SD Life Sciences Roundup: Illumina, Sophiris Bio, & New Funding Deals

The clock is ticking down on the shareholder vote for Roche’s unsolicited offer to buy San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]). We also saw a bunch of new funding deals for local life sciences companies, so get your briefing now.

—In a letter sent ahead of Illumina’s showdown shareholder meeting—set for April 18—CEO Jay Flatley and Chairman William Rastetter urged shareholders to reject moves by Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, to acquire the San Diego company in a $6.7 billion hostile takeover. Roche wants to increase Illumina’s board of directors and has submitted its own slate of nominees in a bid to force its offer through. In their letter opposing the deal, Flatley and Rastetter cite a BioBeat column Luke wrote that offers five reasons why Illumina should fight Roche’s low-ball bid. Roche moved to acquire Illumina in January; its latest offer is $51 a share.

—Stock in a new San Diego drug development company, Sophiris Bio, began trading today at 55 cents a share on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SHS. Sophiris, which has a late-stage drug targeting benign prostatic hyperplasia (enlarged prostate), moved to San Diego last year from Vancouver, B.C., where the company was known as Protox Therapeutics. A spokesman for the company says Sophiris also has secured more than $26 million in financing from the private equity firm Warburg Pincus.

—San Diego-based CalciMedica, which has been developing oral drugs that target calcium channels on the surface of cells, has raised $13.2 million in debt and rights to securities, according to

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.