Charting Startups in the Downturn, San Diego’s Biotech Survival Index (Part Deux), Court Dismisses Federal Patent Suit Against Qualcomm, & More SD BizTech News

November; Goodrich Aerostructures, which laid off 112 workers; and La Jolla Pharmaceuticals, which is winding down its business and has filed a notice to lay off all 94 employees.

—Luke laid out a comprehensive survey of available cash at 23 publicly traded life sciences companies. He found six that have less than $50 million.

—The independent accountants at ethanol maker Verenium (NASDAQ: VRNM), a biofuels startup based in San Diego and Cambridge, MA, added a statement to a regulatory filing last week that raises questions about Verenium’s ability to continue as a going concern. Verenium CEO Carlos Riva maintained the company is not in a cash crisis.

—Anadys Pharmaceuticals’ CEO Steve Worland told Luke he’s looking for a partnership with a major pharma after getting promising results earlier this year for the drug Anadys is developing to treat hepatitis C. The biotech’s strategy calls for developing ANA-598, a non-nucleoside polymerase inhibitor, as a key ingredient in a drug “cocktail” to overwhelm the virus.

—A San Diego federal judge dismissed a patent infringement lawsuit that Irvine, CA-based Broadcom filed in October against Qualcomm, the San Diego wireless technology giant. The dismissal was good news for Qualcomm, but a Broadcom spokesman says the Irvine chipmaker plans to address the legal deficiencies identified in its case and refile the suit.

—After rebuffing a buyout offer from San Diego’s Sequenom (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SQNM]]), the board of Exact Sciences has replaced the CEO and CFO at the Marlborough, MA, medical diagnostics company.

—For the first time in March Madness history, Qualcomm’s MediaFLO is broadcasting all 63 games of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament to AT&T customers who own a mobile TV-enabled wireless device. MediaFLO also is broadcasting a limited number of games for Verizon customers.

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

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.