Xconomy San Diego Hosts its Premiere Event, A Regional Algae Initiative Blooms, Mpex Pharmaceuticals Raises $27.5M, La Jolla Pharmaceuticals Fails Key Trial, & More San Diego BizTech News

The highlight last week for Xconomy San Diego was our premiere event, “Physics for Future Presidents,” which drew a big turnout (about 200 people registered), including at least two Ph.D. physicists—Lowell Burnett of Quasar Federal Systems and J. Robert Beyster, the founder and retired chairman and CEO of defense contractor SAIC. Yet it also was an eventful week in San Diego for the life sciences, cleantech, software, and information technology sectors.

—As an equal-opportunity “Debunker in Chief,” UC Berkeley Physics professor Richard Muller separated science from mythology in his talk, “Physics for Future Presidents,” which touched on nuclear terrorism, energy, and global warming.

—San Diego Internet entrepreneur Lee Stein, who helped to pioneer online payment systems, travels in rarefied circles, which include PayPal founder Elon Musk, Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post, and Segway inventor (and Boston Xconomist) Dean Kamen. His latest project is Prize Capital, a Del Mar, CA, investment firm he founded to help support the development of breakthrough green technologies.

—San Diego’s Mpex Pharmaceuticals says its $27.5 million in venture funding will carry the life sciences startup through Phase 2 clinical trials of its inhaled version of approved antibiotic levofloxacin for treating certain lung infections.

—The San Diego “regional algae initiative” has formed a virtual network to encourage the growth of all companies algal. Project manager Rick Halperin told me San Diego’s experience in aquaculture, expertise in algae biology, and sunny climate gives the region an early advantage in developing a new algae industry cluster here.

—San Diego’s Arena Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ARNA]]), which has run

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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.