San Diego’s life sciences community experienced an early December flurry of deals over the past week, led by Optimer, Volcano, Avelas Bio, and Biomatrica. We’ve got that and more.
—Optimer Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: [[ticker:OPTR]]), which recently opened a new headquarters in Jersey City, NJ, said it had signed an agreement with AstraZeneca to commercialize Optimer’s fidaxomicin tablets in South America. The deal could be worth as much as $23 million for Optimer, which developed fidaxomicin to treat diarrhea caused by Clostridium difficile infections. The company says its corporate headquarters and R&D laboratory are still in San Diego, and Jersey City is only Optimer’s new commercial headquarters. CEO Pedro Lichtinger lives in the New York City area, according to his LinkedIn profile.
—San Diego medical device maker Volcano Corp. (Nasdaq: [[ticker:VOLC]]), which specializes in devices used in the diagnosis and treatment of coronary and peripheral vascular disease, agreed to pay at least $36 million to acquire Menlo Park, CA-based Crux Biomedical. Crux has developed an innovative inferior vena cava (IVC) filter, used to treat pulmonary embolisms—a type of blockage typically caused by a blood clot that has broken free.
—San Diego-based Avelas Biosciences, a three-year-old biotech developing fluorescing peptides for use in cancer diagnostics, closed on a $7.65 million round of Series A funding, raised
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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