San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Illumina, Sequenom, Acutus, & More

general corporate purposes, including R&D expenses, capital expenditures, working capital, and general administrative expenses.

—Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VRTX]]) plans to run a series of small clinical trials intended to test different combinations of antiviral medicines against hepatitis C. The Cambridge, MA-based company, which has significant operations in San Diego, says the series of trials it’s running with South San Francisco-based Alios Biopharma will help to identify a combination of drugs that can raise the hepatitis C cure rate while reducing the side effects for millions of patients.

—The non-profit West Wireless Health Institute said it began a year-long study of Sense4Baby, the San Diego institute’s first experimental wireless medical device for monitoring fetal vital signs, in Yucatan, Mexico, under a joint research agreement with the Carlos Slim Health. By providing wireless remote monitoring by clinicians and community health workers, the institutes are demonstrating their mutual goal of extending the reach of patient care anywhere.

—San Diego’s La Jolla Pharmaceutical, which trades on the over-the-counter market, acquired rights to an experimental drug from privately held Solana Therapeutics that appears to inhibit a specific immune response implicated in cancer and chronic organ failure. La Jolla Pharmaceutical also named former Solana Therapeutics CEO George Tidmarsh as CEO.

—London’s Advent Venture Partners said it has invested $2.2 million from its dedicated life sciences fund in Acutus Medical, a medical technology company based in San Diego and Zurich that is developing an electrophysiological mapping system to help treat patients with irregular heartbeats. Advent said its investment is part of a $5.4 million Series A Round that was previously disclosed. Index Ventures and company founders also participated.

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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.