Numira Biosciences Inc., a medical imaging startup targeting drug researchers, has raised $2.5 million in a first round of funding.
Irvine-based Numira plans to use the money to expand operations and develop and market its products and services.
“The key reason why we’re here is to help companies develop drugs, safer drugs, much more efficiently, which is a huge problem,” said Michael Beeuwsaert, Numira’s cofounder and chief executive.
Beeuwsaert is a California State University, Fullerton, graduate and has worked with other startups as well as Ansys Diagnostics Inc., which managers bought out from Marion Merrell Dow Inc., a drug maker later bought by Hoechst AG, now part of France’s Sanofi-Aventis.
Leading the investment were Tech Coast Angels, a group of Orange County and other Southland investors, the Pasadena Angels and Spring Capital Investors LLC of Baltimore and Radnor, Pa.
Numira is developing 3-D medical scans that can show genetic defects and how drugs might counter them. The company offers scans of bones, tissue and embryos.
Acquisition, rather than an initial public offering, may be a more likely path for Numira, Beeuwsaert said.
“Ultimately, we see ourselves being a nice fit for traditional (drug development) tool companies,” Beeuwsaert said.
Virtual Histology, Numira’s main product, came out last spring. It is an imaging system for analyzing soft tissue and skeletal anatomy in animals, primarily mice.
Numira is targeting birth defect studies with Virtual Histology.
The product, Beeuwsaert said, could be used by drug or chemical companies to get data required by the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency on what a drug does to a developing embryo or fetus.
“With this technology, we can now do this using imaging,” he said.
Numira’s target markets include drug makers, biotechnology companies and research institutions.
Potential rivals include San Jose-based Applied Imaging Corp. and Cambridge, Mass.-based Genzyme Corp.
Beeuwsaert said he didn’t see any company on the horizon “that can deliver the type of resolution and anatomical detail that we can as quickly as we can.”
Before starting Numira in 2005, Beeuwsaert was chief executive of Alerion Biomedical Inc., a San Diego company that developed imaging agents for clinical uses.
His background also includes serving as chief executive of LXN Corp., a San Diego venture-backed device maker that was bought by Inverness Medical Innovations Inc. of Waltham, Mass., in 2001.
Numira grew out of a meeting between Beeuwsaert and Charles Keller, a doctor and cancer researcher at the University of Utah.
Keller, Numira’s cofounder, was developing technologies to help him in his primary field of research,rare cancer tumors that showed up in the muscles of children.
“He had approached me at my last company (Alerion), wondering if we were interested in acquiring them, and it didn’t fit with us then,” Beeuwsaert said. “But after I left that company, I reconnected with him. He had made considerable progress, and we decided to form Numira.”
By that time, Keller had moved from the University of Utah to the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.
The company licensed a number of patents from the two universities to form a company around them, Beeuwsaert said.
Numira’s research laboratory and manufacturing is in San Antonio, across the street from Keller’s office.
Irvine “just seemed to be best suited for attracting the type of talent that we need to attract,” said Beeuwsaert, a longtime Orange County resident.
He declined to say how many people Numira employs, citing competitive reasons. He also declined to say when Numira might seek more funding.
“Competing is tough enough without giving the marketplace too much information,” he said, chuckling.
In January, Numira bought Visual Influence Inc., a Salt Lake City-based software company.
Visual Influence is a spinoff from the University of Utah’s Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and develops software for medical imaging, scientific data management and image processing.
