A startup with a new approach to cancer drug development made its debut this week in San Diego. We’ve got the details, along with other local news in life sciences and industrial biotechnology.
—Effector Therapeutics, a San Diego startup developing anti-cancer drugs based on technology licensed from UC San Francisco, raised $45 million in a Series A round of venture financing. Steve Worland, the former CEO of Anadys Pharmaceuticals, founded Effector with UCSF scientists Kevan Shokat and Davide Ruggero, whose research has focused on translation control and cancer. Effector said it seeks to develop small-molecule drugs for targets that continue to drive a cell toward cancer, even after a key oncogene has been silenced. Investors include GlaxoSmithKline’s SR One, Novartis Venture Funds, Astellas Venture Management, Abingworth, Osage University Partners, U.S. Venture Partners and Mission Bay Capital.
—San Diego-based Ignyta, founded with technology from UC San Diego to improve the diagnosis and treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, said it has acquired Actagene, a San Diego startup developing personalized medicines for unmet cancer needs. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the deal broadens Ignyta’s model for “companion diagnostics”-–using its expertise in
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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