San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Aragon, Illumina, CareFusion, & More

We saw some sizable deals in the life sciences domain over the past week, including an interesting partnership that Domain Associates formed with Moscow-based Rusnano.

—The venture capital firm Domain Associates and Moscow-based Rusnano, the government-owned Russian Corporation of nanotechnologies, agreed to jointly invest $760 million on both sides of the globe. Under the deal, Rusnano will match mostly late-stage investments that Domain and its venture partners invest in Domain’s portfolio of U.S. life sciences startups. The partners also agreed to jointly establish a drug and medical device manufacturing facility in Russia, where technology licensed from the Domain-backed companies would be produced for the Russian market. Domain has offices in Princeton, NJ, and San Diego.

—San Diego’s Aragon Pharmaceuticals raised $42m in a Series C financing to advance its small molecule drug candidates that target hormone-driven cancers, including a therapy for castration-resistant prostate cancer. Aragon, founded in 2009, will use the proceeds to advance cancer drugs capable of blocking and even degrading the androgen receptor (AR) and other sex hormone receptors.

—San Diego biotech pioneer Ted Greene was officially inducted as the 10th member of the Connect Entrepreneur Hall of Fame. The nonprofit entrepreneurship group hailed Greene as the founding CEO of Hybritech, which developed a monoclonal antibody assay system that led to a new generation of immunodiagnostics, and for his role in starting diabetes drug developer Amylin Pharmaceuticals and other life sciences companies.

—In a provocative BioBeat column, Luke argued that if Roche were successful in its hostile bid to acquire San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]), “it would be bad for Illumina shareholders, bad for the genetic tools industry, bad for science, bad for the

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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.