Amylin Pharmaceuticals Gets New Directors (But Who Are They?), Ophthonix and Vical Raise Capital, Metabasis Cuts Back—Again, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

After months of buildup to get to yesterday’s shareholder vote to determine the makeup of Amylin Pharmaceuticals’ board of directors, a key question remains unresolved. Happily for those who like more closure, the rest of the week held more definitive news for San Diego’s life sciences companies.

—The protracted proxy battle between San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals and activist shareholders Carl Icahn and Eastbourne Capital Management came to a somewhat anticlimactic conclusion yesterday. The vote recap: Icahn and Eastbourne each got at least one of their candidates elected to the company’s 12-seat board, while Amilyn says it got 10 of its candidates elected. Final results are expected in a week or two, but a big question lingers: Which two of Amylin’s incumbent directors lost their board seats?

—The annual meeting of the American Society of Gene Therapy began yesterday in San Diego, with some 2,000 scientists gathering for presentations on the latest developments in the field. The society’s president, David M. Bodine, told Denise that a severe falloff in venture capital funding “has really slowed very promising trials from getting to patients.”

—San Diego’s Fate Therapeutics says a drug candidate it is developing to spur the growth of blood-forming stem cells has been used to treat the first patient in an early-stage clinical trial. The study is being conducted at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston to determine the safety and tolerability of the drug in some cancer patients.

—San Diego’s Ophthonix raised $25.9 million in a “Series AA” venture round, with investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Enterprise Partners, DAG Ventures, Gund Investment Corporation, InterWest Partners, Trex Enterprises, and Wasatch Advisors’ Cross Creek Capital Fund participating in the deal. The vision correction company determines each patient’s lens prescription by using a laser to analyze how light travels through the eye.

—San Diego biotech Vical (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VICL]]) raised $20 million in private stock sales arranged with several institutional investors. The deal includes two longtime backers, the Pittsburgh, PA-based Federated Kaufmann Fund and New York’s Special Situations Funds. Vical is developing a vaccine for the H1N1 swine flu.

—Metabasis Therapeutics is reducing its workforce by another 45 employees, or 85 percent, leaving just seven employees remaining at the San Diego diabetes drug company. Metabasis says it may be forced to cease operations entirely.

—President Rolf Muller of San Diego’s Biomatrica says the company is starting to gain market acceptance for technology designed to store biological samples at room temperature. The Biomatrica products, which basically dehydrate and shrink-wrap samples, offer potential energy savings to biotech and research laboratories. Muller told Luke that sales have doubled in the last year, and that the company has grown from 13 to 25 employees.

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.