15 seems to be the magic number for RedBrick Health.

The Minneapolis-based health care management company said Wednesday that it raised another $15 million in venture capital from new investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and existing investors Highland Capital Partners, Versant Ventures and Fidelity Ventures.

RedBrick raised two previous rounds of $15 million a pop, bringing their total take to $45 million.

Founded in 2006 by CEO Kyle Rolfing and other veterans of Definity Health, RedBrick works with large, self-insured employers and runs health-and-wellness as well as disease management programs for companies. The company provides incentives for workers to improve their health. A smoker who signs up for a cessation program, for example, gets a discount on premiums. So does an obese worker who participates in a weight-loss program.

Customers include Welch Allyn and Hannaford Bros.

Check out the Minnesota Department of Commerce’s new Office of Energy Security website.

Okay, that’s not exactly what the University of Minnesota tech transfer folks told me over lunch last week. But something like that.

Let’s back up. Destination 2025, a report released last month by BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota and Deloitte Consulting, chided the U for losing ” its once-recognized leadership role in medical device research. [The school] must reestablish its premier status among universities by supporting research relevant to the medical device industry.”

I asked Jay Schrankler and Doug Johnson about this. The two men respectively run the Office of Technology Commercialization and the Venture Center, responsible for licensing U technology and spinning out new companies. They sort of shrugged.

First of all, big medical device makers like Medtronic and Boston Scientific collectively spend $3 billion a year on research and development, Schrankler said. The U’s research budget, by contrast, totals $600 million. Big Devices has the situation covered, he said.

Besides, the U is interested in next generation, world changing technology, Johnson said, not just incremental improvements to device technology that already exists. That’s why the U has shifted its focus from devices to biologics, he said.

Biotechnology, not devices, is the future, the two men say. They point to the work of Dr. Doris Taylor, a U scientist who stunned the science world last year with her work in regenerative medicine. Taylor and her team grew a beating rat heart in a jar, a technique that can eventually be applied to human organs. In other words, why would a patient need a pacemaker or an ICD when you can grow a new heart?

Of course, growing human hearts is at least decades away. And it’s not like the U is completely abandoning medical devices. Last June, the university opened a $400,000 Medical Devices Center, a hub for faculty, students and professionals to transform research into real companies.

But Shrankler and Johnson’s views represent an important shift in the U’s thinking, at least from a tech transfer point of view. The school that helped invent the pacemaker and the heart valve now believes its best chance of producing breakthrough technologies depends on its ability to manipulate cells and DNA, not wires and pulse generators.

This year, the U plans to spin out a new company based on Taylor’s research. The start-up will help pharmaceutical companies speed up research and development of drugs by testing their products on cells and tissue grown from Taylor’s technology. In theory, the technique will help drug makers determine which patients can’t tolerate certain medications.

Destination 2025 may have harshly criticized the U for perceived shortcomings. But it sounds like the U knows what it’s doing.

No, I’m not talking about some epic battle between the Spartans and Persian Empire. But rather the amount of jobs the Hormel Institute wants to create through a proposed $50 million expansion versus the number of Minnesotans who received pink slips so far this year.

300 would seem like a drop in the bucket if not for two things: 1. someone is actually creating jobs and 2. those jobs are high tech, high paying research positions meant to develop new technolgies that could lead to even more…you guessed it… jobs.

Based in Austin, the Hormel Institute is mostly known as a research arm of the University of Minnesota. The biomedical research center specializes in using natural compounds found in foods like green tea and ginger to prevent and treat cancer. Spokeswoman Gail Dennison, however, says it’s time for the institute should be recognized as an economic development engine.

The center is working with the University of Minnesota and Mayo Clinic to commercialize its technology. Mayo has already invested $5 million in the partnership and maintains an office at the institute. The center recently held discussions with Johnson & Johnson and will probably participate in the proposed Elk Run Biosciences Center in nearby Pine Island. Institute officials will also travel to Saudi Arabia next month as part of a Minnesota trade mission.

Last fall, the center debuted its $23.4 million expansion project that includes a new two-story research building for housing 20 state-of-the-art research laboratories. The institute also purchased a IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, hoping the machine can speed up research.

The institute is trying to raise $50 million to add another building. Dennison knows times are tight but she hopes the center can get a cut of Minnesota’s share of the federal stimulus money.

Considering the center is a stimulus in itself, that seems like a worthwhile investment.

Medtronic Inc. is investing in a Californian start-up that uses electricity to help treat hypertension or high blood pressure.

Ardian Inc., based in Palo Alto, said it raised $47 million from Medtronic and Emergent Medical Partners. Split Rock Partners, based in Eden Prairie, is also an investor in the company.

Ardian has developed a catheter-based technology that blocks electrical and chemical transmissions along the renal sympathetic nerve. The hyperactivity of the nerve causes high blood pressure, the company says.

“We are particularly encouraged to have Medtronic as a new partner,” Ardian CEO Andrew Cleeland said in a statement, “and see their investment as a validation of our exceptional early clinical results, as well as the potential of our treatment for such a pervasive and complex disease.”

Ardian has local competition that is much further along with its neurostimulation technology. CVRx Inc. of Brooklyn Park is conducting a large scale Phase III clinical study of his Rheos System. (A Phase III trial is the last study before the company seeks approval from the Food and Drug Administration)

While both Ardian and CVRx employ electricity, CVRx targets a different nerve. Here’s how Rheos works: A device implanted beneath the collarbone sends electrical pulses to the carotid arteries, which then send signals known as baroreceptors to the brain.

The baroreceptors tell the brain that the body’s blood pressure is too high. In response, the brain instructs organs such as the heart and kidneys to expand blood vessels and stop producing stress-inducing hormones.

I’m not a doctor but Ardian’s technology sounds a lot simpler than Rheos. Guess time (and clinical data) will tell who’s right.

Interesting story from the New York Times.

I know it sounds counter-intuitive but an economic recession is probably the best time to innovate and launch a start-up. Think Hewlett Packard in the 1930s, Microsoft in the 1970s, and Google, YouTube, and Facebook during the post dot com bubble.

True innovation is kind of like the stock market. With stocks, you should buy low and sell high. Probably is, investors tend to do the opposite. They buy stocks during boom years because everyone else is doing the same thing, leading to inflated valuations and…well. you know the rest.

Same thing for innovation. In the frenzy of dot com mania, how many companies had true innovation? Most of the start-ups were simply me-toos, offering little if any improvement on the ideas of someone else.

I know it’s not easy to launch a company, especially with VC scarce. But if you have no job and lot of brain power and courage to spare, why the hell not?

What else are you going to do?