This is not welcome news by any means for the VC money that was invested. A redirection of the product was too costly as well, thus they shop closes with million invested and a loss. The FDA restrictions also played a role in the limiting of consumer clinical trials here, so with a series of events, there was no place left to go. 
This is only one story, but there are many more like it out there and the money keeps pouring in, and at times investing can truly be compared to a rolling of the dice a the craps table, as R and D works with a changing world of rules and conditions to be met to provide save and potentially useable technology.
The headache is over for medical device maker Cierra Inc. Actually it’s all over. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company is out of business after failing to draft enough participants into a clinical trial of a catheter-based technology purported to reduce migraines. It takes $29 million in venture capital down with it from investors Delphi Ventures, Frazier Healthcare Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures and Split Rock Partners.
Believing that migraines could be made less frequent by sealing a passage between the heart’s upper chambers, Cierra followed the lead of peer NMT Medical Inc. This turned out to be a mistake when NMT announced lackluster results from a treatment study and investors started to get cold feet. Another blow came when the Food and Drug Administration restricted the company’s clinical trial participants to those who had already tried three other migraine medications. It briefly tried to redirect its efforts into stroke prevention, but the costs were too high.
http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/14/migraine-sufferers-look-elsewhere-as-cierra-buckles/
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