Medical Device Daily

InnerPulse (Research Triangle Park, North Carolina), a privately held company developing technologies for the treatment of abnormal heart rhythms, reported the closing of $50 million in a new equity financing, one of the largest private rounds in the med-tech sector in recent memory.

The company, formerly known as Interventional Rhythm Management until June 2006, said that the new capital will be used for the completion of the company’s implantable defibrillator — the Percutaneous Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (PICD) and to support the infrastructure required to advance the company from its early developmental phase to human clinical trials and commercialization.

Dan Pelak, president/CEO of InnerPulse, put the company’s most recent funding in perspective. “If you look at med-tech IPOs that are being done,” he told Medical Device Daily, “in many ways, we almost raised as much in a private financing as some of the IPOs have. I can’t recall, at least in recent years, any [private med-tech rounds] that have topped this.”

Pelak said the funds from this, the company’s C round of financing, should take the company through to commercialization in Europe, which he projected should take place in late 2008. But, he noted, the funds will not take the company up to U.S. clinical trials.

With this round, the company has now raised more than $85.2 million since its founding in 2003 and incubation by Synecor.

The syndicate of investors included Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation (New Brunswick, New Jersey), Medtronic (Minneapolis) Synergy Life Science Partners, Ascent Biomedical Ventures, Delphi Ventures and Frazier Heathcare Ventures. Additionally, the company noted that Boston Scientific (Natick, Massachusetts) and Greatbatch (Clarence, New York) remain significant stockholders of InnerPulse.

According to Pelak, the company has been so successful at raising funds for its plans to pioneer an alternative to traditional electrophysiological devices, because investors see the potential for a largely untapped patient population at risk for sudden cardiac arrest (SCA).

InnerPulse’s products employ a technology designed to simplify the ICD implant utilizing a minimally invasive approach that shortens the procedure, reduces post implant discomforts, and renders the device invisible. The company believes the minimally invasive nature of the technology will expand the number of implanting physicians, thereby providing access to more patients who critically need defibrillator technology.

There are an estimated 450,000 people in the U.S. alone that suffer SCA every year, and the company is targeting a “gap” in implantable cardioverter defibrialltor (ICD) referrals, which it believes “conservatively” represent less than 25% of all the current prospective primary prevention patients.

“We view this as really augmenting traditional defibrillators and believe that we’ll grow the market for defibrillators fairly significantly,” said Pelak.