drug was generally well tolerated. Santarus acquired rights to develop and market rifamcin in the United States in 2008 from Cosmo Technologies. About 10 million international travelers develop diarrhea primarily caused by bacteria every year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
—Nasseo, the San Diego-based startup that won the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge in June with its bonding technology for dental and orthopedic implants, has raised $154,000 from investors, according to a recent regulatory filing. The company, which plans to raise a total of $308,000, says its technology provides implant-to-bone bonding that is significantly stronger than conventional bonds.
—SpectraScience, a San Diego medical device company developing “optical biopsy” technology for detecting cancer, has raised about $260,000 of a planned round of $1.5 million, according to a recent regulatory filing. The company’s technology combines a low-power, fiber-optic blue laser with computerized spectroscopy. Since I profiled the company in 2009, Michael Oliver has stepped in as CEO.
— The National Institutes of Health named two scientists at the Salk Institute, Björn Lillemeier and Axel Nimmerjahn, as recipients of the 2012 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, part of a “High Risk-High Reward” program the NIH began in 2007. The Salk Institute said Lillemeier and Nimmerjahn will each receive $1.5 million over a period of five years. Nimmerjahn is a physicist and the award will support his research into microglia, the resident immune cells in the brain. Lillemeier is a biochemist studying signal transduction in the plasma membrane of T lymphocytes.
