Deals & Data
Good things come in threes: Trius Therapeutics has filed for an initial public offering to fund its Phase 3 clinical trials. This marks the third San Diego-based company to file for an IPO recently, Xconomy reports.
Even more good news for San Diego’s life sciences industry was reported on Nov. 9, when Pfizer said its La Jolla research facility will be unscathed in the reorganization stemming from the acquisition of Wyeth. La Jolla will be one of five major research hubs and nine smaller research campuses under the company’s new plan. A Pfizer spokesperson said the company anticipates "very little change" at the 1,000-employee La Jolla campus, which will remain the center of the company's efforts in cancer research, according to a story in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Drug giant Eli Lilly & Co. is trying to become a player in the world of small, nimble biotechnology companies. The Indianapolis-based company has consolidated two San Diego biotech companies that it acquired in recent years into a fully remodeled, environmentally friendly facility in La Jolla. The new Lilly Biotechnology Center-San Diego joins a five-floor research center in New York for biotech ImClone Systems, which Lilly bought last year, and a biotech research complex the company has built in Indianapolis. The Union-Tribune wrote about the new center.
Medipacs, a San Diego-based start-up that is developing the first non-mechanical infusion pump for drug delivery, received the Association of University Research Parks Innovation Award for 2009. The prestigious award is presented annually to a company located in a research or science park “that has produced a substantial and meaningful innovative product or service”. Medipacs is also featured this week in the Biocommunique cover story.
Cowen Healthcare Royalty Partners snatched the assets of Artes out of bankruptcy early this year for an undisclosed price. It gave the company a new name, Suneva Medical. And it worked to cut costs, with about 40 employees today compared with about 150 at Artes. “This was a great product,” said Niv E. Caviar, whom Cowen brought in as chief executive. “It just wasn't executed well,” he told the Union-Tribune.
Amylin Pharmaceuticals announced a deal under which Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical will pick up a big chunk of the development cost for Amylin's weight-loss drugs. The deal unveiled late last Sunday calls for Amylin to head up development through mid-stage, midstage, or phase II, clinical trials, with Takeda picking up the work at that point and ultimately commercializing the drugs. That's important because weight- loss drugs require large, expensive clinical trials before they can go on the market. Takeda is assuming 80 percent of the development costs required for U.S. approvals and 100 percent outside the U.S.
As universities go, The House That Roger Revelle Built is a puppy, founded just four decades ago. But it’s one of the top dogs in pulling in federal research dollars. And according to the National Science Foundation, UCSD has once again ranked 6th nationwide. UCSD got $491 million in federal R&D money and spent a total of $842 million in total R&D activities for fiscal year 2008. Bradley Fikes, the biotech writer at the North County Times, posted a list of universities and the grant dollars they received on his blog.
The Voice of San Diego ran a story about superbugs, and the efforts of San Diego’s life sciences community to combat them. The story included information about Optimer Pharmaceuticals, Trius Therapeutics and Mpex Pharmaceuticals.
Stephen Mayfield, a world-renowned researcher who studies the use of algae as a biofuel, is leaving his post as the dean of graduate studies at The Scripps Research Institute for a faculty job at the University of California, San Diego.
Stem cell engineering company Novocell Inc. has an ambitious goal: It aims to bring the first human embryonic stem cell therapy for diabetes into the clinic in just four years. Already backed by four venture capital firms and pharmaceutical powerhouse Pfizer Inc. to the tune of $80 million, Novocell recently found a third partner: the state of California. The San Diego Business Journal wrote a story that provides an update on this promising company and technology.
Last week’s $1 billion co-development deal with Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Asia’s biggest drug maker, serves as a reminder that Amylin is still in the running for capturing a significant share of the obesity markets, which some analysts estimate could top $2 billion. Orexigen Therapeutics and Vivus, a Mountain View- based company, are also aiming to bring new products to market. The San Diego Business Journal took a look at the potential business opportunities in this market.
La Jolla Pharmaceutical has postponed liquidation once again after 93 percent of its shareholders failed to vote for dissolution by last Friday. To liquidate, the company needed a majority of its outstanding voting shares to approve dissolution. The vote has already been postponed once and has now been postponed to this Friday, Nov. 13.
