SD Biotech Roundup: Life Technologies, KFx Medical, Shire, & More

From dollops of cash to big project announcements, here is our roundup of San Diego life sciences news for the past week.

—Waltham,MA-based Alere (NYSE: [[ticker:ALR]]) recalled an additional 650,000 Triage cardiology screening tests after a FDA inspection of the company’s San Diego facility raised concerns about quality control. Alere recalled more than 803,000 tests last month, according to the Boston Business Journal. The diagnostic tests are used to diagnose heart failure and other conditions.

—Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LIFE]] has unveiled plans to establish a design and manufacturing center of excellence in Singapore. It will be the only Life Technologies owned-and-operated instrument manufacturing facility outside the United States, and will produce next-generation genome sequencing and molecular diagnostic instruments. A spokeswoman for Life says the company’s Asia sales rose more than 9 percent last year, and the volume of items shipped per day in the region quadrupled.

—In his BioBeat column this week, Luke described how the movement toward “medical genomics,” also known as “clinical genomics,” has started to take off. Apart from the fierce competition among companies like San Diego’s Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]) and Life Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LIFE]]) to sequence genomes at $1,000 apiece, Luke said demand for personal genome analyses has been soaring at companies like Cambridge, MA-based Knome and Foundation Medicine.

—Kevin Rakin, the regenerative medicine president at Shire, told me the Irish pharmaceutical giant is spending well over $100 million on the first phase of a new San Diego facility—and he wants

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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.