Deals & Data
Suneva Medical said its cosmetic wrinkle filler Artefill showed positive results in an 18-month interim analysis of an ongoing study. Suneva said 88 percent of patients reported high satisfaction, while the incidence of adverse reactions known as granulomas was less than one-tenth of 1 percent.
La Jolla’s Burnham Institute for Medical Research has received a $50 million challenge grant from T. Denny Sanford, a South Dakota businessman and philanthropist who has emerged as a major backer of San Diego’s medical research community. The San Diego Union-Tribune broke the news.
Indications are that employment in San Diego’s life sciences industry appears to be stabilizing, good news after a tumultuous year in which hundreds of experienced scientists and business professionals lost their jobs. Xconomy analyzed these good signs.
With Sen.-elect Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, some medical-device makers who oppose a $2 billion tax aimed at their industry said there is a possibility that the weakening of the Democrats’ Senate majority could enable them to get that provision eliminated.
Meanwhile, the therapeutics side of the life sciences industry has put years of effort into helping create a pathway for biosimilars to be brought to market. The Senate version of the health care bill would give 12 years data protection to biosimilars. BIOCOM President and Chief Executive Joe Panetta said that provision needs to be passed. The House passed a different version.
San Diego’s Sequenom said it paid $14 million in cash to settle a class-action shareholder lawsuit over the company’s mishandling of study data on a test it is developing for Down syndrome. Sequenom also agreed to turn over an estimated 6.8 million shares to the plaintiffs, which would have a current market value of $29 million. But the total number of shares has not yet been decided.
In nearly eight years as chief executive of San Diego’s Volcano Corp., Scott Huennekens has taken the medical device company from an 11-employee startup to the verge of profitability. The company, based in Carmel Valley, makes systems that use catheters and guide wires to help doctors detect and treat blockages in a patient’s arteries. The technology gives physicians an inside view of the blood vessel and the obstruction-causing plaque, rather than the external, X-ray-type view provided by widely used angiograms. The Union-Tribune caught up with Huennekens recently for a Q & A.
Unable to raise capital, many biotechs and medical instrument makers have turned to local consulting firms, biomedical research laboratories, and a variety of specialized service providers. Collectively, they are known as CROs, or clinical research organizations—and in San Diego, at least, they are proliferating. About 144 CROs are providing a variety of contract services for local life science companies. It is a hub that has been 15 years in the making, according to Joe Panetta, President and CEO of BIOCOM. The CROs “create efficiencies and cost-savings and a level of expertise that biotechs would not otherwise have,” Panetta said in an interview with Xconomy.
Vertex Pharmaceutical’s, with a research facility in San Diego, has a new Chief Executive. Xconomy recently profiled Matt Emmens, tracking his trail from security guard to CEO.
One of the more intriguing experimental drugs for multiple sclerosis has just entered its first clinical trial. Cambridge, MA-based Biogen Idec has now started what it believes to be the first-ever clinical trial of a drug with the potential to regenerate the fatty protective coating around nerves that gets damaged in people with multiple sclerosis. Xconomy wrote about the news.
Smart companies are cautious about fiddling with successful products. So why is Roche reformulating its blockbuster breast cancer drug trastuzumab to include an enzyme from San Diego-based Halozyme Therapeutics?