Buying, Selling, Agreeing. San Diego’s life sciences companies conducted a lot of different transactions over the past week. We have a rundown for you.
—San Diego’s ResMed, which specializes in medical devices used to treat sleep apnea and related breathing disorders, said it acquired BiancaMed, a private Irish maker of sensor technology used to monitor sleep and breathing. Financial terms were not disclosed, but a ResMed spokeswoman told the U-T the deal represented a significant premium over the $15.8 million that all of BiancaMed’s investors—include ResMed—previously put into the company.
—-The executive chairman of San Diego’s aTyr Pharma, John Mendlein provided an overview of an idea he conceived that would enable nonprofit disease foundations to help fund aTyr’s R&D, along with big government agencies and privately held pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
—ActivX business development executive Robert Hillman alerted me yesterday to just-published findings, which the San Diego-based unit of Japan’s Kyorin Pharmaceutical said validate its KiNatiV technology. Hillman says the technology uses probes that interact and bind with kinases within cells of any tissue from any species, enabling ActivX to use sophisticated mass spectroscopy to identify key attributes of kinases that can’t be obtained any other way. In a statement, the company says, “Given the utility of kinase inhibitors as research tools and promising agents for molecular-targeted therapy, the opportunity to characterize their interactions with native endogenous kinases undoubtedly represents a significant step forward.”
—San Diego’s Cadence Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CADX]]) got a new headache, after the FDA disclosed that an unidentified competitor wants to bring a generic version of Cadence’s pain reliever to market in the United States. The FDA allowed Cadence to start selling its injectable formulation of acetaminophen to hospitals just nine months ago.
—Life Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LIFE]]), the Carlsbad CA-based giant in biomedical diagnostics, settled an intellectual property dispute with Fluidigm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:FLDM]]), the South San Francisco maker of microfluidic instruments used to identify rare and valuable cells.
—San Diego’s CareFusion (NYSE: [[ticker:CFN]]) agreed to pay $150 million to acquire Rowa, a German maker of robotics used in pharmacies for the automated high-speed storage and retrieval of pre-packaged pharmaceutical products. CareFusion said the buyout offers an opportunity for the company to expand its Pyxis line of products in markets outside the United States.
—OncoSec Medical, a three-year-old San Diego company developing a proprietary electroporation technology that’s intended to make cancer drugs more effective, raised $3 million through a private stock placement. The company trades on the over-the-counter bulletin board as ONCSD.
—San Diego-based Apricus Biosciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker:APRI]]) sold BioQuant, its contract research organization (CRO) subsidiary, to BioTox Sciences for $5 million in up-front and future earn-out payments and a potential to get as much as $20 million over the next 10 years. Apricus Bio said it retained all NexMed-related research conducted by Bio-Quant as well as BioQuant’s profitable diagnostic kit business. Apricus, which was previously a New Jersey life sciences company known as NexMed, moved to San Diego after it acquired BioQuant about eight months ago.
