Halozyme Deal Could Yield $83M, Wireless Health Leaders Converge, Readers Vote on Worst Drug Names, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

that a medium and high dose of the Meritage drug reached the main goal, reducing inflammation and symptoms by half or more, when compared to a placebo.

—Luke explained in his BioBeat column why so many drug names are so unpronounceably awkward. In addition to all the marketing considerations, the FDA has been rejecting four out of every 10 name proposals. In our informal readers’ poll, the five worst drug names (and number of votes each received) are: Xgeva (27), Yervoy (20), Edarbi (16), Viibryd (10), and Incivek (8). Our readers said the five best names are: Provenge (39), Benlysta (27), Prolia (21), Incivek (10), and Horizant (9).

—San Diego’s Jitterbug launched a mobile personal emergency response system during the wireless health summit. Jitterbug’s new service enables certain subscribers to easily connect with an on-call agent trained to deal with medical problems and other emergencies.

—Nukona, a San Diego startup that specializes in security management software for mobile devices, said during the wireless health summit that it’s working with Newport Beach, CA-based Integer Wireless to provide HIPAA-compliant wireless networks for hospitals, physician groups, and other healthcare providers.

—Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical made an unspecified investment in Fate Therapeutics, the San Diego developer of stem cell technology. The announcement came a few weeks after regulatory filings by Fate showed it had increased its current equity funding to $36 million, not including another $1 million in debt financing.

—San Diego’s ImThera Medical, which is developing an implantable neurostimulation device for treating obstructive sleep apnea, raised about $1.8 million of a planned $2 million financing round. ImThera plans to use the funding for the next phase of trials in the European Union, and to advance the company’s FDA request for an investigational device exemption.

—San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMLN]]) and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation plan to collaborate in a series of clinical studies to investigate the feasibility of mixing pramlintide, an analog of the human hormone amylin, with insulin to treat type 1 diabetes. The idea is to see if a combined formulation works as well at controlling blood sugar levels as separately injected doses, which is currently the only FDA-approved method for administering the two drugs.

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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.