life science research, drug R&D and clinical diagnostics, reported closing a Series A financing of $7.78 million.

The company said that the financing, led by North Bridge Venture Partners, with angel investors also contributing, will support its current product launch and new product development.

Aushon's 2470 initial microarrayer instrument was unveiled at Boston's Discovery to Diagnostics Conference in September. The company said the 2470 can produce high quality microarrays of a variety of biological materials, including those at the forefront of current research — proteins, antibodies and cell lysates.

One of the keys to future discoveries in life science, pharmacology and diagnostics is the ability to process genomic and proteomic assays in massively parallel formats to unravel the complexities of biological systems and enable genome-based/proteome-based diagnostics and drug discovery.

• Response Biomedical (Vancouver, British Columbia) reported that it has closed the $8 million equity investment made in by 3M's (St. Paul, Minnesota) medical division. The alliance, reported earlier this month, gives 3M about a 13% ownership position in Response Biomedical.

The financing grants 3M worldwide exclusive rights, through its medical division, to pursue the development and commercialization of diagnostic products targeting hospital and community-acquired infectious diseases, using Response's RAMP testing platform.

3M's equity investment consists of 14,797,419 shares at a price of C 62 cents a share ($0.5406). 3M has agreed not to sell any of its shares for a period of 12 months from closing.

Response develops rapid on-site diagnostic tests for use with its portable RAMP Platform for clinical and environmental applications.

• Invitrogen (Carlsbad, California) has entered into a strategic development and distribution relationship with Blue Heron Biotechnology (Bothell, Washington). Invitrogen will invest in Blue Heron in exchange for worldwide rights to distribute Blue Heron's custom gene synthesis services. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Blue Heron Biotechnology's GeneMaker platform is designed to synthesize any gene sequence, with perfect accuracy regardless of length or complexity.

Invitrogen is a provider of recombinant cloning and protein expression products, as well as providing the largest fully sequenced human open reading frame clone collections.

Blue Heron Biotechnology has produced nearly 10 million base pairs of DNA since its inception in 1999. The company regularly produces simple to complex DNA sequences from less than 100 base pairs to more than 20,000 base pairs.

The companies will also co-develop new products and services for the research and bio-pharmaceutical markets.

• Beckman Coulter (Fullerton, California) reported the pricing of its offering of $525 million aggregate principal amount of convertible senior notes, due 2036. The company also granted the initial purchasers an option to purchase up to $75 million aggregate principal amount of additional notes to cover any over-allotments.

The company estimated that the net proceeds from the offering will be about $512.5 million after deducting discounts, commissions and estimated expenses associated with the offering.

It said it expects to use about $100 million of the proceeds to repurchase shares of its common stock and about $245 million of the proceeds to consummate the tender offer for any and all of its outstanding 7.45% senior notes due 2008. The remainder of net proceeds will be used to reduce amounts outstanding under its revolving credit facility.

The overall purpose of the offering is to reduce Beckman Coulter's interest expense in order to fund additional R&D activities, including its molecular diagnostics project, it said.

The notes will pay interest semi-annually at 2.50% per year and, under certain circumstances, beginning with the six-month period beginning Dec 15, 2012, contingent interest. The notes will be convertible, at the holder's option, at an initial conversion rate of 13.4748 shares per $1,000 principal amount of notes, which represents a 25% conversion premium.