A Medical Device Daily

Mediscience Technology (Cherry Hill, New Jersey) and an unnamed New York investment group have executed an agreement seeking a minimum of $5 million and a maximum of $10 million on terms favorable to the company's shareholders and providing for a “firm commitment public offering” by the company's wholly owned subsidiary for its ingestible diagnostic pill – called the Compact Photonic Explorer (CPE) – presently under joint development with its equity partner, Infotonics Research (Rochester, New York).

The company believes the CPE demonstrates great promise in providing a noninvasive, preliminary means of detecting in vivo precancerous and cancerous tissues in the upper digestive tract with the use of diagnostic photonics molecular data as compared to other scientific technology platforms upon which pill technology is being produced.

Infotonics and Mediscience are jointly developing the CPE for medical applications. The initial focus of the project is developing a pill that would detect cancer and monitor body functions.

In other dealmaking news:

• StatSure Diagnostic Systems (Framingham, Mass-achusetts) reported that it has successfully completed the sale of $2.15 million of its Series 2006 A 8% convertible preferred stock to institutional investors.

Chardan Capital Markets was the company's placement agent for this transaction. StatSure's primary business relates to a patented technology that provides point-of-care testing for certain infectious diseases. The company's first commercial introduction of this platform is expected to be in screening for HIV antibodies.

The company said this funding would permit it to commercialize its intellectual property across a broad range of infectious disease testing opportunities beyond AIDS.

“This financing represents an important milestone in our progress toward commercializing our rapid-diagnostic product technology,” said Steve Peltzman, CEO and chairman of StatSure. “In addition, these funds will enable us to capitalize on the growing market demand for our oral fluid collection device. StatSure will invest in building the ongoing revenue base of this high margin product line and take advantage of the increasing external demand for oral fluid testing for drug of abuse, certain cancers and other novel analytes.”

• Crescent Diagnostics (London), a company developing a new test for bone health, reported the completion of a EUR 800,000 ($1 million) funding round.

Seroba BioVentures (Dublin, Ireland), a specialist life science venture capital firm, led the round in conjunction with a number of private investors.

Crescent, founded in 2004, is a development stage diagnostic company focused on advancing its Bone Quality Test (BQT). BQT is a method of assessing osteoporosis fracture risk and drug response simply by examining the human fingernail.

The current gold standard method involves exposing the patient to expensive X-ray based DEXA scans. In preliminary clinical studies, Crescent has shown that its BQT was a better predictor of fracture risk than DEXA. Awareness of bone quality as an important factor in bone health and in determining risk of bone fractures is growing.

As part of the financing, Alan O'Connell, partner from Seroba, will join the board of directors.

• HemoBioTech (Dallas) reported that it will redeem its outstanding redeemable Class A warrants. The company issued the warrants in October 2004 in connection with a private placement of its common stock.

The company has fixed July 14 as the date for redemption. The redemption price is $0.001 per share.

Warrant holders have until 5 p.m. EDT on July 13 to exercise their warrants.

Up to the date of this release, about 2.35 million Class A warrants have been exercised, resulting in an additional $2.49 million in gross proceeds to the company. There are 2,948,495 Class A warrants that remain outstanding. If all of these warrants are exercised prior to the date of redemption, the company will receive an additional $3,125,404.70 in gross proceeds.

The company said the net proceeds to the company would be used for further development of HemoTech and general working capital. HemoTech is a novel human blood substitute technology exclusively licensed from Texas Tech University Health Science Center (Lubbock, Texas). It is a chemically modified hemoglobin, which not only carries oxygen in the blood, but can also induce red blood cell production.

HemoBioTech said it believes that HemoTech may possess properties that diminish the intrinsic toxicities that have plagued other attempts at developing blood substitutes.

MDD receives award for series on infant testing disparities

Medical Device Daily earlier this month received a second-place award from the Newsletter and Electronic Publishers Association (Arlington, Virginia), the major national association representing newsletter publishers, in the category of “Best Investigative Reporting.”

The series, written by Christopher Delporte – until late last year Washington Editor for MDD – and edited by Don Long, managing editor of MDD, focused on the current disparities in neonatal genetic testing in the U.S., resulting from the lack of agreement among the states concerning how many tests should be mandated for newborns.

Delporte's three articles and a sidebar highlighted the fact that because of the inconsistencies from state to state, a child living on one side of a state border may receive early screening and treatment for a devastating disease while a child living only yards away, but on the other side of the border, may be saddled with the results of this same disease for lack of testing, or death.

Delporte attacked the story from a variety of angles, from the point of view of a mother who became aware of this disparity and helped to build an advocacy organization addressing the issue, to national organizations attempting to educate the public concerning the need for a standard number of early genetic tests, state to state. Where the largest number of screenings are used, up to 30,000 babies each year may be saved from retardation or death, according to Delporte's reporting.

Long said he encouraged Delporte's pursuit of the topic after he himself had written a story referencing the March of Dimes (White Plains, New York) and received an angry e-mail in response.

“I had done a story on genetic testing and a mother responded by saying my references to the March of Dimes in the story were really off base – that I should have highlighted what she considered that organization's failure to pursue this issue more aggressively. She was very upset, and I called her and she supplied me with some initial contacts. Moral of the story, listen to your critics.”

Long said he passed the contacts on to Delporte and “he carried the story forward with energy.”

Delporte joined the Medical Device Manufacturers Association (Washington) last fall as director of member relations and communications.

The Newsletter and Electronic Publishers Association this month has adopted a new name – the Specialty Information Publishers Association.