food enzymes and oilseed processing business. DSM acquired assets last year from San Diego’s Verenium in a deal valued at $37 million.
—GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: [[ticker:GSK]]), AstraZeneca (NYSE: [[ticker:AZN]]), Cubist Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CBST]]), and Japan’s Astellas have reportedly expressed interest in buying San Diego’s Optimer Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OPTR]]). Optimer Pharmaceuticals‘ headquarters moved from San Diego, where the company was founded, to New Jersey as former Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell took over as CEO.
—San Diego’s Genalyte said it has a new diagnostic test to determine if a therapy is triggering an unwanted immune response to a drug. The company says anti-drug antibodies can reduce the efficacy of a drug and cause a variety of harmful effects. Genalyte says its assay streamlines testing for both mouse and human samples, “providing real-time detection without the use of dyes, fluorescent probes or radioactive labels.”
—San Diego’s Organovo, which currently trades over the counter, has signaled plans to apply for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq exchange. In a statement, the regenerative medicinecompany says its board approved a change in the end of Organovo’s fiscal year. Organovo’s current fiscal year began on April 1st and will end on March 31st each year.
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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