Medical Device Daily
and Staff Reports

Peakadilly (Ghent, Belgium), a company focused on predictive protein biomarkers, pulled in EUR 8.5 million ($10.6 million) in a final closing of its Series A round, bringing the total amount raised to $18.4 million.

“That's a pretty significant Series A financing for Europe, I think, and a good demonstration of the confidence investors have in what we're doing and the capability of the technology,” said CEO Nick McCooke. “In fact, we were oversubscribed.”

Investors included GIMV (Antwerp, Belgium); Life Science Partners (Amsterdam, the Netherlands); KBC Private Equity (Brussels, Belgium); and Baekeland Fonds II, the venture capital fund of the Ghent University Association.

The first Series A closing occurred in March, when Life Science Partners and Johnson & Johnson Development Corp. , a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson (New Brunswick, New Jersey), invested EUR 6 million ($7.7 million).

Peakadilly was founded in late 2004 by the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology , a research institution that provides bio-incubator space to biotech companies. It has co-founded other start-up companies such as Devgen and Ablynx (both Ghent). The technology came out of research done at Ghent University (Zwijnaarde).

Peakadilly intends to use the proceeds to increase the capacity of its protein biomarker discovery operations, which is based on its MASStermind technology.

“The technology is discovering biomarkers in blood and other tissues,” McCooke told Medical Device Daily's sister publication, BioWorld Today, “and we will be using that in our own projects in discovering biomarkers that will be used in diagnostic and pharmacodiagnostic products.”

With the technology, the analysis of one blood sample allows researchers to assess close to 3,000 different proteins and their processed isoforms. Peakadilly is able to deliver heat-maps comparable to microarray datasets, which include the position of the biomarker in the gene product.

The expansion of the technology will help Peakadilly develop more relationships with pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies, the company said. The biomarker discovery engine is known as COFRADIC, which stands for “combined fractional diagonal chromatography.”

McCooke said Peakadilly's technology represents a significant advance over other approaches. “The gold standard in proteomics is still the 2-D gel, but we've implemented a much higher throughput, much more sensitive, much higher dynamic range technology,” he said.

In connection with the financing, Peakadilly named Jim Van heusden, senior investment manager at GIMV, to its board.

McCooke said he was not certain how far the Series A funds would carry Peakadilly. “As is the case with a company that has a revenue-generating component to the model, it's going to be a little dependent on the scale of the revenues,” he said.

Peakadilly has a vision that biomarkers, which it calls “peaks,” will become a commodity just like the consumer brands advertised at places like Piccadilly Circus in London. The company hopes to create diagnostics that will revolutionize the development of cancer and inflammatory disease treatments, and that will enable the development of personalized medicines. It currently has 28 employees.

NHS sets new diagnostic waiting times

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) already has improved access to diagnostic procedures such as tests and scans, but further improvements will help deliver ambitious new waiting time targets, said Health Minister Caroline Flint.

Responding to a review of diagnostic services in NHS acute-care hospitals published by the Healthcare Commission, Flint said improving diagnostics “continues to be a key priority. Since 1997 an extra 200 million has been invested in scanning equipment in the NHS, an extra 1,600 radiographers have been recruited, and the number of students entering radiography training has more than doubled.”

She added that the independent sector also is providing more than 1.5 million additional diagnostic procedures per year for NHS patients over the next five years.

“To help the NHS identify where further improvements need to be made, we have for the first time started publishing monthly waiting times for diagnostic procedures across every Trust,” Flint said. “This transparency is un-precedented in the history of the NHS and is a vital step in delivering the new 18-week maximum wait from GP to treatment by the end of 2008.”

She said the Department of Health is confident the NHS will deliver this new target. “The service has already eradicated the long waits that were all too common in the past – the average outpatient wait is four weeks, while the average inpatient wait is around seven weeks. The challenge now is to build on this success and give patients even more certainty about their treatment.”

To further speed up access to diagnostic tests, the Department of Health also announced that the choice of scan program would be extended. Beginning next April, patients who do not have an appointment within 13 weeks will be offered an appointment at an alternate hospital or clinic.

European office for PR firm

Schwartz Communications (Waltham, Massachusetts), one of North America's leading public relations agencies focused on the high-tech medical device, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, said it plans to open a European headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden, on Nov. 1.

Schwartz veteran Kristina Ebenius, who has most recently been serving in a senior role for a leading Swedish public relations agency, will be the office's managing director.

“Schwartz Communications has enjoyed outstanding growth and recognition in North America as the result of its innovative and high-impact work. The opening of our Stockholm office enables us to extend our brand to Europe,” said Steve Schwartz, company president. “As a center of technical innovation, entrepreneurship and global competitiveness, Stockholm is an excellent location for our European headquarters.”

The Stockholm office will serve companies throughout Europe and North America, providing a full suite of Schwartz's traditional and new media services.

Schwartz Communications was founded in 1990 by the husband and wife team of Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz. In addition to the Waltham office, the company has another U.S. office in San Francisco. Schwartz has more than 200 employees and 170 clients.