Luke the first results are expected to be released sometime near the end of June.
—San Diego-based Celula, a molecular diagnostic startup that is developing a prenatal diagnostic test based on isolation of fetal cells from the mother’s blood, has raised $15 million in a secondary round of venture funding led by Skyline Ventures of Palo Alto, CA.
—Stemgent, a startup based in Cambridge, MA, and San Diego that provides stem cell research materials, has raised $5.6 million of a planned $10.1 million round of equity funding.
—Afraxis, a San Diego biotech startup developing a promising compound for treating fragile X syndrome, the most common cause of inherited mental retardation, has raised $1.2 million of a planned $6 million venture round.
—Avalon Ventures founder Kevin Kinsella, whose biotech investment portfolio includes deals involving Aurora Biosciences, Illumina, Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Avelas, AnaptysBio, Amira, InCode, and Sirion, says any robust startup ecosystem needs local venture capital. In recent years, San Diego’s startup ecosystem has been losing local venture capital firms.
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.
View all posts by Bruce V. Bigelow