A Medical Device Daily
Safeguard Scientifics (Wayne, Pennsylvania) led a $30 million Series C financing in Rubicor Medical (Redwood City, California), a company that is developing disposable, non-invasive, breast biopsy devices.
Safeguard provided $20 million of growth capital and ITX International Equity provided $5 million.
James Vetter, MD, Rubicor's chairman and CEO, and other founding shareholders are expected to provide the balance of the funding.
Rubicor's three devices represent alternatives to existing breast biopsy devices. Ovation, its lead product, em-powers physicians to capture complete breast tissue abnormalities with a minimally invasive procedure. This results in a more accurate assessment of the sample including evaluation of margin and determination of size. Two additional breast biopsy devices are projected for launch in the near future, and all three have received FDA clearance.
“Ovation's innovative concept and design enables minimally invasive retrieval of a complete, contiguous tissue sample – making Ovation an attractive alternative to open surgical biopsy,” said James Datin, executive vice president and managing director of life sciences at Safeguard. “We estimate the market in which Rubicor competes could be in excess of $500 million today in the U.S.”
BioMed Realty Trust (San Diego) reported that it has closed a $147 million loan secured by the company's Shady Grove Road property in Rockville, Maryland. The loan bears interest at 5.97% and will mature on Sept. 1, 2016. BioMed used the proceeds of this new mortgage loan, along with borrowings on its unsecured revolving credit facility, to repay the company's $150 million bridge loan, which was secured by the same property.
“We are very pleased to have entered into this new loan with Keybank, allowing us to obtain long-term fixed-rate financing at a very attractive interest rate,” said Kent Griffin, CFO of BioMed. “In addition to lowering our borrowing costs for the Human Genome Sciences [Rockville, Maryland] headquarters acquisition, we were able to significantly reduce our exposure to floating interest rates.”
The company also reported it has closed on the previously disclosed acquisitions of three properties, totaling 224,358 rentable square feet of laboratory and office space, for an aggregate purchase price of about $53.3 million.
The properties include a 76,389 square foot property in Malvern, Pennsylvania, for about $9.4 million; the Array BioPharma (Longmont, Colorado) life science campus for about $20.8 million; and a 69,946-square-foot, two-story office and laboratory facility located in San Diego for about $23.1 million.
“These acquisitions, when combined with our previously announced acquisitions, bring our total property investments to over $310 million for the third quarter, and demonstrate our ability to execute our stated strategy of acquiring life science assets in our target markets,” said Alan Gold, president/CEO of BioMed
BioMed is a real estate investment trust focused on providing real estate to the life science industry.