San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: BeneChill, Sotera, Imthera, & More

—After naming former Boston Scientific executive Fred Colen as CEO last month, San Diego’s BeneChill raised nearly $15 million in a round that’s targeting a total of $25.6 million, according to a recent regulatory filing. BeneChill, founded in 2004, has been developing therapeutic hypothermia medical products. The company’s European headquarters is in Lausanne, Switzerland, and BeneChill has European approval to sell its intra-nasal cooling system—which induces therapeutic hypothermia immediately following cardiac arrest.

—San Diego’s Sotera Wireless has been busy getting its ducks in a row. After applying for FDA approval of its vital signs wireless patient care monitoring technology in August, Sotera raised $12.2 million last week in Series D financing. Sotera said it also signed a commercial partnership agreement with Kansas City, MO-based Cerner, the giant health IT systems provider. If all goes as planned, funding from the current financing round will be used to support the launch of Sotera’s “ViSi Mobile System” in early 2012.

—Melinda Richter, the founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Prescience International sat down with me to discuss her plans for the life sciences incubator going in at Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical R&D facility in San Diego. The J&J facility, known as the Janssen Labs at San Diego, will host 18 to 20 early stage startups. Richter, who will manage the facility under a contract with Janssen, said she wants to dramatically lower the costs for starting a life sciences company.

—Optimer Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OPTR]]) said it won approval to start selling its new antibiotic, fidaxomicin (Dificlir) in Europe as a new treatment for C. difficile infections of the gut. Japan’s Astellas Pharmaceuticals has the rights to

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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.