debt, securities, and warrants or rights. The San Diego biotech, which got $5.7 million a couple of years ago, intends to raise another $1.9 million for developing small molecule drugs that block the production of complex carbohydrates known as glycans.
—The National Institute on Drug Abuse has awarded an innovation grant worth $350,000 over two years to San Diego’s Multimeric Biotherapeutics to develop a vaccine against nicotine, and eventually other drugs of abuse. Multimeric says vaccines against nicotine are designed to generate antibodies that sequester nicotine in the blood and prevent the molecules from crossing into the brain and re-enforcing the nicotine habit. The two-year-old biotech is developing proprietary methods for boosting highly targeted antibody responses.
—The World Economic Forum convened a one-day summit on mobile health at the Estancia La Jolla Hotel & Spa. Some 75 or so academic, policy, and business leaders from eight countries were invited to attend the conference, which focused on ways to resolve the tangle of regulatory and policy problems that threaten to thwart the advance of wireless health technologies.
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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