Monday, October 15, 2007

Primera closes $2.4M, gears up for next round

By Ryan McBride

After launching its first diagnostic product in September, a Mansfield startup is tapping previous investors to help fund operations until it closes a larger round of financing in the coming months, said a member of the firm's board of directors.

Primera Biosystems Inc. closed a $2.4 million supplemental round of Series A financing last month, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange filing. Primera has operated quietly since it closed an $11 million Series A financing in 2005. In the past two years the firm moved from Providence, R.I., where it had been spun off from Providence-based life sciences company Sention Inc., to Massachusetts and realigned its focus on the diagnostics game rather than the more-competitive market for DNA microarray products.

The new capital is intended to fund operations in advance of a planned $20 million Series B round slated to close during the next six months, said Todd Foley, a venture partner at Boston private equity firm MPM Capital, a primary backer of the company.

Foley, a member of Primera's board of directors, said the company last month launched its "Viraquant" product, which tests recipients of transplanted organs for six viruses by looking for genetic indicators of the viruses in their blood samples. The test is expected to be available at third-party laboratories in the United States and marketed to transplant centers.

The firm's main competitors are the labs that "home brew" their own tests to detect each of the viruses screened in the Viraquant product, Foley said. He noted the worldwide annual market for the test is more than $100 million.

The company had originally set out to market its technology as a platform for DNA microarray, a roughly $500 million annual market dominated by Santa Clara, Calif.-based Affymetrix Inc. But the firm is now focused on the development of tests for certain viruses and diseases.

"(DNA microarray) is a harder business to break into," said Foley. "Their technology is still applicable" to DNA microarray "and I can imagine them licensing their technology for that."

Primera's president and CEO, Martin Verhoef, was unavailable for comment this week.