Qualcomm Strikes Deal With China’s Largest Cell Phone Maker, Volcano Moves to Buy Axsun, Life Technologies Buys Visigen, & More San Diego BizTech News

a $4 million installment of a Series C round of venture funding that could total $12 million if certain milestones are met. The $4 million came from Sanderling Ventures; Biogen Idec New Ventures and SR One, the corporate venture arm of GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: [[ticker:GSK]]) promised the additional $8 million. [[Editor’s note: An earlier version of this item erroneously said that CalciMedica had collected the full $12 million. We apologize for the error.]]

Calcimedica was founded in 2006 to develop small molecule drugs for the treatment of autoimminue disorders, organ transplant rejection, and other immune diseases.

Life Technologies, the Carlsbad, CA-based maker of biotech lab equipment, paid about $20 million to buy VisiGen, a Houston startup working on a new, low-cost process to sequence individual genomes.

International Stem Cell, an Oceanside life sciences company that supplies stem cells for biotech research, says it received the first $1 million in a private placement deal that’s expected to yield up to $5 million over the next several months. The company says the financing is in the form of a new class of convertible preferred stock.

San Diego’s Sempra Energy (NYSE: [[ticker:SRE]]) announced it has completed the company’s first solar energy project, a 10-megawatt photovoltaic facility about 40 miles southeast of Las Vegas, NV.

Big drug companies are thinking a lot these days about finding new ways to innovate in the drug discovery business. Peter Pallai explained how he started San Diego-based BioBlocks as a chemistry outsourcing service for big Pharma. Meanwhile, Rodney Lappe of CovX, a San Diego biotech acquired by Pfizer, desribed the alternative approach to drug development within Pfizer’s Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center, of which it is now a part.

As part of a restructuring that NextWave Wireless announced earlier this year, the company said it sold a 75 percent stake in its IP Wireless subsidiary to an entity formed by certain management personnel for $1 million, and reimbursement of transaction expenses.

And Finally, TheSportsTV.com, a San Diego startup that provides a web-hosted video site for amateur athletes, recruiters, and scouts, got $20,000 in funding from the San Diego Venture Group. The startup won the group’s annual “PitchFest” business plan competition.

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.