PhotoThera, a Carlsbad, CA, startup developing transcranial laser therapy for treating acute ischemic stroke, said it has closed a $50 million Series D round of financing led by Warburg Pincus, the private equity firm. The funding is intended to support a planned Phase 3 clinical study of the treatment, which is designed to be given within 24 hours of a stroke.
In addition to Warburg Pincus, participating investors in the round include The Vertical Group, a medical technology venture firm in Summit, N.J., Hamilton BioVentures of San Diego, Delphi Ventures of Menlo Park, CA, DeNovo Ventures of Palo Alto, CA, and individual investors.
In its announcement, PhotoThera also said Arthur T. Taylor, the former chief operating officer of Kyphon, a medical technology company in Sunnyvale, CA, has been named to succeed Thomas C. Wilder as CEO at PhotoThera. Wilder, who became CEO three years ago, has served the company for three years. Taylor headed Kryphon’s products business after Medtronic acquired the company in late 2007.
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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