Sequenom Plans $19M Lab in North Carolina, Illumina Shares Plunge, PatientSafe Advances Device, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

It was a full and busy week for life sciences news in San Diego, with interesting advances in wireless health and a variety of deals. I’m planning at least one more report from the Wireless Health 2011 Conference, but in the meantime, here’s everything else.

North Carolina Gov. Beverly Burdue said yesterday that San Diego-based Sequenom (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SQNM]]) plans to build an $18.7 million molecular diagnostics clinical laboratory in the Research Triangle Park. Tar Heels state officials offered the diagnostics company as much as $2.3 million in incentives if Sequenom can meet certain hiring and investment goals. Sequenom, which currently has more than 280 employees in San Diego, would nearly double in size, as the North Carolina lab is expected to create 242 jobs over the next five years. Sequenom has been working to commercialize its noninvasive test for Down syndrome, which identifies a fetal marker for the condition that circulates in the maternal bloodstream.

—The Wireless Health 2011 Conference, a scientific and technical symposium, continues through today at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines. In a keynote presentation earlier this week, Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) CEO Paul Jacobs demonstrated a mobile app developed by San Francisco-based AliveCor that turns an iPhone into an electrocardiograph device. “The future is already here,” Jacobs said, quoting the sci-fi writer William Gibson. “It’s just not very equally distributed.” AliveCor raised $3 million in first round venture funding earlier this year from Qualcomm Ventures, Burrill & Co., and the Oklahoma Life Sciences Fund.

—The price of shares in San Diego-based Illumina plunged by 32 percent after the company posted disappointing third quarter sales of $235 million, about $40 million short of expectations. Illumina, the market leader in high-speed gene sequencing instruments, also withdrew its 2011 sales forecast “due to the many market uncertainties.” Illumina’s stock, which had been trading around $40 a share, fell to $27.08 on the news last week. Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]) shares closed yesterday at $26.04.

—I sat down with the chairman and CEO of PatientSafe Solutions, Jim Sweeney, who talked about the wireless healthcare company’s PatientTouch device, a souped-up Apple iPod Touch that’s been extensively modified to help

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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.