Amylin Dissidents Win Board Seats, Targeted Genetics’ Troubles Raise Gene Therapy Concerns, Celladon Eyes Partnership, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

development partner in the near future. Celladon has enrolled about half the patients it needs for a mid-stage trial of its gene therapy for heart failure.

—San Diego’s Senomyx (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SNMX]]), which uses biotechnology tools to develop compounds that enhance or block key flavors, says one of its corporate partners is expected to begin commercializing one of its sweet flavor enhancers later this year. Senomyx CEO Kent Snyder told me that Firmenich, the Swiss flavor and perfume company, plans to launch S2383, a molecule his company developed to enhance the taste of sucralose, the sweetener used in Splenda. Snyder also said Senomyx has more flavor ingredients in its development pipeline.

—Raj Krishnan, a bioengineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego, has won three first-place awards in graduate research competitions this year for his work in developing a new early stage cancer-screening test. Topping that, Krishnan and fellow UCSD graduate students David Charlot and Roy Lefkowitz, won the $40,000 first prize in the annual UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge business plan competition for Biological Dynamics, the startup Krishnan founded to develop his diagnostic technology.

—Novocell, a San Diego stem cell engineering startup, received its second U.S. patent covering the use of endoderm cells derived from human embryonic stem cells for drug discovery. The technology represents a potential stem cell treatment for diabetes. As Luke reported, the strength of Novocell’s intellectual property is one of the things that led CEO John West to join the company a month ago.

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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.