Rempex Raises $67.5M, Vertex Shares Tumble, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

an earlier $2 million round with Life Science Angels, according to San Diego TCA member Jay Kunin, who told me in an e-mail, “which is how I ended up on the board.” Kunin says he also is PharmaSecure’s acting CTO, but he won’t be moving to India, where the company’s technology team and data centers are based.

—San Diego-based Gen-Probe (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GPRO]]) wrote off $39.5 million of its $50 million investment in Pacific Biosciences, the DNA sequencing company based in Menlo Park, CA. “Even though we have both the ability and the intent to hold this investment for the long-term, we wrote it down because the trading price of Pacific Biosciences’ stock may remain below our cost basis for an extended period of time,” Gen-Probe CEO Carl Hull told analysts in a third-quarter earnings call. Gen-Probe said the write-down contributed to its net loss of $15.4 million, which contrasts with the $27.4 million profit posted in the same quarter last year. Revenue rose 5 percent to $139 million.

—Perminova, a San Diego startup developing Web-based software to manage the workflow at cardiac centers, raised $3 million in equity and secured a $4 million loan in a Series A financing. Perminova’s technology began as a database for tracking cardiac patient care but has evolved into a more comprehensive system for everything from patient scheduling to post-procedural documentation and billing.

—San Diego-based Optimer (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OPTR]]) generated almost $11 million in new revenue during the quarter that ended Sept. 30 from its sale of fidaxomicin (Dificid), its drug for treating intestinal bacterial infections caused by the C. difficile bacteria. Optimer reported a net loss of $26.8 million in the quarter, which prompted a sell-off in Optimer shares. The company’s stock price, which hit a 52-week peak of $17.95 on Sept. 23, has been trading above $11 a share in recent days.

—The Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute has joined the global network New York-based Pfizer has been building to foster collaborations between basic research and new clinical applications. The institute will be working closely with UC San Diego at Pfizer’s Centers for Therapeutic Innovation, which UCSD joined in August.

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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.