treatment strategy that was identified by Susumu Tonegawa, a Nobel laureate and MIT professor of biology and neuroscience, and has been funded by San Diego’s Avalon Ventures.
—Cibus Global, a San Diego-based agricultural biotech, raised about half of a $2 million round of equity and rights, according to a recent regulatory filing. As we’ve previously reported, the company has been developing proprietary technology to develop a desired genetic trait, such as resistance to a widely used weed killer, in certain high-value crops.
—San Diego-based Asteres, which is developing an automated kiosk for dispensing prescription and over-the-counter drugs, raised $750,000 in debt and securities, according to a regulatory filing. Asteres was founded at least six years ago by Linda Pinney, a longtime vice president for business development at Pyxis (now part of CareFusion). Astere’s venture investors include Forward Ventures, Pacific Venture Group, and Sanderling Ventures.
—Abbott Biotech Ventures made an undisclosed investment in Del Mar, CA-based NeuroGenetic Pharmaceuticals, a two-year-old startup developing a drug intended to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. NeuroGenetic says its experimental drug is expected to prevent the deposition of amyloid plaques in the brain, thereby precluding neuronal cell death and the dementia associated with Alzheimer’s. The funding is intended to advance pre-clinical development to the point of enabling the startup to initiate clinical trials.
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.
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