SD Life Sciences Roundup: Optimer, Illumina, & Deals, Deals, Deals

In an encouraging sign for San Diego’s life sciences sector, a number of new financing deals recently went to local companies. Here’s our roundup of all the news.

—Shareholder suits have begun to pile up after San Diego’s Optimer Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OPTR]]) shook up its leadership, citing concerns over a stock grant issued by a Taiwanese affiliate. The board removed founder Michael Chang as chairman (and asked him to resign from the board), and named former Pfizer (NYSE: [[ticker:PFE]]) CEO Hank McKinnell as chairman. Optimer’s board also dismissed the CFO and a vice president over corporate governance concerns.

—With the annual meeting for San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]) less than a week away, three proxy advisory firms—Glass Lewis, International Shareholder Services (ISS), and Egan Jones—have sided with the company in its proxy fight with the Swiss giant Roche. Roche is battling to control the Illumina board, which has rejected its $6.7 billion hostile takeover bid. Roche urged Illumina shareholders in a letter yesterday to vote their proxy cards for Roche’s slate of independent director nominees.

—There’s a new molecular diagnostics company in town. San Diego-based NexDx says it finalized an exclusive worldwide licensing agreement with the UC San Diego School of Medicine to commercialize discoveries made in the lab of rheumatology specialist Gary Firestein. NexDx raised about $250,000 six months ago to develop new diagnostics technology for rheumatoid arthritis. UCSD’s Firestein and Jonathan Lim of San Diego’s City Hill Ventures founded NexDx last year.

—Genalyte, a San Diego life sciences company developing a new approach for autoimmune testing, said it

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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.