San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Nucelis, Evoke, PharmAkea & More

Downtown San Diego skyline (photo by BVBigelow)

It was a week of diverse news from San Diego’s life sciences community, even with the Memorial Day holiday. From digital health to drug development, and a new center for stem cell imaging, here’s our wrap-up.

—The Eighth Annual Wireless-Life Sciences Convergence Summit kicked off in downtown San Diego with a featured talk by Joseph Kvedar, director of the Partners Healthcare Center for Connected Health in Boston. Chronic illness accounts for more than half of total healthcare costs in the United States, Kvedar said. Much of that burden could be prevented if people would change their behavior—by exercising, eating healthier foods, and adhering to doctors’ orders. The Center for Connected Health has been working on mobile apps and other technologies to help people change their unhealthy patterns of behavior. We got a preview of the industry from Rob McCray of the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance, which organizes the conference.

Nucelis, an industrial biotech using technology licensed from Cibus, commissioned a pilot-scale fermentation at the company’s new San Diego Headquarters. The plant houses two fermentation vessels, and has room to expand. The three-year-old company plans to test and optimize production processes for customers, using its Rapid Trait Development System (RTDS) to make non-transgenic changes in the DNA of bacteria, yeast, and other organisms. Nucelis said its first project is squalane, a clear oil compound used in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and specialty lubricants. Nucelis named Sean O’Connor, a former Chemtura executive, as CEO in March.

Evoke Pharma, a San Diego specialty biopharmaceutical developing a new drug for a gastrointestinal disorder, filed for a $23.9 million IPO. Evoke was founded to develop a new formulation of metoclopramide, the only FDA-approved drug for treating diabetic gastroparesis, a stomach disorder with symptoms that include vomiting, bloating, and pain. Evoke hopes to

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.