Optimer Antibiotic Gets Panel Nod, CareFusion Buys Vestara, Tracon Raises $16.5M, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

antibiotics as part of World Health Day.

—San Diego-based CareFusion (NYSE: [[ticker:CFN]]) paid $17 million to acquire Irvine, CA-based Vestara and the technology it developed to help hospitals safely dispose of pharmaceuticals. Vestara’s software uses bar codes to cross-reference drugs to obtain information about federal, state and local laws regarding their disposal.

—La Jolla Pharmaceutical said it has acquired the rights to a novel class of compounds known as Regenerative Immunophilin Ligands (RILs) from privately held GliaMed, and plans to focus its resources on this emerging field of regenerative medicine. The biotech says RILs are small-molecule compounds that could be used to promote the regeneration of a wide range of tissues, including complex skin tissue, lung tissue, cardiac muscle, cartilage, and bone, following acute injury. Financial terms were not disclosed.

—Several local life sciences companies participated in funding deals over the past week, following what seems like a prolonged drought in the sector. They were:

—Tracon Pharmaceuticals, which has been licensing and developing drugs for cancer and age-related macular degeneration, raised $16.5 million of a planned $24.5 million equity round. The company declined to comment on the report.

—San Diego-based Biotix, which provides pipette tips and other lab supplies, raised $2 million out of a planned $4 million round of equity funding. A spokeswoman told me Biotix has raised a total of $74 million since it was established in the 2005 merger of Continental Lab Products and a predecessor startup.

—AnaBios, a San Diego contract research organization that specializes in assessing drug safety and efficacy, raised $800,000 of a planned $2 million round led by Southern California’s Tech Coast Angels.

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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.