Privately held specialty pharmaceutical firm Roxro Pharma Inc. brought in $42.7 million in a private placement to advance its pain compounds, including ROX-888, an intranasal analgesic.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company said funds should support ROX-888 "and our clinical pipeline well into the future." Roxro, founded in 1999, previously obtained seed and Series A funding.

The latest round, led by Prospect Venture Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures, both of Palo Alto, Calif., with participation from Thomas Weisel Healthcare Venture Partners, also of Palo Alto, completed the company's Series B round started in late 2005.

Roxro's strategy is to in-license compounds from pharma and biotech to develop for acute medical conditions. Its lead product candidate, ROX-888, is an intranasal version of ketorolac, an injectable nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, that has shown an ability to provide analgesia in moderate to severe pain without the disabling side effects of opioid analgesics.

The product completed the second of two Phase III trials in postoperative pain earlier this month, and results showed ROX-888 rapidly and effectively eased pain in patients who had undergone major abdominal surgery. In that 321-patient study, those who received Roxro's compound reported greater improvement in pain relief and required 22 percent less morphine in the first 24 hours following surgery, compared to patients who only had access to morphine.

With those results in hand, Roxro is on track to submit a new drug application for ROX-888 in the first half of 2008.

Earlier in its pipeline, the company has ROX-828, a candidate for treating headaches, in Phase II development and ROX-818, in preclinical development for neuropathic pain.

In other financings news:

• Acusphere Inc., of Watertown, Mass., entered definitive agreements with investors to raise $20 million in gross proceeds in a registered direct offering of common stock and warrants. Net proceeds are expected to total about $18.7 million and will be used for general corporate purposes, which could include funding clinical trials, research and development, regulatory activities and the build-out of a commercial manufacturing facility, as well as potential acquisitions of companies, products or intellectual property, or the repayment of debt. The company agreed to sell 7.7 million units priced at $2.60 each. Each unit consists of one share of common stock and one warrant to purchase 0.4 shares of common stock at an exercise price of $3.10. If the warrants are exercised fully for cash, the company would receive additional proceeds of about $9.5 million. Cowen and Co. LLC acted as exclusive placement agent. Tuesday, shares of Acusphere (NASDAQ:ACUS) dropped 25 cents, or 9.6 percent, to close at $2.35.

• Evogene Ltd., of Rehovot, Israel, completed an $8 million initial public offering on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, selling units totaling 3.8 million ordinary shares, 3.9 million Series 1 warrants and 3.4 million Series 2 warrants. Existing shareholders exercised warrants for about 2 million ordinary shares. The full exercise price of both series of warrants would bring the company an additional $16.8 million in capital. Proceeds from the IPO will be used to expand Evogene's gene discovery efforts, as well as to advance products toward commercialization and to widen its activities in biofuels. Evogene's focus is on delivering improved plant traits to the agro-biotechnology and biofuels sectors through the use of a platform combining computational genomics, molecular biology and advanced breeding methods. Its shares are listed on the Tel Aviv exchange under the ticker "EVGN."