BioNanomatrix Moves HQ, Awarepoint CEO Talks Strategy, Ambit Raises $30 Million, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

I surmise that fewer than 1 percent of all U.S. life sciences professionals are using the service.”

—Shortly after withdrawing its IPO, San Diego’s Ambit Biosciences said it raised $30 million in a second Series D round of venture capital. Ambit said that among other things, the additional funding would enable the company to continue a pivotal mid-stage trial for its lead drug candidate, a potential treatment for acute myeloid leukemia.

—Pacira Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PCRX]]), a Parsippany, NJ-based specialty pharma with operations in San Diego, said the FDA asked for more information and extended its review of Pacira’s lead drug candidate, a long-acting version of the pain drug bupivacaine. Investors reacted to the three-month extension by chopping roughly 15 percent from the price of Pacira shares.

—Peter Dresslar, who moved his analytics software startup Torrey Path to San Diego in 2009, told me he’s now unwinding the business and selling its assets. Dresslar has started a new company, Sequencethree, with bioinformatics scientist Derren Barken, to develop new uses of computational technology for analyzing the immunological properties of peptides and similar molecules.

—San Diego’s Somaxon Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SOMX]]) raised a total of $5 million by selling nearly 2.2 million shares of its stock to Paladin Labs in a private placement. Paladin has exclusive rights to commercialize Somaxon’s doxepin (Silenor) in Canada, South America, and Africa.s

—San Diego-based Sequenom (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SQNM]]) said it secured a $30 million financing commitment from Silicon Valley Bank. The medical diagnostics company plans to will use the financing to support the development and commercialization of new products and other near-term growth initiatives.

—AnaBios, a contract research provider that raised $800,000 in April from Southern California’s Tech Coast Angels, raised an additional $200,000, according to a recent regulatory filing. That brings the running tally to just over $1 million of a potential $2 million series A round. The two-year-old startup deploys assays and develops databases to assess drug safety and efficacy.

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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.