UK’s Enigma Diagnostics to Establish U.S. Headquarters in San Diego

Enigma Diagnostics, a UK-based medical diagnostics startup, plans to close its current U.S. office in San Francisco and open a new office in San Diego as its U.S. headquarters, according to chairman and CEO John McKinley.

McKinley outlined Enigma’s development of rapid molecular diagnostic technology in a presentation yesterday at the annual investor conference organized by Biocom, the San Diego life sciences industry group. The company has developed a desktop-size instrument based on advances in PCR (polymerase chain reaction) technology, which McKinley says can identify certain pathogens in less than 45 minutes. Amid concerns over the H1N1 swine flu outbreak and other infectious disease, McKinley says, “There currently is nothing in the market like our pending technology.”

Enigma expects to make an official announcement about its new San Diego office next month, McKinley says, and he estimates the company will have 30 employees here by mid-2010. He tells me he decided to establish an American beachhead for Enigma Diagnostics in San Diego because, “It’s a diagnostics center for the U.S. The pool of labor is certainly here.”

Among the factors that McKinley cited is the presence of Life Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LIFE]]), the Carlsbad, CA, company that was formed in last year’s merger of Invitrogen and Applied Biosystems, as well as Quidel (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QDEL]]), and Stratagene, a San Diego business that is now part of Santa Clara, CA-based Agilent Technologies.

Enigma ML device
Enigma ML device

McKinley says Enigma, a venture-backed company founded in 2004, first developed a rugged military version of its diagnostic machine for field detection of biological agents under funding from the UK’s Defence Science Technology Laboratory. The company’s investors include the UK’s Porton Capital Group, GlaxoSmithKline, and the UK Government Science Technology Laboratory.

The company intends to first win approval for its automated Enigma ML “mini laboratory” in Europe by next September. Following that, McKinley says Enigma intends to ask the FDA to waive requirements under CLIA, or Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments, which would enable the device to be operated in U.S. hospitals, clinics, and other point-of-care facilities.

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.