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BioLucent is marketing pads to ease pain associated with mammograms

If you want to know if there might be a market for Aliso Viejo-based BioLucent Inc.’s product, just ask a woman over 40.

BioLucent, a venture-backed startup, makes the Woman’s Touch MammoPad, a disposable foam cushion that’s applied to the surface of a mammography machine. The pad provides a barrier between the breast and the mammography machine’s compression plates. Company officials say the pad cuts the pain of mammograms and doesn’t interfere with X-ray quality.

“Mammography pain is why this market has such huge potential,” said Jill Anderson, BioLucent’s vice president of marketing. “There are documented clinical studies that demonstrate that 70% of women experience some discomfort,from moderate to severe,in having a mammogram.”

BioLucent, formed in April 2000, has raised about $5 million in venture funding, according to Steven Gex, BioLucent’s chief executive. In Septem-ber, BioLucent closed on $4 million in funding from a mix of private sources and three venture capital firms.

The company is looking at a mass market for its product. The Woman’s Touch MammoPad sells for about $4 apiece and is disposable. Some 60 million U.S. women should have annual mammograms, according to Gex. At a compliance rate of 60%, that’s about 40 million mammograms a year, he said.

“Our hope is to make this standard of care on all mammograms,” Gex said.

BioLucent, which employs 10 people, received federal clearance for Woman’s Touch earlier this year and started marketing the product in the summer. The company has some sales under its belt, Gex said.

“Last month, we shipped close to 15,000 units,” he said.

Local customers include St. Joseph Hospital-Orange and Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills, Gex said. The company is eyeing some 10,400 other Food and Drug Administration-approved mammography clinics in the U.S., he said.

Gex said he expects the company’s sales to be in the seven-figure range after a full year of operation. Profitability is expected at the end of 2002, he said. BioLucent is “still several years away” from a possible initial public offering or an acquisition, he said.

BioLucent sells Woman’s Touch, a single-use device, primarily to hospitals and mammography physicians. Because Woman’s Touch is a Food and Drug Administration-approved class II device, it cannot be sold directly to patients, Anderson said.

Gex said he isn’t aware of any competing products. Most innovation in the field comes from the machine makers themselves, he said.

One way BioLucent is pushing Women’s Touch is through what it calls “application specialists”,mammographers who go into clinics and do training and sales sessions. The company is working on hiring four to five regional managers to help identify device distributors, Gex said. The company contracts out production of the pads.

Fog City Ventures, a Redwood City-based venture investor, is one of the three firms backing BioLucent.

“I knew the management. I knew the sector. I did very little (due diligence),” said Nancy Olson, Fog City’s managing partner, about her firm’s investment.

Olson said she was an investor in Irvine-based Biopsys Medical Inc., now part of Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon Endo-Surgery Inc. Gex headed Biopsys, a maker of breast biopsy devices, and took the company public before the J & J; acquisition.

Olson said she also knows Dr. Thomas Fogarty, a BioLucent co-founder who has helped form some 30 medical device companies.

“With the existing business, they have a nice market sector,” said Olson, adding that the company “will never be phenomenally large.”

Gex said getting financing for BioLucent was made easier by his track record with Biopsys. Still, he said BioLucent, because of the nature of its product, doesn’t need a lot of money.

“We’re hoping this last round is our last round of financing,” Gex said.

Gex said the pad’s low cost and “low-tech (appearance) to the human eye” led BioLucent to seek funding from a smaller venture fund such as Fog City, which has $40 million to invest in life science and medical device companies. Fog City is a satellite fund of Minneapolis-based St. Paul Venture Capital.

Stanford University professor and breast surgeon Gail Lebovic invented BioLucent’s product. Lebovic, one of BioLucent’s directors, worked on her initial concept with a group of designers and engineers at Fogarty Research in Portola Valley, run by BioLucent co-founder Fogarty.

“This is the third company we’ve started together,” Gex said of Fogarty.

The others were Biopsys and Rancho Santa Margarita-based Applied Medical Resources Corp., a heart surgery device company. n

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