San Diego’s life sciences community and angel investors are watching transfixed as investigators unfold the suspicious death of La Jolla resident John G. Watson. We also saw some huge funding deals over the past week, and we’ve summarized it all for you here:
—Carlsbad, CA-based Regulus Therapeutics announced a lucrative partnership with Sanofi-Aventis, the Paris-based pharma giant, to discover, develop, and someday co-market microRNA drugs. Sanofi agreed to pay Regulus as much as $750 million in milestone payments, eclipsing the $600 million deal Regulus struck with GlaxoSmithKline in 2008.
—Kent Keigwin, a 59-year-old financial advisor, appeared in a San Diego County Superior Court yesterday to face identify theft, grand theft and forgery charges. San Diego Police say Keigwin posed as John G. Watson, a retired biotech executive and local angel investor, and illegally transferred $7.5 million out of Watson’s brokerage account. Watson, who was 65, was found dead in his La Jolla home on June 8.
—San Diego’s Neurocrine Biosciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NBIX]]) granted worldwide rights to experimental diabetes drugs to German drug maker Boehringer Ingelheim in a deal that could be worth as much as $225 million. In a separate deal, the U.S. drug giant Abbott Laboratories agreed to pay Neurocrine up
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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