What makes a health care VC stand out in the minds of entrepreneurs? According to a first-of-its-kind survey by Windhover, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Wilson Sonsini, and Applied Information Networks, the answer is value-added services. Entrepreneurs prize VCs who assist them, pre-financing, with constructive feedback and sharing of due diligence results. VCs do pretty well here. But they do less well on the more important post-financing criteria: helping their portfolio companies secure additional financing and recruit customers, partners, and employees.

ImaRx Therapeutics Inc. aims to use a diagnostic contrast agent as a vehicle for drug and gene delivery. The company will encapsulate a therapeutic payload in a synthetic microbubble, inject it into the body, then apply ultrasound across the skin to rupture the microbubble at the targeted site. Shockwaves from the rupture are thought to permeate capillary walls and drive the drug or gene instantaneously into the targeted tissue.

Point Biomedical is developing a third-generation ultrasound contrast agent before second-generation agents have been successfully adopted. But as a small company, it must make choices about what it can realistically handle and what it can't--thus it is purusing a second business in acoustic drug delivery, but passing on urological and surgical applications of its biomaterials technology.

Start-ups developing man-made surrogates for living processes hope to achieve the alchemy of turning base materials into human tissue.