San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Halozyme, Sophiris, Arena, & More

stockholders on July 31 to vote on the $3.7 billion buyout offer from Bedford, MA-based Hologic (NASDAQ: [[ticker:HOLX]]). In a statement released by the two companies, Gen-Probe Chairman and CEO Carl Hull has agreed to serve as a senior vice president and general manager of the combined company’s diagnostics business for at least 15 months.

—San Diego’s Arena Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ARNA]]) said it has filed an application with regulators in Switzerland to market its lorcaserin weight-loss drug there. It is the third such application that Arena has filed for the drug. U.S. regulators approved the use of lorcaserin (Belviq) last month, and the drug is currently under review with the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Switzerland is not part of the EMA and requires a separate application.

—Steve Flaim, current chairman of Southern California’s Tech Coast Angels, offered some interesting insight about angel investments in life sciences deals when we talked about a new report that shows U.S. angel investing is holding steady so far this year. Flaim said some savvy Web and social media investors are shifting their investment focus to life sciences. “If you kind of sniff around the corners of healthcare,” Flaim said, “you can find opportunities that align within the angels’ framework of investments over three to seven years.”

—San Diego’s Halozyme Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:HALO]]) made Luke’s list of “the best boring companies in biotech.” In his BioBeat column, Luke explained that he based his list on companies that have accomplished something noteworthy without getting much media attention. Halozyme is focused on what happens outside the cell, in the extracellular matrix, and has developed a family of recombinant human enzymes designed to boost or aid the effects of biologic drugs.

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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.