San Diego’s life sciences community took two steps forward last week, as two new startups stepped into the light with new medical device technologies, and then one step back with the closure of another company founded in 2000. We have all the latest moves for you, plus a lot more.
—San Diego’s Topera Medical, which has maintained a low profile since it was launched three years ago, established a Lexington, MA-headquarters to commercialize technology developed by UC San Diego cardiologist Sanjiv Narayan. Topera, which hired former Boston Scientific executive Edward Kerslake as CEO, has technology designed to map the heart’s abnormal electrical currents, which occur with irregular heartbeats like atrial fibrillation.
—San Diego-based OncoSec, which was created March 1 through a reverse merger with a dormant public company, says it has licensed drug delivery technology from Innovio Pharmaceuticals to improve the efficacy of certain anti-cancer drugs. Inovio’s electroporation technology uses brief pulses of electricity to temporarily increase the permeability of cell walls, making it easier for OncoSec’s conventional chemotherapy drugs to penetrate cancerous tumors.
—San Diego’s Novalar Pharmaceuticals sold its only product, an FDA-approved drug for reversing the numbing effects of dental anesthesia, and will shut down in coming weeks. The French dental medication company Septodont acquired
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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