A Medical Device Daily

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 (Medical Device Daily, Nov. 17, 2006), 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:

• Cerus (Concord, California) reported that it has entered into agreements with institutional investors for the purchase of up to 3,903,952 shares of its common stock at $6.68 a share.

Net proceeds to Cerus are expected to be about $24.3 million.

Banc of America Securities acted as lead placement agent for the offering and Robert W. Baird & Co. acted as co-placement agent.

Cerus develops products in the fields of blood safety and immunotherapy. In the field of blood safety, the company is commercializing the Intercept blood system, designed to enhance the safety of donated blood components by inactivating viruses, bacteria, parasites and other pathogens, as well as harmful white blood cells.

• 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.

• US Oncology Holdings (Houston) reported that it will make a private offering of $150 million of its common and preferred stock to Morgan Stanley Strategic Investments.

The parties have entered into a term sheet regarding the offering, with consummation subject to numerous conditions.

The net proceeds of the issuance of the stock, together with the cash-on-hand of USOncology , the company’s wholly owned subsidiary, will be used to pay a dividend of $190 million to company stockholders and pay fees and expenses related to the offering.

Subject to finalization of the terms and conditions of the offering and satisfaction of the other conditions, the company said it anticipates the offering will close before the end of the year.

US Oncology is a large cancer treatment and research network. According to the company’s last quarterly report, it is affiliated with 1,029 physicians in 411 locations, including 91 radiation oncology facilities in 35 states.

• Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell reported that an early-stage biotechnology firm, Integrated Technologiesand Services International Biosciences (ITSI; Johnston), will receive a $500,000 state investment to expand its research capacity.

Rendell said, “This field is one of the most rapidly advancing areas in the world today, and we’re committed to ensuring that Pennsylvania is playing a leading role in that development. That’s why we’re making this type of strategic investment.”

ITSI said it plans to build a 12,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art building in Johnstown’s Kernville neighborhood to house a clean room and a proteomics laboratory that will allow the company to conduct large-scale protein studies.

The nearly $1.8 million building will expand the company’s operations, accelerate research and development activities and increase bioanalytical kit manufacturing capacity to streamline specimen testing.

The $500,000 grant was provided through Pennsylvania’s Enterprise Zone Program created to promote job growth and business expansion in distressed or disadvantaged municipalities.

The company plans to lease space to other bioscience companies wanting to locate in the city. Twenty-three new jobs are expected to be created between ITSI’s expansion and the other prospective tenants.

• Oragenics (Alachua, Florida) reported that it has filed a U.S. patent application covering a collection of 44 genes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) specifically induced during infection of human patients. Initial funding for this TB project was provided through a competitive Small Business Innovative Research grant from the National Institutes of Research . The company said, however, that additional funding will be necessary.

The company reported that the early exercise of stock warrants by a company board member has brought $420,000 into the company. When combined with existing cash, this added funding, reduced by a current monthly burn rate estimated at $150,000, should result, it said, in the company having sufficient funds through 1Q07.

The identification of these gene targets offers the promise of anew TB test to meet a critical worldwide need, and could potentially serve as the basis for an effective new vaccine against tuberculosis infection, the company said.

These new TB gene targets were discovered using the IVIAT technology, now exclusively owned by Oragenics as a result of the recent acquisition of iviGene . IVIAT, or In Vivo Induced Antigen Technology, is a discovery platform designed to identify genes of pathogenic bacteria that are specifically expressed during actual human infections.