It was a good week for raising capital in San Diego’s life sciences community. We have a rundown of the big deals and other news, too.
—San Diego’s MEI Pharma (Nasdaq: [[ticker:MEIP]]), a cancer drug developer headed by former Favrille founder Dan Gold, arranged a private financing with Vivo Ventures and New Leaf Venture Partners, which purchased $27.5 million of common stock and warrants. The company said the proceeds would be used mostly to begin work on an epigenetic regulator drug, Pracinostat, that MEI acquired in August. The drug has shown promise in treating blood cancers such as myelodysplastic syndrome and acute myeloid leukemia.
—San Diego’s Ambit Biosciences closed the first $25 million tranche of a $50 million round of financing, which will be used to move its lead drug candidate, quizartinib, to late stage trials. Existing investor OrbiMed Advisors led the financing with participation from other existing Ambit investors including Aisling Capital, Apposite Healthcare, Roche Ventures, GrowthWorks, MedImmune Ventures, Forward Ventures, GIMV, and Radius Ventures. Ambit Biosciences has been developing
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.
View all posts by Bruce V. Bigelow
