Pacira and Histogen Disclose Layoffs, Optimer Advances Diarrhea Drug, Torrey Path Comes to Town, & More SD BizTech

Between President Obama’s speech to the joint session of Congress and California’s jobless data reported Friday, economics dominated the news last week. We saw the effects with a couple of layoffs here in San Diego’s innovation community, along with news about local startups, clinical trials, and new technologies. Read on!

—The unemployment rate in California hit 10.1 percent in January, providing a sobering backdrop for the student-managed Disciplines of Engineering Career Fair at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. UCSD engineering students were sensing the worsening job market before the state jobless data was reported Friday, but a survey of corporate recruiters attending the job fair offered some encouragement. About 40 percent of the corporate recruiters say they plan to hire the same number of full-time engineers in 2009 as they did in 2008.

—Speaking of unemployment, two San Diego life sciences disclosed layoffs last week. Pacira Pharmaceuticals, which markets two approved sustained-release drug delivery products, laid off about 40 employees after a setback in its development of a new product for treating post-surgical pain. The staff reductions represent about 36 percent of Pacira’s workforce.

—Histogen CEO Gail Naughton told me the life sciences startup laid off all 36 of its employees at the end of January after a funding crisis erupted. A group of angel investors withdrew their planned $2.4 million investment in Histogen at the end of January, after learning that a local rival company, Carlsbad, CA-based SkinMedica, had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Histogen.

—San Diego-based Optimer Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OPTR]]) reported encouraging results from a second key clinical trial of its antibiotic pruliflxacin, which successfully killed

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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.