Life Sciences Roundup: Halozyme, Avalon Ventures, Auspex & More

Image licensed by Depositphotos.com/Christian Delbert.

a recent regulatory filing. Auspex, which has raised a total of at least $17 million from CMEA Ventures, Costa Verde Capital, and Thomas McNerney & Partners, says deuterium replaces metabolically sensitive hydrogen atoms to create novel therapeutics.

—The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute awarded a National Institutes of Health grant to San Diego-based OrPro Therapeutics—not to be confused with Irvine, CA-based OrPro Prosthetics and Orthotics. OrPro Therpeutic’s Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Raser, told me in an email the $183,089 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant will be used to advance development of its lead product, ORP-100, a recombinant engineered variant of thioredoxin, for the treatment of cystic fibrosis.

—The La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology made the top 10 list of “Best Places to Work” in academia in the 10th annual survey by The Scientist magazine. In a list of best places to work in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, San Diego-based Genomatica made the list.

—Prometheus Laboratories, the San Diego specialty pharmaceutical and diagnostic company acquired last year by Nestlé Health Science, introduced a new proprietary test for patients taking infliximab to control their inflammatory bowel disease. The company said its test is intended to help doctors identify potential causes for loss of treatment response and to help guide patient management decisions. In its statement, the company says a loss of treatment response may be the result of insufficient infliximab levels, or it could be due to the development of antibodies to infliximab (ATI).

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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.