BioMed Realty Remains Mostly Mum About New BioMed Ventures

Bruce Steel has managed to stay more or less off the radar screen since the fall of 2010, when he was named as managing director of BioMed Ventures, an investment arm of BioMed Realty (NYSE: [[ticker:BMR]]), the San Diego-based real estate investment trust (REIT).

But as I’ve noted many times, San Diego is not exactly awash in local venture investors. So my curiosity was aroused when the San Diego Venture Group listed BioMed Ventures among San Diego’s investors during its recent summit. Steel also was elected to the venture group’s board at the end of last year, and he’s been turning up elsewhere too. BioMed Ventures was listed as a participating VC at the Rock Stars of Innovation Summit (organized in San Diego by Connect and Xconomy), and at the 2011 BIO Investor Forum in San Francisco.

When I caught up with Steel by phone, he told me he approached BioMed Realty CEO Alan Gold in 2010 with the idea of establishing an in-house venture arm at the company.

At the time, Steel was the chief business officer at San Diego-based Anaphore, which pays its rent to BioMed rival Alexandria Real Estate Equities. Before that, though, he served as a co-founder and CEO of San Diego’s Rincon Pharmaceuticals and as head of corporate development at Ambit Biosciences, where he says he got to know Gold and other members of BioMed’s team. Steel said his proposal “fit pretty well with some of the ideas they already were thinking of doing in terms of adding to the team.”

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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.