Vertex Sales Much Bigger Than Expected, Amylin Re-Submits Exenatide, Mini VC Fund Debuts, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

If there’s a common thread in San Diego’s biotech news over the past week, it would be perseverance. If you can persist with our briefing, you’ll see what I mean.

—Cambridge, MA-based Vertex, (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VRTX]]), which has a sizable presence in San Diego, said it generated $74.5 million in second-quarter sales of telaprevir (Incivek), its new drug for treating hepatitis C. Wall Street analysts had expected the number would be less than half that.

—San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMLN]]), Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly (NYSE: [[ticker:LLY]]), and Waltham, MA-based Alkermes (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ALKS]]) re-submitted an application to the FDA to market exenatide, its new, once-a-week version of Bydureon.

—San Diego-based Arena Pharmaceuticals, (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ARNA]]), which sustained a major setback last October when the FDA refused to clear its obesity drug, reported results from a recent study that could address part of the FDA’s objections. Arena said its weight-loss drug lorcaserin (Lorqess) was found in cerebrospinal fluid at much lower concentrations in human beings than in rats. The company plans to address each of the concerns raised by the FDA about its drug.

—San Diego-based BrainCells Inc., which has raised at least $77 million in venture capital since it was founded in 2003, has raised nearly $1 million in a planned financing of $14 million. But BrainCells is moving forward without CEO James Schoeneck, who joined the company more than five years ago, and Carrolee Barlow, who was the chief scientific officer. Consultant Robert Williamson has been serving as the company’s acting CEO.

—There’s a new venture firm in town, called Moore Venture Partners. Terry Moore told me he can make a difference in helping San Diego’s underserved startup community with even a small fund of $10 million to $15 million. Moore plans to invest in both tech and life sciences startups, and participated in last year’s $26.5 million Series B financing at San Diego-based Astute Medical.

—San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]) said it is working with the University of Oxford to sequence the whole genomes of 500 people with a range of life-threatening genetic diseases or disorders that pose major challenges in diagnosis, treatment, and care. The team plans to recruit patients from Oxford’s clinical community in an effort to identify genetic mutations that could be used to diagnose their diseases and optimize treatment.

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.