Amylin Regroups From FDA Smackdown, CalciMedica Plans Trial of New Anti-Immune Drug, FDA Gives CareFusion Recall Highest Priority, & More San Diego Life Science News

FDA regulatory moves turned out to be the biggest news items over the past week, prompting San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals and CareFusion to respond separately to the agency’s actions. Get our latest assessment here, along with updates on venture funding, CEO pay, and the new museum-quality home for San Diego’s Avalon Ventures.

—Investors hammered San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration refused to approve its formulation for exenatide once-weekly (Bydureon), which was expected to be a blockbuster diabetes drug. Amylin and partners Eli Lilly and Alkermes said they hope to gather all the data for a re-submission “by the end of 2011.”

—As Luke reported when the news broke, the FDA decision regarding exenatide once-weekly was a chilling signal for any life sciences company developing diabetes drugs.

—Testing a recently discovered pathway of cellular communications, San Diego’s CalciMedica plans to start an early stage trial next year of a once-daily oral pill designed for patients with moderate to severe psoriasis. CalciMedica’s experimental drug could also be useful someday for other chronic inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, and asthma.

—Venture Capital firms invested a total of $231 million in 32 San Diego companies during the third quarter that ended in September, with $129.7 million (56 percent) going to 17 life science companies (53 percent), according to the MoneyTree Report. Six of the top 10 deals of the quarter involved life science companies: Otonomy, AutoGenomics, Accumetrics, Auspex Pharmaceuticals, Cylene Pharmaceuticals, and Cebix.

—The MoneyTree Report on third-quarter venture funding echoes results that we reported earlier this week, showing $4.8 billion was invested in

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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.