The News

Bifurcated stent company Stentys completes $18 million ‘Series B’ venture financing Scottish Equity Partners leads the round; Sofinnova Partners reinvests

09/03/2008

“This financing round will allow us to complete clinical trials and obtain CE Mark for our drug-eluting, bifurcated stent to treat coronary heart disease.”
Gonzague Issenmann, CEO, Stentys

PARIS, March 19, 2008—Medical device pioneer Stentys announced today that it has completed an $18 million ‘Series B’ round of venture financing. The lead investor was UK venture firm Scottish Equity Partners. Series A investor Sofinnova Partners also participated in the B round. Aelios Finance served as financial advisor to Stentys. Brian Kerr, one of the founding directors of Scottish Equity Partners and a Partner in the firm’s Healthcare Group, will join the Stentys Board of Directors. Coronary artery disease, one of the leading causes of mortality in the world, is caused by fatty lesions that narrow the coronary artery and reduce blood flow, resulting in an often-lethal myocardial infarction (heart attack). Cardiologists have been using stents (small meshed metal tubes) to unclog the artery, but standard stents are simply ill-suited to treat artery bifurcations, the area where one main vessel branches out into two smaller vessels. In fact, the procedure does not work in more than one patient out of five, and these patients must subsequently undergo a second intervention, and quite often open-chest surgery.

“This financing round will allow us to complete clinical trials and obtain CE Mark for our drug-eluting, bifurcated stent, enabling interventional cardiologists to offer their patients the next generation of dedicated bifurcated-stenting procedures,” said Stentys’ CEO and co-founder, Gonzague Issenmann. “We are very proud to have the most prestigious European VCs as our financial backers, and we are delighted to welcome Brian to our Board of Directors.”

“Stentys has achieved a major breakthrough in terms of patient safety, ease of use for cardiologists, and clinical efficacy,” said Brian Kerr. “It has a high-caliber management team, and it has made rapid progress towards obtaining regulatory approval. There is a $1 billion-plus market opportunity for its product, and we are confident that the company will deliver significant value.”
"Sofinnova initially invested in Stentys because we thought that the company potentially had a very unique and simple solution to the bifurcation issue. We also knew management and their capacity to rapidly advance such a project to First in Man clinical trial,” commented Antoine Papiernik, Managing Partner, Sofinnova Partners. “Stentys over-delivered on those milestones, and this explains the success of this fundraising, to which we are participating in an important way. I am also very glad to now count SEP as a partner in developing the company to the next stage."

“Stentys has come a long way in a short period of time,” concluded Jacques Séguin, MD, PhD, Co-Founder and Non-Executive President of Stentys as well as Founder, Chairman, and CEO of CoreValve. “The fact that two of Europe’s most successful venture capital firms are solidly behind the Company underscores not only the very significant potential of the Stentys bifurcated platform but also the Company’s swift success in validating proof of principle. As its dedicated bifurcation stent shows further efficacy and safety in the clinic, the market for the innovative Stentys devices will watch closely—because cardiologists now consider the current, standard stents as sub-optimal for bifurcations.” Narrowings at a bifurcation site are quite common. Indeed, 18 percent of percutaneous coronary interventions involve a bifurcation stenosis. Of those, restenosis (re-occurrence of the blockage) occurs in 20-25 percent of bifurcations treated with drug-eluting stents (DES). The patent-pending innovation of Stentys’ bifurcat d stent is that the stent-opening for the side branch can be created anywhere in the stent after it is implanted in the vessel. In short, the procedure’s success is independent from precise positioning at the bifurcation.

About Scottish Equity Partners
SEP is a leading European venture capital firm with offices in Glasgow and London. It helps entrepreneurs to create and build world-class companies. The investment team, which has been investing together for 15 years, has backed and built world-class companies in the information technology, healthcare and energy-related technology sectors. SEP’s current portfolio includes a range of leading-edge technology companies including picoChip, ipaccess, Radioscape and Zeus. New investments include Irish fabless semiconductor start-up Powervation and recent exits include the $275 million sale of energy services company MTEM to Petroleum Geo-Services (ASA:PGS) (OSE and NYSE: PGS). www.sep.co.uk
For more information contact: Valerie Darroch, Corporate Affairs, SEP
Tel + 44 141 585 3169 or c + 44 7970 737708 Email: valerie.darroch@sep.co.uk

About Sofinnova Partners
Founded in Paris in 1972, Sofinnova Partners is one of Europe’s leading independent venture capital firms. With 900M€ under management, Sofinnova Partners invests in early-stage companies and corporate spin-offs in the technology and life sciences sectors – companies that have the potential to become tomorrow’s global leaders. Sofinnova Partners has supported entrepreneurs in over 460 ventures throughout Europe and the United States, putting its expertise and international experience to work on their behalf. The companies in its portfolio also benefit from the firm’s collaborative relationships with an international syndicate of co-investors, including Sofinnova Ventures, its sister firm in San Francisco. For more information, please visit www.sofinnova.fr.

About Aelios Finance
Aelios Finance (www.aeliosfinance.com) is the leading French corporate finance advisory firm helping entrepreneurs and mid-cap companies to complete successful capital raising, mergers & acquisitions, LBO and IPO. Aelios Finance is also the exclusive French office of the world's largest network of M&A companies, M&A International Inc. (www.mergers.net).

About Stentys
Based in Paris, Stentys intends to make treatment of blocked coronary artery bifurcations as simple and effective as a conventional stenting procedure. The Company has developed the world’s first next-generation dedicated stent for treatment of blocked coronary artery bifurcations that is designed so that hundreds of thousands of patients might avoid open-chest surgery. To date, the Stentys bifurcated stent has been successfully implanted in patients as part of the OPEN 1 trial, taking routine interventional time to complete; the patients were released from the ICU within hours of implantation of the Stentys bifurcated stent and were discharged from the hospital shortly after the procedure.