Acadia Takes a Fall, CareFusion Spins Off, Life Technologies Takes $450M in Cash, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

CareFusion, a medical technology company, got its official start earlier this week and is already one of the largest companies in San Diego, with 15,000 employees and $3.7 billion in annual revenue. Find out how that happened and read up on other local biotech news.

—Shares of San Diego’s Acadia Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ACAD]]), which had run up nearly six-fold since late April on hopes for its lead experimental drug, collapsed after the biotech said Tuesday that the anti-psychosis drug, pimavanserin, had failed in a trial. Acadia’s announcement also was a blow to Biovail, the Toronto-based collaborator that had provided $30 million in funding to help develop pimavanserin for Parkinson’s patients.

—CareFusion, a San Diego medical technology company spun off by Ohio-based Cardinal Health (NYSE: [[ticker:CAH]]), officially became an independent company with shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: [[ticker:CFN]]). CareFusion’s business, which includes technologies created by San Diego’s Pyxis and Alaris, has about 15,000 employees and $3.7 billion in annual sales. The company’s stock was included in the S&P 500 index.

—Carlsbad, CA-based Medsphere Systems says it raised $12 million in venture funding to expand sales of its OpenVista electronic health record technology. The healthcare IT company’s announcement was among several funding deals in the San Diego region, according to a series of regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Those deals included:

—Aubrey, the Carlsbad, CA-based developer of advanced biosynthetic dressings for treating wounds and burns, raised nearly $3.9 million from investors and wants to raise another $2.1 million.

—Animal Cell Therapies, the San Diego company developing methods to produce and store animal stem cells, has raised $1.1 million of a planned

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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.