San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: IPOs, ResMed, Ventrix, CovX, & More

Biotech laboratory pipettes

Last week, there was only a trickle of life sciences news out of San Diego. This week the dam broke, and there’s a lot of news—including two IPO filings by San Diego biotechs.

—San Diego’s Sophiris Bio, a startup developing a new drug treatment for benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH), or enlarged prostate, plans to raise almost $75 million through an initial public offering. Sophiris plans to use the proceeds to begin two pivotal trials of its drug, a genetically modified recombinant protein, with the first study scheduled to begin by mid-year.

—After dropping plans for an $86 million IPO two years ago, San Diego’s Ambit Biosciences is back again. The biopharmaceutical, focused on kinase-inhibiting drugs for cancer, autoimmune, and inflammatory diseases, hopes to raise $57.5 million, according to a regulatory filing. Ambit’s lead drug candidate, quizartinib, is under clinical development in patients with relapsed/refractory acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and in newly diagnosed AML patients.

—Saying “Our society needs more heroes who are scientists and researchers and engineers,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and other high-tech leaders named the first 11 recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. The inaugural list includes Napoleone Ferrara, senior deputy director for basic sciences at the University of California San Diego Moores Cancer Center. The prize comes with a $3 million cash award for each recipient.

—Pfizer (NYSE: [[ticker:PFE]]) said it is closing one of its R&D sites, which the world’s largest pharmaceutical company created in San Diego with its acquisition of CovX in late 2007. A Pfizer spokeswoman confirmed the CovX closure, which affects about 100 staffers, to Fierce Biotech and U-T San Diego. CovX specializes in drugs that combine a bioactive peptide, such as oxytocin or leptin, with an antibody.

—Ventrix, a San Diego startup founded in 2009, said it plans to begin its first human clinical trial later this year after its VentriGel material safely and effectively improved

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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.