VC Biotech Funding Rebounds, Biogen Idec Co-Founder Resigns From Board, Pathway Genomics Debuts $250 Personal Genome Test, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

Venture capital funding for San Diego’s life sciences companies was surprisingly strong from April through June—with another deal announced this week.

—One of the key trends to be teased out of venture capital investment data for the second quarter of this year is that VC funding for life science companies rebounded to record levels. In San Diego $154 million of nearly $209 million invested from April through June went into 13 life sciences startups, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Three of San Diego’s five biggest VC deals were for biotech companies: PhotoThera, $50 million; Intellikine, $28.5 million; and SkinMedica, $9.4 million.

—Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BIIB]]) became subject to considerable boardroom intrigue after activist investor Carl Icahn succeeded in getting two new directors elected to the board of the Cambridge, MA-based company. So now shareholders and media mavens are puzzling over the unexpected resignation of Phillip Sharp, the Nobel-Prize-winning biologist and Biogen co-founder, from the board where he has served for 27 years. Ryan reports that Biogen’s board will decide whether or not to replace Sharp on what is now a 12-member board of directors.

—In a data dump earlier this week, Orexigen (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OREX]]) said its drug candidate for treating obesity helped people lose weight in all three of its big clinical trials. The San Diego biotech said its drug, a longer-lasting form of two generic compounds, has cleared enough hurdles for Orexigen to file a new drug application to the FDA by this time next year.

—Speaking of VC funding of life science companies, San Diego’s BeneChill said this week it has raised $13.5 million in a Series C round of venture funding. BeneChill plans to use the proceeds to fund early commercialization of RhinoChill, a portable medical device that uses hypothermia to treat patients with cardiac arrest, stroke, or head injury.

—San Diego’s Pathway Genomics made its debut last week by announcing it can test consumers for their genetic risk for more than 90 health conditions for $250. The startup is among several new medical diagnostic personal genome companies  that are offering to help consumers decode their own personal genome to determine their risk for disease.

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.