Diagnostics company LipoScience is looking to raise between $65 million and $75 million through an initial public offering of stock, based on a filing with the SEC earlier this week.

The venture capital-backed, privately held firm has mulled an IPO before, aiming as high as $86 million in a June 2011 filing.

If the IPO is successful, LipoScience would trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol LPDX.

However, in the latest filing on Jan. 10, LipoScience set a target price of between $13 and $15 a share for five million shares.

The company also will make available a 750,000 over-allotment of shares for the underwriters, which include Barclays, UBS Investment Bank and Piper Jaffray.

Through Sept. 30 of 2012, the company said revenues totaled $27 million.

In all of 2011, revenues reached $37 million. In 2010, revenues were $31 million. In 2009, revenues totaled $27 million, according to the filing.

LipoScience spelled out how it planned to raise the stock proceeds if it hits a strike price of $14 a share.

  • “$5.2 million upon the closing of this offering to pay dividends on the outstanding shares of Series F redeemable convertible preferred stock that will convert into common stock;
  • “approximately $22.6 million to hire additional sales and marketing personnel and to support costs associated with increased sales and marketing activities;
  • “approximately $18.0 million for capital expenditures, including components of the Vantera system and other improvements to our laboratory infrastructure;
  • “approximately $4.8 million to fund our research and development programs, including the expansion of our diagnostic test menu based on the Vantera system; and
  • “the balance for other general corporate purposes, including general and administrative expenses, working capital and the potential repayment of indebtedness.”

The IPO comes after the company won FDA approval last September for a new test through its Vantera system. LipoScience received FDA 510(k) clearance on its Vantera Clinical Analyzer. The technology builds on diagnostics technology that LipoScience already has commercialized to assess a patient’s risk of heart disease.

LipoScience’s devices are based on a technology called nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR. The technology exposes a blood sample to a short pulse of radio frequency energy within a strong magnetic field. LipoScience says its blood analysis can give a better assessment of cardiovascular risks compared to cholesterol tests.

The company’s first blood test, the NMR LipoProfile, received FDA clearance in 2008. While LipoScience was cleared to market that test throughout the United States, the FDA limited the actual testing of blood samples to LipoScience’s facility. That meant that all blood samples had to be sent to the company’s Raleigh laboratory for analysis under the watch of company personnel familiar with NMR technology.

Vantera will allow diagnostic laboratories and health care facilities to do the testing at their own sites. A laboratory technician needs no knowledge of NMR technology to operate Vantera.

Since the NMR LipoProfile test was commercialized, LipoScience says more than 8 million tests have been ordered. With the testing of blood samples no longer restricted to LipoScience’s facility, the company is now making a push to make its tests a clinical standard of care.

The company’s strategy includes placing Vantera systems at high-volume national and regional clinical diagnostic laboratories across and health care facilities across the country.

LipoScience’s venture capital investors include Durham-based Pappas Ventures and Three Arch Partners, a Bay Area venture firm.

LipoScience l filed plans for an initial public offering to raise $86 million. No effective date has been set, but according to the company’s most recent securities filing in April, the LipoProfile tests helped the company generate $45.8 million in revenue in 2011.

The tests are reimbursed by payers including Medicare, TRICARE, WellPoint, United Healthcare, and several Blue Cross Blue Shield Affiliates.