San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Regulus, Aragon, Cytori, & More

[Corrected 10/09/12, 1:45 pm. See below.] We saw some significant financing transactions in San Diego’s life sciences community over the past week. Here’s our rundown of those deals, along with other recent developments. It was a busy week!

—[Thanks to Greg Greenberg of suburban Kansas City for calling out my error on Astra Zeneca’s stake in Regulus.] Trading in San Diego’s newest public company, Regulus Therapeutics (Nasdaq: [[ticker:RGLS]]), opened yesterday at $4.73 a share—18 percent above its $4-a-share IPO price. Regulus dropped its offering price to that figure from an estimated range of $10 to $12 a share in the early morning before the market opened. Shares of the biopharmaceutical firm closed yesterday at $4.25 a share in regular trading. A Big Pharma partner, AstraZeneca, purchased $25 million of Regulus’s common stock in a private placement. AstraZeneca will own about 18.3 percent of Regulus’s outstanding shares after the offering.

—Aragon Pharmaceuticals, a three-year old San Diego biopharmaceutical developing drugs for hormone-driven cancers, said it’s raised $50 million in a Series D financing led by venBio, the life sciences private equity firm based in San Francisco. Existing investors Topspin Fund, Aisling Capital, OrbiMed Advisors, and The Column Group also participated. Aragon said the capital would be used to advance drug development, including of ARN-509, the company’s experimental drug for treating castration-resistant prostate cancer. In results reported earlier this week, Aragon said ARN-509 was well-tolerated in three different patient groups. The company has raised $88 million so far this year.

—Vital Therapies, a San Diego biotechnology startup focused on treatments for acute liver failure, said it had raised the first $16 million in a multi-stage commitment from

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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.