La Jolla Pharmaceutical Revives With $6M Financing

Like a scene from a Monty Python skit, a San Diego biotech left for dead has announced plans for a new financing—and says it has revived interest in its experimental drug for treating Lupus of the kidneys. La Jolla Pharmaceutical halted work on the drug in early 2009.  In a statement yesterday, La Jolla Pharmaceutical disclosed plans to raise as much as $16.3 million to evaluate potential various opportunities, including Riquent, its drug for Lupus nephritis. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports today that La Jolla Pharmaceutical found institutional investors to commit up to $6 million toward efforts to restart its business. The biotech could not get enough shareholders to vote on a liquidation plan last year, and withdrew from a planned merger in March.


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.