We saw a spate of funding deals and other activity in the week or so preceding Thanksgiving. Here’s our roundup of life sciences news, with best wishes from Xconomy for your Thanksgiving holiday.
—Allergan (NYSE: [[ticker:AGN]]), the Irvine, CA-based multi-specialty healthcare company, said it has agreed to pay $350 million upfront to buy the skin care business from Carlsbad, CA-based SkinMedica. The deal will expand Allergan’s line of skin-care products, which includes the wrinkle reducer Botox and skin filler Juvederm. SkinMedica’s products include Vaniqa, the only prescription product for reducing unwanted facial hair in women. Allergan said it will pay an extra $25 million if certain sales goals are met. The deal doesn’t include SkinMedica’s Colorescience makeup line, which will be spun out as a separate company
—San Diego’s Vital Therapies has extended its latest round to $86.1 million, according to a regulatory filing made earlier this month. The company, which is developing a product that combines liver cells with a medical device that could help people with acute liver failure, said in September that it planned to raise $76 million from existing investors. At the time, Vital Therapies said the capital would be used to
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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.
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