Yet another Orange County medical startup has caught the eye of a major healthcare company.
Aviir Inc., an Irvine-based clinical laboratory that offers predictive heart disease testing, has secured up to $30 million from investors, including Merck & Co. Inc.’s Merck Global Health Innovation Fund.
Whitehouse Station, N.J.-based Merck is one of the country’s largest healthcare conglomerates, with annual sales of $46 billion and a recent market value of $118 billion.
The innovation fund was established independently in 2010. It has an evergreen $250 million to invest in six focus areas outside of the company’s core drug, consumer product, vaccine and animal-health businesses, according to its website.
Aviir plans to use the $30 million it recently raised for commercialization and product development, and new hires.
“Merck was particularly interested in the opportunity for what are called ‘adjacencies,’ which means they have investments in other companies that we were very complementary to,” Aviir Chief Executive Douglas Harrington said.
“A lot of heart disease is preventable, and the biggest problem with preventing it is getting people to do the right thing,” Harrington added. “We’re using lab tests, software tools and expertise from Merck and adjacency companies.”
The company is “working diligently to identify disease in an earlier phase to allow time to do something about it, and that does include both lifestyle modification and pharmacotherapy,” he said.
Merck makes several cardiovascular drugs, including cholesterol-controllers Vytorin and Zetia, and Cozaar and Hyzaar for blood pressure.
Merck said that its investment in Aviir is “consistent with (our) strategy of investing in companies that offer potentially breakthrough healthcare solutions in high-growth fields.”
More Jobs
More jobs are also coming as a result of the investment. Aviir now has 29 workers, “and we’ll at least double and maybe triple by the end of the year,” Harrington said.
Aviir has raised $71 million since its 2005 inception. Its other investors include Aberdare Ventures and Bay City Capital LLC, both of San Francisco, and Menlo Park-based New Leaf Venture Partners.
Harrington said that Merck was introduced to Aviir through an existing investor, and “we went through a fairly in-depth process of diligence where they vetted our technologies and our research and liked what they saw.”
That process included Merck visiting Aviir’s offices, as well as meetings at Merck’s complex with marketing and research team members.
“I’m doubly pleased that we have a partner like Merck involved in this, and we’re going to make sure that we employ that capital efficiently and do a great job here,” Harrington said.
Aviir’s tests, including the TruRisk, aim 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, according to Harrington.
Aviir moved from the Bay Area into a 16,000-square-foot building at 9805 Research Drive in the Irvine Spectrum last year. Its lab is now fully licensed under the federal Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments law. A sales team is working with Orange County doctors, with plans to introduce its services to Los Angeles in late February.
“We did an extremely rapid build-out,” Harrington said in an interview last year.
Aviir came to Orange County in part because of its work force, Harrington said.
The company has a strong desire to remain independent. Merck’s investment did not come with any option to buy Aviir.
“We don’t really want to be acquired,” Harrington said. “We think we can grow quite well … the cardiac health market is very, very, very large. It’s millions and millions of people.”
Aviir does not appear to have any direct competitors.
CardioDx Inc. in Palo Alto focuses on messenger RNA testing rather than proteins. Other heart testing companies concentrate more on lipids, including Berkeley HeartLab Inc., a San Francisco unit of Alameda-based Celera Corp., and Atherotech Inc. of Birmingham, Ala.
“Different Animal”
Troponin, a heart disease test made by Beckman Coulter Inc., now a Brea-based unit of conglomerate Danaher Corp. in Washington, D.C., is “a different animal” than Aviir’s test because it is targeted toward detecting heart attacks as they occur rather than gauging the likelihood of one in the future, Harrington said.
Aviir might look at prognostic tests for stroke, peripheral arterial disease and insulin resistance in the future, said Harrington, whose previous positions included serving as president and laboratory director of Nichols Institute, the San Juan Capistrano clinical laboratory owned by New Jersey’s Quest Diagnostics Inc.
Aviir grew out of technology developed by Stanford Univeristy School of Medicine professors Thomas Quertermous and Phillip Tsao.
