Cleveland HeartLab completes $3.0M fundraising round

Cleveland HeartLabMar 2 2010

Cleveland HeartLab LLC (CHL) today announced that it has completed a $3.0-million fundraising round. The company’s new shareholders include local business leaders, and Glengary LLC, Second Generation Ltd. and Zapis Capital Group LLC.

“We have assembled an excellent group of leaders and advisors to help Cleveland HeartLab fulfill its mission of preventing and managing cardiovascular disease”

Cleveland HeartLab is a clinical reference laboratory specializing in next-generation cardiovascular disease prevention, diagnosis and management. CHL operates a CLIA-certified and CAP-accredited reference laboratory, and daily receives patient samples from physicians’ offices and hospitals across the country. Among the important biomarkers on its clinical test menu, CHL offers a robust, affordable panel of inflammation biomarkers that provide additive and complementary data to standard cardiac tests used to measure a patient's risk for heart disease. CHL also is advancing a proprietary test pipeline that includes clinically important cardiovascular and inflammation biomarkers licensed to it exclusively by the Cleveland Clinic, one of the world's most respected cardiovascular centers.

The company also announced that its board of directors has elected Les C. Vinney chairman of the board. Jake Orville was elected CHL’s president and chief executive. Drs. Marc Penn and Stanley Hazen have been appointed the company’s chief medical officer and chief scientific officer, respectively.

Mr. Vinney brings more than 35 years of general, operations and financial management experience to CHL’s board. He is the retired president and chief executive of STERIS Corp., a global provider of infection and contamination prevention technologies, products and services. Mr. Vinney serves on the boards of several health care service and device providers. He is chairman of NorTech, the Northeast Ohio Technology Coalition, which is focused on the growth of the high tech economy in northeast Ohio. Prior to joining STERIS, Mr. Vinney served as chief financial officer of the B.F. Goodrich Co. and held executive positions at Engelhard Corp. and Exxon Corp. He holds bachelor of art and master of business administration degrees from Cornell University.

“I am delighted to help Cleveland HeartLab take advantage of the exciting opportunities it has in front of it,” Mr. Vinney said. “I am confident in the company’s ability to execute on its plan to capture those opportunities and to create value for physicians, their patients, and our shareholders. We are fortunate to have Jake Orville, a proven diagnostics executive, leading CHL and its management team."

Mr. Orville has nearly a decade and a half of medical device, diagnostics and life science management experience. He held senior management positions with publicly-traded companies Third Wave Technologies Inc. and NextGen Sciences. Mr. Orville is a director of Stealth Therapeutics Inc., a developer of vein port devices to help deliver chemotherapy and antibiotics to patients with cancer and long-term infections. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and his master’s degree in business administration from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Marc Penn, M.D., Ph.D. F.A.C.C., the company’s newly appointed chief medical officer, is director of the Bakken Heart-Brain Institute at the Cleveland Clinic and a nationally-recognized expert in cardiovascular disease and critical cardiac care. He is a staff cardiologist in the clinic’s section of clinical cardiology, its Department of Cardiovascular Medicine and its Heart & Vascular Institute.

Stanley Hazen, M.D., Ph.D., CHL’s newly appointed chief scientific officer, is head of the Section for Preventive Cardiology and Rehabilitation and director of the Center for Cardiovascular Diagnostics and Prevention. He also is a staff physician in the Department of Cell Biology, and the Robert and Suzanne Tomsich Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Cleveland Clinic.

CHL also said that a group of nationally-recognized experts will serve as its medical advisory board. The board will be led by Dr. Penn. Other members of CHL’s medical advisory board include:

• William C. Popik, M.D. Dr. Popik has more than 30 years of experience as a practicing physician and senior health care executive developing clinical programs that improve quality and reduce costs. He mostly recently served as chief medical officer of LifeMasters Inc., South San Francisco, Calif., a disease management company. He also has served as chief medical officer of Aetna Inc., the Fortune 100 health insurer, and national medical director of CIGNA Healthcare.
• Michael C. Fiore, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A. Dr. Fiore is a clinically-active general internist and preventive medicine specialist, treating patients for tobacco dependence. He is professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Dr. Fiore chaired the U.S. Public Health panel that produced clinical practice guidelines related to tobacco use and dependence in 1996, 2000 and 2008.
• Melissa A. Ohlson, M.S., R.D., L.D. Ms. Ohlson is a registered and licensed dietitian with a decade of experience promoting heart-healthy diets and lifestyles. Since 2001, she has served as nutrition projects coordinator for preventive cardiology and rehabilitation at the Cleveland Clinic’s Heart & Vascular Institute. She also has served as a nutrition consultant to hospitals, school districts and businesses.

“We have assembled an excellent group of leaders and advisors to help Cleveland HeartLab fulfill its mission of preventing and managing cardiovascular disease,” Mr. Orville said. “We are grateful for the confidence that our shareholders have placed in us. The funds we’ve raised will enable us to expand our reference laboratory operations, augment our selling and marketing efforts, advance our pipeline of unique markers like dysfunctional HDL and nitrotyrosine, and move towards profitability. CHL is focused on creating value for customers and shareholders through the achievement of these goals, as we deliver quality testing services to physicians and their patients.”