5AM Ventures, Versant Ventures, and Apposite Capital.
—The venture outlook for 2009 was permeated by a kind of irony, as VCs told a gathering of San Diego software entrepreneurs that their odds for getting funding were never very good in the first place.
—San Diego biotech Cypress Bioscience (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYPB]]) got a boost after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved its drug for treatment of fibromyalgia, a painful condition involving connective tissue.
—With chipmaker Intel reporting a 90 percent decline in fourth-quarter profits, San Diego laser-maker Cymer (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYMI]]) says it’s making some cutbacks, including a 10 percent trim in its workforce. Cymer makes specialized lasers used by chipmakers.
—The father of the cell phone, Martin Cooper, says he anticipates the advent of Google’s Android operating system will accelerate a wireless revolution in the development of “open access” wireless networks.
—San Diego’s Burnham Institute of Biomedical Research says it has signed an institution-wide partnership with Johnson & Johnson’s Pharmaceutical Research and Development. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
—Cambridge, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BIIB]]), with big R&D operations in San Diego, announced some encouraging results from a pair of mid-stage trials of an experimental drug being considered to treat Parkinson’s disease.
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.
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