Navy’s Goal Could Improve Economics of Biofuel Development, Arena Plans More Studies of Weight-Loss Drug, Lpath Signs Deal With Pfizer for Eye Drug, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

San Diego’s life sciences news began to slow down over the past week, but there was still plenty of items to round up. Happy holidays from Xconomy.

—San Diego’s emerging algal biofuels industry got encouragement from the U.S. Navy, which said it will need 336 million gallons of advanced biofuels a year, beginning in 2020, to meet a goal set by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus. The Navy secretary wants to use alternative energy sources to provide 50 percent of the energy for all its war-fighting ships, planes, vehicles and shore installations in less than 10 years.  That’s good news for San Diego-based General Atomics, a private defense contractor developing algal biofuels for the Pentagon.

—San Diego-based Lpath said it has granted Pfizer an exclusive option for a worldwide license to develop and commercialize its lead monoclonal antibody drug candidate, iSONEP, as a possible treatment for wet age-related macular degeneration and other disorders of the eye. Under the agreement, Pfizer will provide Lpath with an upfront option payment of $14 million and share the cost of planned early stage clinical trials. If Pfizer exercises additional options, Lpath could receive as much as $497.5 million and sales-based royalties.

—Shares of San Diego’s Arena Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ARNA]]) fell 24 cents, or almost 12 percent, yesterday after the biopharmaceutical company said it will likely be the end of 2011 before the company will resubmit the new drug application for its weight loss drug, lorcaserin. Arena, which closed at $1.80 a share in heavy trading, said it’s now planning new studies of the drug’s potential cancer risks after meeting this week with the Food and Drug Administration. “The meeting discussions reinforce our position that we have a path forward to seek FDA approval of lorcaserin,” Arena CEO Jack Lief says in a statement from the company.

—Reva Medical, a San Diego maker of absorbable stents, is scheduled to begin trading today on the Australian Securities Exchange after the medical device company raised almost $85 million in its initial public offering.

—Santa Clara, CA-based Affymetrix (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AFFX]]) said a federal judge dismissed a patent infringement lawsuit that San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]) had filed against it.

—San Diego diagnostic product maker Gen-Probe (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GPRO]]), paid $53 million to acquire GTI Diagnostics of Waukesha, WI. Gen-Probe said GTI’s technology will expand its product offerings with diagnostics focused on transplantation.

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.