Diagnostics & Imaging Week s

Genomic Health (Redwood City, California) last week priced its initial public offering (IPO) at $12 per share, raising $60.2 million to fund commercialization and further research and development of its Onco type DX diagnostic cancer tests.

The company is selling about 5 million shares of its common stock, and it also granted underwriters an option to purchase another 752,508 million shares. If the over-allotment option is exercised in full, the company expects to receive total net proceeds of $62.3 million.

In addition, Genomic Health expects to receive $5 million from a private stock sale to Incyte Genomics (Palo Alto, California).

On its first day of trading last Thursday, the company’s stock lost 9 cents, to close at $11.91.

The amount raised fell below the $75 million the company anticipated raising when it filed its registration statement in July. However, the share price managed to stay within the $12 to $14 range set earlier in September, which put Genomics Health in a better position than most companies who have taken the IPO route this year.

Genomic Health remained in a quiet period and was unable to comment, but the company said in its prospectus that about $25 million from the offering would be used to cover costs related to the marketing of its Onco type DX, a genomics-based test launched in January 2004 for early stage breast cancer patients.

The test is designed to predict the likelihood of cancer recurrence, as well as the likelihood of patient survival within the 10 years of diagnosis and the chances that a patient will benefit from chemotherapy.

The company’s initial test was aimed at patients in the early stage of the disease with node-negative, estrogen receptor positive breast cancer who face treatment with the hormonal therapy tamoxifen. About half of the estimated 230,000 patients to be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005 are projected to fit into that group.

Hoping to expand the applications of Onco type DX, Genomic Health said it also expects to spend about $20 million on its ongoing research and development programs in several different cancers, including colon, prostate, renal cell, non-small-cell lung cancer and melanoma.

Funds from the offering also will go toward expanding facilities and laboratory operations and for general corporate purposes.

The company reported a net loss of $15.7 million for the first six months of 2005. While it spent about $4.6 million on R&D activities, the largest portion of expenditures, about $7.4 million, went to fund its selling and marketing efforts. As of June 30, the company had cash and cash equivalents totaling $25.2 million.

J.P. Morgan Securities and Lehman Brothers are joint book-running managers for the offering, while Piper Jaffray & Co., Thomas Weisel Partners and JMP Securities are co-managers.

Tessera (Seattle) has completed a Series B private equity round of financing, raising $8.5 million.

“Our new investors are highly sophisticated and their commitment to and support for our development of tests for the early detection of both prostate and colon cancer is an important event in the life of our company,” said Ray Cairncross, Tessera’s chairman and CEO. “We have one product in the marketplace now and have, through our relationships with Johns Hopkins University [Baltimore] and the University of Pittsburgh, developed impressive data for highly specific and sensitive blood tests for both types of cancer. We will now prepare this breakthrough technology for clinical trials and commercialization.”

Tessera’s first commercial product, ProstaMark EPCA (Early Prostate Cancer Antigen), is an analyte-specific rea-gent for use in the pathology laboratories on tissue samples taken in prostate biopsies.

Tessera was incorporated in 2000 as a company committed to the development of products for the early detection of prostate and colon cancer. Through its licensing arrangements with Johns Hopkins and the University of Pittsburgh, the company has obtained exclusive, worldwide rights to the use and development of more than 60 protein markers for the early diagnosis of these cancers as well as for drug screening and in vivo imaging.

In other financing activity:

• Guardian Technologies International (Herndon, Virginia), a developer of intelligent imaging informatics (3i) solutions, reported that it has issued 893,297 shares of restricted common stock for total proceeds of about $2.4 million pursuant to the exercise of common stock purchase warrants.

The warrants, which originated from a 2004 private placement, entitled the holders to acquire up to 1,248,842 restricted common shares at a price of $2.65 per share until Sept. 23.

The company said the proceeds from the warrant sale would be used for research and development initiatives that will advance the deployment of the 3i solution to additional market opportunities, an increase in technical staffing, and to support ongoing working capital requirements.

Guardian primarily focuses on the areas of healthcare radiology and transportation security scanning.

• Longport (Glen Mills, Pennsylvania), a company specializing in high-resolution ultrasound imaging, re-ported closing on an issue of convertible preferred stock worth about $1.2 million at an issuance price $2.30 a share.

The terms of the preferred shares entitle the company to call for the conversion of the preferred shares into common shares on a one-to-10 basis once the underlying common shares have been registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Investors included a select group of accredited investors who have previously indicated their interest in acquiring common stock in Longport as well as A, B, and C warrant holders.

“The funds raised will allow Longport to continue the implementation of our operating plan including the expansion of sales activities and application studies,” said Paul Wilson, company president. “We are expanding our distribution channels through established medical device sales and marketing companies as well as direct activities. Initial application studies will concentrate on generating data for the wound and dermatology markets.”

• Advance Nanotech (New York), a provider of financing and support services to drive the commercialization of nanotechnology discoveries, reported the financing for BiMAT, a new technology that may aid in the early detection of avian influenza (bird flu) in humans and animals.

One of the key applications for BiMAT technology will be to enable first responders – medics, EMTs and doctors – to rapidly analyze microscopic amounts of biological material for specific diseases on site.

The company said its technology would eliminate the need to send samples to specialized laboratories, speeding treatment and reducing problems of handling, storage, mislabeling and treatment delay.

BiMAT is developing integrated, low-cost and disposable sensors and sensor arrays for point-of-care diagnostics, clinical monitoring and biomolecular research.

The investment in BiMAT was made in partnership with the Center for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (CAPE) at the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, UK).

The CAPE program is funded by Advance Nanotech, Alps Electric, Dow Corning and Marconi, and is designed to encourage research activities to proceed to development and exploitation in close collaboration with industry.

The program enables designers and engineers within academia and industry to benefit from developments in advanced photonics and electronics.

• Nanogen (San Diego) reported that it will sell 6.8 million shares of its common stock to institutional investors at a price of $2.94 per share, plus 1 million warrants exercisable at $4 per share for five years. After fees and expenses, the company said it would receive about $18.9 million from the sale, in accordance with its shelf registration filed in June.

The company said it would use the proceeds for working capital, acquisitions and other general corporate purposes.

Seven Hills Partners was lead placement agent, with Stonegate Securities as co-placement agent.

Nanogen’s products include real-time polymerase chain reaction reagents, the NanoChip Molecular Biology Workstation platform for molecular diagnostic applications and a line of rapid point-of-care diagnostics.