Irvine-based biotechnology company Aviir Inc. plans to use the proceeds of a recent round of funding to hire more workers as it expands its services beyond California in the second half of the year.
Aviir provides heart disease testing. Its core TruRisk predictive test aims to see if a person is prone to blood clots, which form out of fatty plaque deposits on arterial walls and are more likely to lead to death than narrowing arteries. It also offers routine heart disease testing and genetic testing for measuring the effectiveness of drug therapy.
The company now has about 50 workers, up from 29 earlier this year, and expects to add 20 more by the end of 2012. Most of the hires will be sales staff and licensed clinical laboratory scientists who will work here.
“We are employing people in Orange County,” said Douglas Harrington, the biotechnology company’s chief executive.
Aviir is building itself up after securing $30 million from various investors, including the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, in January.
Merck’s fund is the investment arm of Whitehouse Station, N.J.-based health conglomerate Merck & Co., which makes several cardiovascular drugs, including Vytorin to control cholesterol and Hyzaar for blood pressure. Merck has said its investment in Aviir is part of a strategy of investing in companies “that offer potentially breakthrough healthcare solutions in high-growth fields.”
$71M Raised
Aviir has raised $71 million since its 2005 establishment. Other investors include Aberdare Ventures and Bay City Capital LLC, both in San Francisco, and Menlo Park-based New Leaf Venture Partners.
“We’ve been completing the infrastructure build out,” Harrington said.
Aviir’s expansion is centered on plans to offer tests beyond what Harrington called “the limited geography of California” sometime later in 2012. The company already has added equipment to its laboratory to handle additional test volume.
Aviir’s expansion effort is led by Larry Hansen, the company’s newly hired chief commercial officer. Hansen came to Aviir in May after serving as vice president of commercial operations for San Diego-based bioTheranostics Inc., a cancer diagnostic testing company.
“It’s a very rich environment as far as technically competent employees,” Hansen said of Orange County.
Process
Aviir’s commercialization involves a three-part process, according to Hansen.
Sales of services to corporate wellness programs; a push for new customers for its more routine cardiometabolic laboratory tests; and marketing of specialized tests such as TruRisk nationally.
The company will analyze what types of doctors to target—potentially and realistically.
“Once you’ve established that number, you’ll never get to all of them because you’re well north of 200,000 doctors,” Hansen said. “So then you have to determine what percentage of them we’re going to be focusing on.”
The company also is planning to use clinical studies published in peer-reviewed medical journals to attract potential customers, Hansen added.
Aviir plans to complete commercialization without further funding, Harrington said.
“Our intent was to make this round the final round, which gets us to break-even,” he said.
Harrington didn’t provide revenue specifics. He said Aviir isn’t considering a sale and views its products as “complementary” to other heart disease tests.
“There’s still value in having niche labs,” Harrington said. “We basically want [doctors] to perceive us as a new tool they can add.”
Other heart testing companies include CardioDx Inc. in Palo Alto, which focuses on messenger RNA testing rather than proteins. Berkeley HeartLab Inc. of San Francisco and Atherotech Inc. of Birmingham, Ala., concentrate more on lipid testing.
Harrington has said that troponin, a heart disease test made by Danaher Corp.’s Brea-based Beckman Coulter business unit, is a “different animal” than Aviir’s test because it’s targeted toward detecting heart attacks as they occur.
Aviir emerged from technology developed by Philip Tsao and Thomas Quertermous, both Stanford University professors. Aviir moved from the Bay area to Irvine in 2011.
The company looked at numerous buildings before settling on its 16,000-square-foot building at 9805 Research Drive within the Irvine Spectrum, Harrington said.
Aviir’s building includes warehouse space, corporate offices and a fully licensed laboratory under the federal Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments law.
Philanthropy
Aviir is also engaged in philanthropy. It established a related nonprofit, the Guard a Heart Foundation, to drive awareness of heart disease prevention and to raise funds to cover the cost of testing for patients who lack of insurance coverage.
“Any funds we raise from the public, 100% goes back to the community,” said Estrella Harrington, Guard a Heart’s founder and Douglas Harrington’s wife. Guard a Heart works with other companies besides Aviir.
It recently held a gala to honor talk show host Larry King for his and his foundation’s work in fighting heart disease.
“Our campaign right now is ‘know your risk, save your life,’” Estrella Harrington said.
