Novalar’s OraVerse for an undisclosed payment to Novalar and its investors, to be followed by milestone payments and royalties from continuing OraVerse sales.
—Incoming Verenium CEO James Levine told me the company must “go forward to profitability” as it moves its headquarters from the Boston area to San Diego and shifts its strategic focus to using biotech tools to develop industrial enzymes. Levine wants Verenium to broaden and diversify its product line, sign up new corporate partners, improve manufacturing processes, control expenses, get at least two products submitted for regulatory approval, and pay down its corporate debt. And that’s just this year.
—Luke offered a bit of evidence in his BioBeat column to refute critics who said the Obama Administration’s healthcare reform law would put a damper on new drug development. A Government Accountability Office report issued a year after the law was enacted shows that brand-name drug prices climbed by an annual average of 8.3 percent from 2006 through the first quarter of 2010.
—San Diego’s Accelrys (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ACCL]]) signed a partnership agreement with Oxford Nanopore Technologies that will make it possible to get real-time analyses of experimental data from Oxford’s single molecule analysis system.
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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