While much of the life sciences news seemed to come out of the big BIO conference in Boston, San Diego still had its share of significant developments over the past week. Here’s my rundown.
—Merck (NYSE [[ticker:MRK]]), the New Jersey pharmaceutical giant, agreed to pay San Diego-based Ambrx $15 million—and another $288 million in potential milestone payments—for technology to deliver a double-whammy to cancer cells and other disease targets. As part of the deal, Merck plans to supply Ambrx some additional biological targets for technology that combines the precision of targeted antibody drugs with potent toxins in what Ambrx calls “antibody drug conjugates.”
—After almost three years as the chief business officer at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, Paul Laikind is now the president and CEO at San Diego’s ViaCyte, a preclinical life sciences company. ViaCyte has been developing a new cell therapy product for treating insulin-dependent diabetes. Laikind, who discussed his vision for business development at the Sanford-Burnham institute, was previously a co-founder at Gensia Pharmaceuticals, Viagene, and Metabasis Therapeutics.
—Carlsbad, CA-based GenMark Diagnostics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GNMK]]) said it has priced a secondary public offering of 10 million shares of its common stock at a price of $4.20 a share. GenMark, which makes automated molecular diagnostic testing systems to
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.
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