SD Biotech Roundup: Wireless Sensor Prize, Zogenix, Sangart, & More

Image licensed by Depositphotos.com/Christian Delbert.

The X Prize Foundation’s Peter Diamandis came to San Diego to announce the formation of a new incentive prize competition, while a variety of companies disclosed new funding deals. It’s all part of our roundup of local life sciences news.

—San Diego-based Sangart, which has been developing an oxygen-carrying compound for treating the effects of traumatic blood loss, raised $50 million from its biggest investor following an interim evaluation of a second mid-stage trial. An independent data monitoring committee unanimously recommended that Sangart should move to complete a second mid-stage trial without making any changes to its study.

—In a bid to stimulate the development of a new generation of wireless health sensors, the X Prize Foundation and Nokia unveiled the $2.25 million “Nokia Sensing X Challenge” in San Diego last week during the Wireless-Life Sciences Convergence Summit. X Prize founder and CEO Peter Diamandis told the audience, “My car, my airplane, and my computer have more biometric sensing capabilities that we do as humans. We should be creating gigabytes of data per day about our bodies’ health, monitoring every single moment, every single second of what we do.”

—San Diego-based Zogenix (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ZGNX]]) said it has submitted an investigational new drug (IND) application for a drug-and-device combo—the company’s needle-free DosePro drug injector and a once-monthly formulation of risperidone (Relday) for treating schizophrenia. Zogenix said initial clinical trials are planned to begin in the second half of the year, with results expected by year-end.

—Xconomist Evan Snyder, a leading stem cell researcher at San Diego’s Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, provided an overview of research and development in regenerative medicine and related efforts to commercialize stem cell technology. Snyder said developing new stem cell therapies can be a hard sell among private biopharmaceutical companies because 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.