Roche Acquires Anadys, Wests Create $100M Fund, Johnson & Johnson Makes Room for 20 Startups, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

Between the formation of the new $100 million West Health Investment Fund and the new wet-lab space Johnson & Johnson is hosting for as many as 20 startups, you’d have to say it’s been a good week for life sciences innovation in San Diego. Get briefed here or get left behind.

—San Diego’s Gary and Mary West, who provided $90 million to establish the West Wireless Health Institute, established the $100 million West Health Investment Fund to invest solely in startups that promise to drive down the cost of health care. Don Casey, the fund manager and West Wireless CEO, vowed that the fund would not cause a “balloon squeeze,” where innovation moves the cost from one part of the health system to another.

—Johnson & Johnson has refurbished part of its Pharmaceutical Research & Development facility in San Diego to provide lab and office space for as many 20 life sciences startups. Each startup will have to make monthly payments to stay at the Janssen Labs at San Diego, but J&J says there is no “quid pro quo,” and each tenant will get office space and access to a common area with wet lab research equipment that would be difficult for a company to afford on its own.

—Anadys Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ANDS]]), the San Diego-based biotech developing antiviral drugs for treating hepatitis, agreed to an all-cash buyout offer worth $230 million from Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant. Roche’s offer to pay $3.70 for each Anadys share was a 256 percent premium over the previous trading day’s close of $1.04. Anadys had just released encouraging results from a mid-stage clinical trial of its lead hepatitis C drug.

—Venture capital firms invested $6.95 billion in 876 deals throughout the United States—including $202 million in 21 venture deals in the San Diego area—during the three months that ended Sept. 30, according to the MoneyTree Report. The third-quarter survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association, and Thomson Reuters also highlighted a shift in VC activity, with a pullback in funding for life sciences. That was also true in San Diego, where nine life sciences companies got $26 million, or 13 percent of total VC investments here.

—Following a two-year setback, San Diego’s Sequenom (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SQNM]]) rolled out a laboratory-developed blood test that can determine with

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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.