NexBio, a San Diego-based company developing a broad spectrum, host-targeting therapy called Fludase, recently presented animal studies showing that the therapy inhibits airway hyper-reactivity, characteristic of asthma. Fludase, also called DAS181, further decreases the number of inflammatory cells and mucous secreting cells in the respiratory tract. In the animal models, DAS181 is as effective as a bronchodilator or a steroid which are anti-asthma drugs on the market. People with asthma are prone to develop severe complications when they catch influenza. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the majority of hospitalizations from the ongoing H1N1 Pandemic are in people with asthma.
NexBio, in collaboration with scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, St. Louis University, and the University of Hong Kong, also had two peer-reviewed articles published in the journal PLoS ONE. These two published studies suggest that DAS181 may play a potentially important role for the treatment and prevention of the Pandemic Influenza A (H1N1) and drug-resistant influenza.
PaxVax, a San Diego startup backed by Seattle’s Ignition Capital, has raised $2 million of a planned $6 million investment round, according to a document filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The biotech was founded in early 2007 to develop new oral vaccine technology based on a common cold virus called the adenovirus, Xconomy reports. The company says its vaccine, which is administered as oral tablets, avoids much of the requirements that conventional vaccines require—including cold storage for the vaccine itself and inoculation by qualified medical personnel. PaxVax says its oral tablets can be stored and distributed at room temperature, and are self-administered.
Optimer Pharmaceuticals has presented new data from a previously reported Phase 3 trial for fidaxomicin, their antibiotic for the treatment of CDI (clostridium difficile infection). Results showed that when CDI patients required concomitant antibiotics, patients given the San Diego-based company’s experimental therapy had a lower rate of recurrence and significantly higher global cure rate in comparison to those given Vancocin®, the only approved treatment for CDI. This provides support that fidaxomicin may be a more effective treatment in patients requiring concomitant antibiotics.
Ocera Therapeutics said that its experimental therapy AST-120 (spherical carbon adsorbent) was shown to reduce the severity of pruritus (itching) in patients with chronic liver disease. The data were presented at the 60th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. These findings comprised a secondary endpoint of a larger Phase 2 study demonstrating the efficacy, safety and tolerability of AST-120 in cirrhotic patients with mild hepatic encephalopathy (MHE).
Steve Worland, CEO of Anadys Pharmaceuticals wrote in a column for Xconomy on combination therapies being important for the treatment of hepatitis C. Combination therapy has been a central component of treatment for certain viral diseases for more than 15 years. The benefits of combination therapy can arise from activation of multiple host pathways, suppression of mutational variants that can lead to viral escape, or perhaps both.
Life Technologies, the Carlsbad, CA-based provider of biotech instruments and lab supplies, says it has agreed to acquire Woburn, MA-based BioTrove, which has developed a high throughput gene expression and genotyping analysis system. BioTrove, which withdrew plans to raise $75 million in an IPO last year, says the flexible array format of its OpenArray technology enables researchers to perform more than 3,000 PCR or qPCR gene expression assays at a time. Financial terms were not disclosed.
San Diego-based Cyntellect, which makes work stations used by biotechs for cell analysis, purification, and processing, has raised $15.5 million so far in a secondary round that aims to raise a total of $18.6 million, according to a recent regulatory filing. Xconomy reported this news.
San Diego-based Altair Therapeutics, a company developing inhalable drugs to block inflammatory proteins involved in asthma and other respiratory diseases, has closed on the second part of a Series A venture financing, bringing the total it has raised this year to $17 million.
Ionian Technologies, Inc. and Roche Diagnostics Corporation have entered into a collaborative agreement based on Ionian's rapid isothermal nucleic acid amplification technology. Under this agreement, Roche will identify new applications and customers for the technology and will bring these opportunities to Ionian. Roche will have exclusive manufacturing rights for these specific opportunities upon commercialization.
According to the San Diego Daily Transcript, Ligand Pharmaceuticals has notified Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. that it will end a license agreement the company inherited when it acquired Pharmacopeia last December.
International Stem Cell Corp. named a new chief executive and president this week. Andrey Semechkin, the company's executive vice president, will become chief executive officer Sunday. Brian Lundstrom has joined the company as president. Kenneth Aldrich, CEO and chairman, will remain chairman. The company said the appointments help it prepare for placing its stem cell-based disease treatments in human clinical trials.
Cadence Pharmaceuticals said that the FDA has extended the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) goal date for its review of the new drug application for the company’s intravenous acetaminophen by three months. The extended PDUFA goal date is February 12, 2010.