San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Tandem Diabetes, Santarus, & More

Image licensed by Depositphotos.com/Christian Delbert.

How the health care community reacts to the arrival of the nonprofit Nutrition Science Initiative could be an interesting experiment in itself. We have details about NuSI, along with the rest of San Diego’s life sciences news.

—San Diego insulin pump maker Tandem Diabetes Care has raised $36.4 million in a new round of equity financing targeting as much as $50 million, according to a recent regulatory filing. The FDA cleared the company’s wearable insulin pump in November. The latest cash infusion brings total venture capital funding for the company to more than $100 million. Existing Investors include Delphi Ventures, Domain Associates, HLM Venture Partners, Second Technology Capital Investors, and TPG Biotech.

—A nonprofit organization with the lofty goal of using rigorous and nonpartisan science to clearly explain how diet affects obesity, diabetes, and related diseases announced that it’s setting up camp in San Diego. The Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI) intends to fund nutrition research that applies rigorous scientific experimentation to the field, and communicate its findings to the public and decision makers. The initiative is backed by a multi-million dollar commitment for two years from a foundation created by the billionaire hedge fund manager John Arnold. Co-founder Gary Taubes blogs about the idea here.

—Georgia Proton Treatment Holdings, a subsidiary of San Diego-based Advanced Particle Therapy, has raised $30.8 million of a planned $93 million financing, according to a regulatory filing. The company is building the first proton therapy facility in the state of Georgia. The $200-million project with Emory Healthcare is expected to be the first facility in Georgia to offer advanced proton therapy for cancer patients. Advanced Particle Therapy has been working to build similar facilities throughout the U.S. In San Diego, construction of the Scripps Proton Therapy Center began in mid-2010.

—San Diego-based Santarus (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SNTS]]) said that rifamycin, its experimental antibiotic treatment for travelers’ diarrhea, met the main goal in a late-stage trial. The company said its

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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.