The week’s big news in San Diego’s life sciences sector came with the IPO filing by Regulus Therapeutics. The proposed IPO also will test relaxed rules for emerging companies under the new Jump Start Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. It will be a story worth following, and you can get started here.
—After signing partnerships with AstraZeneca and Biogen-Idec, San Diego’s Regulus Therapeutics filed for an initial public offering that would raise $57.5 million. Regulus, founded five years ago by Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ALNY]]) and Carlsbad, CA-based Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ISIS]]) would use the proceeds to fund work on its pipeline of microRNA drugs in pre-clinical development for cancer, hepatitis C, cardiovascular disease, and fibrotic disorders.
—Fate Therapeutics, the San Diego startup developing new drugs from stem cell technology, has raised more than $9.2 million from investors, according to a recent regulatory filing. When Venrock partner (and former Idec Pharmaceuticals CEO) Bill Rastetter was named as CEO nine months ago, we reported that Fate had raised more than $50 million in venture capital from Arch Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, OVP Venture Partners, Venrock, and others. VentureWire reports that
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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