San Diego-based aFraxis is working to advance a possible drug treatment for Fragile X syndrome identified by MIT’s Susumu Tonegawa. Meanwhile Waltham, MA-based Syndax Pharmaceuticals is developing an anti-cancer drug that came out of Ron Evans’s lab at San Diego’s Salk Institute. That’s life sciences, and this is Xconomy:
—San Diego-based aFraxis CEO Jay Lichter told Luke the early stage biotech has identified several hundred compounds that appear capable of turning off a possible drug target for Fragile X syndrome, the second leading cause of mental retardation. Denise, who worked with Luke on the story, reported that aFraxis was founded in 2007, with funding from Avalon Ventures and based on research by the Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa of MIT.
—BrainCells, a San Diego biotech, is planning its drug development strategy after reporting attention-getting results six months ago from a clinical trial of a combination drug for treating depression. When the anti-anxiety drug busiprone was combined with the hormone melatonin, BrainCells researchers got results comparable to standard anti-depression treatments based on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
—San Diego’s Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]) is among the investors that just placed a $28 million bet on U.K.-based Oxford Nanopore Technologies, which has plans to sequence entire human genomes, possibly for as little as $1,000 per genome. Illumina previously invested $18 million in
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.
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