San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Allergan, Qualcomm Life, & More

marketing its 2net Platform technology and services in Europe. In a statement, Qualcomm Life said two of its European customers, Italy’s Telbios and Spain’s Cystelcom, already are using the technology. Telbios provides remote health monitoring services for chronic care and disease management. Cystelcom, an engineering software development company, created mHealthAlert as an open remote monitoring platform for chronic disease patients to reduce readmissions and the length of their hospital stay.

—San Diego’s Auspex Pharmaceuticals, which just raised $25 million to fund late-stage trials of its deuterium-based analog of tetrabenazine (Xenazine), said a U.S. patent granted for SD-900, another drug in its pipeline, validates the company’s innovative approach to drug development. SD-900 is a deuterium-based analog of the JAK kinase inhibitor tofacitinib, approved by the FDA for treating rheumatoid arthritis. In a statement from Auspex, CEO Larry Fritz said, “The issuance of a composition-of-matter patent for SD-900 is strong validation of Auspex’s technological approach to the creation of important new drugs.”

—San Diego-based Illumina, (Nasdaq: [[ticker:ILMN]]) identified the winners of its MiSeq grant program, gleaned from nearly 850 applications submitted by scientists in more than 40 countries. They are: Ramunas Stepanauskas of Maine’s Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, for sequencing single cells from unculturable strains of bacteria in the dark ocean; Stephen Doyle of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, for investigating drug resistance in African river blindness; and Karin Haack of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio, TX, for targeted resequencing of genes implicated in cardiovascular disease. Each winner gets a MiSeq genetic sequencing machine and related products and services valued at more than $150,000.

 

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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.