Report: San Diego’s Innovation Economy Shows Q2 Uptick in Startups, Patents, and Investments

the one I put together in July, which included Intellikine ($28.5 million), ParAccel ($22 million), SkinMedica ($9.4 million), Medsphere Systems ($6 million), Afraxis ($3.3 million), and Loop’d Networks ($800,000). The Connect list of top 10 investments shows:

PhotoThera             $50.0 million

Ophthonix               $25.9 million

Tandem Diabetes Care   $13.0 million

Anaphore                 $13.0 million

aTyr Pharma           $10.8 million

Lithera                      $10.0 million

Aragon Pharmaceuticals   $ 8.0 million

Traversa Therapeutics  $5.0 million

Nirvanix                    $5.0 million

MojoPages.com  $5.0 million

Some other data points from the Connect report:

—Grants from the National Institutes of Health to researchers in the San Diego region totaled $265.3 million, a 56 percent increase compared to the first quarter. Grants from the National Science Foundation to San Diego recipients rose 14 percent to $56.3 million.

—Patent applications submitted during the second quarter by inventors from the San Diego region increased 15 percent over the first three months, to 1,559. Patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office increased by 16 percent to 728. The San Diego area accounted for about 14 percent of the total number of patents filed and granted by inventors throughout California.

—Mergers and acquisitions involving companies in the San Diego area declined during the second quarter, with 24 deals closed compared to 42 deals closed during the first quarter of 2009. Despite that falloff, San Diego companies still accounted for a third of all the M&A deals that closed in Southern California.

The Connect Innovation Report, which is available here, is a joint effort by Connect, the National University System Institute for Policy Research, University of California, San Diego Extension, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch, and the San Diego Business Journal.

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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.