San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Receptos IPO, Isis, Versant, & More

Image licensed by Depositphotos.com/Christian Delbert.

Some of San Diego’s public life sciences companies have been buoyed as the stock market has soared to new heights in recent weeks (for the year, the Dow is up 13 percent and the S&P 500 index 12 percent), but Acadia Pharmaceuticals had an extraordinary ride yesterday. We have details, along with the rest of the area’s life sciences news.

—Shares of San Diego’s Acadia Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ACAD]]), a biotechnology company with $5 million in annual sales, jumped by almost two-thirds in heavy trading yesterday after saying it will file for a new drug application (NDA) sooner than expected. Acadia shares closed at $13.11, gaining $5.14 a share, or more than 64 percent. Acadia said it plans to submit an NDA for pimavanserin, its drug for treating Parkinson’s disease psychosis, by the end of 2014.

—It could be described as the ultimate hack: Computational neuroscientist Eugene Izhikevich is reverse engineering the human brain to duplicate its processing power with semiconductors and software. In a Q&A with Xconomy, the founder and CEO of Qualcomm-backed Brain Corp. talks about developing computer systems that model the biological processes of the brain.

—Receptos, a San Diego biopharmaceutical developing therapeutics for immune disorders, has disclosed plans to raise as much as $86.3 million through an initial public offering. In a filing with government regulators, Receptos said its lead drug candidate is in late-stage clinical trials as a potential treatment for multiple sclerosis. The five-year-old startup’s investors include Arch Venture Partners, Lilly Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Venrock, and Polaris Ventures. Receptos plans to list its shares on the Nasdaq market under the symbol RCPT.

—Menlo Park’s Versant Ventures is moving to replicate the business model of San Diego-based Inception Sciences, its experimental business model for spinning out new life sciences startups, by deepening its ties in Vancouver, BC, and Basel, Switzerland, according to a report by Paul Bonanos in the In Vivo Blog. Versant operating principal Jerel Davis is set to talk about Inception Sciences with CEO Peppi Prasit today at the Rock Stars of Innovation Summit in downtown San Diego. Davis told the In Vivo Blog Versant established a beachhead in Basel in 2008.

—Carlsbad-based Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ISIS]]) will get $30 million up-front, and potentially as much as $362 million in future milestone and licensing payments, after reaching an agreement to work with Roche to develop drugs for treating Huntington’s Disease. If the partners successfully commercialize any drugs, Isis also would receive lucrative royalties from future drug sales.

—Ambrx, the San Diego firm that has developed proprietary technology for optimizing antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), signed a cancer drug development deal with Japan’s Astellas Pharma that could eventually be worth as much as $300 million. Ambrx has developed a new approach for optimizing compounds that combine a small drug molecule with an antibody that targets tumors in specific ways. Ambrx, which gets $15 million upfront, granted Astellas worldwide rights to develop and commercialize ADCs for oncology.

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.