Sorrento Therapeutics Raises $2.3 Million

San Diego-based Sorrento Therapeutics has raised $2.3 million in a one-time equity investment, according to a filing yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The biotech, which specializes in new methods for developing 100-percent human monoclonal antibodies, was founded in 2006 and lists Steve Zaniboni, Antonius Schuh, and Henry Ji as executives and directors.

Zaniboni was named in February as the chief financial officer at Xifin, which provides Software as a Service to support laboratory billings and financial management operations. He previously worked as CFO at San Diego’s AviaraDx, Arcturus Bioscience, and Sequenom, and held financial management positions at several life science companies in the Boston area.

The filing did not identify Sorrento’s investor. But Miami-based OpkoHealth said earlier this month it had made an investment in Sorrento Therapeutics in exchange for a one-third stake in the San Diego biotech. Opko says it also received an exclusive license to the Sorrento antibody library for the discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies in the field of ophthalmology.

Ji is named on several recent patents relating to new ways for amplifying and cloning a specific region or sequences of immunological genes to generate antibody libraries.

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.