Halozyme Therapeutics got a shot in the arm after the FDA decided that safety concerns over the company’s recombinant enzyme were limited to its drug program with Baxter. Here’s my rundown, along with the rest of San Diego’s life sciences news.
—The FDA allowed San Diego’s Halozyme Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:HALO]]) and Exton, PA-based ViroPharma (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VPHM]]) to resume clinical trials of a joint product they’re developing for a rare immune disorder. The FDA on Aug. 2 halted testing of the drug, which combines ViroPharma’s C1 esterase inhibitor (Cinryze) with Halozyme’s proprietary recombinant human hyaluronidase, or rHuPH20. The FDA had halted the trials due to safety concerns over antibodies to rHuPH20 that were detected in tests of another experimental drug called HyQ, which combines Baxter’s disease-fighting immunoglobulin Halozyme rHuPH20. Halozyme said the FDA’s concerns are now limited specifically to the HyQ program.
—I got a chance to talk briefly with Peter Attia, president of the new San Diego Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI), who told me the kind of exacting research he wants to do will require the use of metabolic chambers. Attia said he’s considering acquiring as many as eight of the chambers, and creating a facility for patients that would be much like a hotel—so they’re actually pleasant to be in.
—The San Diego-based West Health Institute said it used Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensing
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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