Medical testing company Aviir Inc. is moving from the Bay Area to Irvine, where it is opening a laboratory this month.
Aviir develops tests to predict a person’s risk for heart disease. The tests are aimed at people who are unaware of their risk for a heart attack, according to the company.
“These would be the people walking around thinking they’re great, and they’re really a walking time bomb,” Chief Executive Douglas Harrington said. “They’re missed, for the most part, by all of the current (testing) methods available.”
Aviir’s tests aim to see if a person is prone to blood clots, which Harrington said are more likely to lead to death than narrowing arteries. Blood clots form out of fatty plaque deposits on the walls of arteries.
Some of Aviir’s tests detect proteins that are secreted by fatty plaques and predict “who’s at risk of having a heart attack in the next five years,” Harrington said.
Traditional heart disease testing focuses on the levels of lipid fats in a person’s blood, such as good and bad cholesterol.
Aviir’s new headquarters is a 16,000-square-foot building at 9805 Research Drive in the Irvine Spectrum. The company leased the building in October and received licensing from state and federal officials in February, according to Harrington.
“We did an extremely rapid build-out,” he said.
Aviir is moving here in part because of the area’s “highly educated and skilled people,” Harrington said.
The laboratory provider now has 25 workers and plans to boost that to 115 in the next 18 months.
Aviir expects to hire technicians and people in sales, finance and accounting, client services, billing, logistics and research and development.
For now, Aviir’s research and development is in a small facility in Palo Alto.
Chief’s Local Roots
Harrington has local roots.
He served as president and laboratory director of Nichols Institute, the San Juan Capistrano clinical laboratory that’s part of New Jersey’s Quest Diagnostics Inc.
His resume also includes serving as chief executive of ChromaVision Medical Systems Inc., which eventually evolved into Clarient Inc., an Aliso Viejo diagnostic testing provider that’s now part of General Electric Co.
Harrington, a San Clemente resident with six children, said he and his family regularly drove back and forth to Palo Alto.
Founded in 2005, Aviir doesn’t have sales yet. The company has raised $41 million from venture capitalists.
“We’re in the midst of raising a round right now, which I can’t talk about publicly,” Harrington said.
Investors include Aberdare Ventures and Bay City Capital, both of San Francisco, and Menlo Park-based New Leaf Venture Partners.
The company expects its pending funding round to be its last.
Like any healthcare startup, Aviir is a potential buyout target.
“We’d really like to develop this and build it into something bigger, but you never say never,” Harrington said. “This is an arena that a lot of the big (laboratory) players would like to get into.”
Competition
Aviir doesn’t appear to have a lot of direct competition. CardioDx Inc. of Palo Alto focuses on messenger RNA testing rather than proteins. Other heart testing providers focus more on lipids, including San Francisco’s Berkeley HeartLab, a unit of Alameda-based Celera Corp., and Atherotech Inc. of Birmingham, Ala.
Troponin, a heart disease test that Brea-based Beckman Coulter Inc. plans to bring back this year after a 2010 recall, is “a different animal” than Aviir’s because it’s targeted toward detecting an acute heart attack rather than a future event, Harrington said.
Aviir’s services also include “concierge phlebotomy,” where a blood-drawing technician will come to a patient’s home or office.
The company grew out of technology developed by professors Thomas Quertermous and Phillip Tsao of Stanford University School of Medicine.
Aviir plans to offer its laboratory service in OC and expand to other areas, Harrington said. Besides Aviir’s proprietary test, the company plans to offer other cardiac tests and select heart disease gene screenings.
The tests are aimed at cardiologists, primary care doctors and gynecologists.
Aviir also is looking at prognostic tests for related conditions such as stroke, peripheral arterial disease and insulin resistance, according to Harrington.
