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

Shire’s regenerative medicine business be generating $1 billion in annual sales in five to seven years. Rakin says the goal is to make Shire a leading player in regenerative medicine, and the partner of choice for regenerative medicine startups.

—Carlsbad, CA-based KFx Medical, founded in 2003 to develop ways to fix tissues in a variety of orthopedic surgical procedures, said it got FDA clearance to market its medical device, a 5-millimeter anchor. The company says it will be able to expand into the rapidly growing market for foot & ankle repair. The venture-backed company’s investors include Alloy Ventures, Charter Life Sciences, Arboretum Ventures, Montreux Equity Partners, and MB Venture Partners.

—San Diego’s Sorrento Therapeutics, which is developing biotherapeutics for inflammation, cancer, and other conditions, said it landed a $300,000 Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer grant to advance its antibody treatment for Staph infections. The company says its approach disrupts “quorum sensing,” a bacterial communication process and a key factor in infectious virulence. Staphylococcus aureus infections include potentially the deadly methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) bacteria.

—Independa, an emerging wireless health company in San Diego, said it will use the 2net Platform developed by Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) new Qualcomm Life subsidiary it its Artemis suite of monitoring technologies. The 2net technology is intended to help resolve interoperability issues by providing a cloud-based service that enables different wireless devices using different technology standards to share data from medical monitoring devices.

—The UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge awarded its top prize, which includes $57,000 in cash and professional services, to Nasseo, a San Diego medical device startup developing new technology for dental and orthopedic implants. Two startups developing anti-cancer treatments, Sonrgy and Uroboros Technologies, took second and third place, respectively.

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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.