San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Isis, Elcelyx, Acutus, and More

Biotech laboratory pipettes

Much of the big news in San Diego’s life sciences community over the past week was coming out of Chicago, where the American Diabetes Association was holding its annual meeting. We’ve got it all wrapped up here.

—San Diego’s Acutus Medical, founded in 2011 to develop minimally invasive technology for creating a 3-D mapping system for treating complex heart arrhythmias, said it has raised $21 million in a Series B financing round led by OrbiMed, the New York healthcare investment fund. The company says proceeds will be used to support its continuing efforts in research and development. Existing investors Advent Ventures and Index Ventures joined in the round.

—Banyan Biomarkers, based in Carlsbad, CA, and Alachua, FL (near Gainesville), said it raised $6 million from private investors to advance development of a blood test for biomarkers that indicate the extent of damage in traumatic brain injury. The company is now enrolling 2,000 patients at eight locations for a pivotal clinical trial funded by a $26.3 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. In a Q&A with UT San Diego’s Brad Fikes, Banyan CEO Jackson Streeter says there are 1.7 million brain injuries in the U.S. each year.

—The FDA has granted an investigational device exemption to San Diego’s Aethlon Medical for its blood purification device, a dialysis-like system for filtering life-threatening infectious disease and cancer glycopathogen particles from the blood. The FDA exemption allows a medical device to be used in a clinical study in order to collect safety and effectiveness data. In a statement, Aethlon said it has focused primarily on using the device to remove hepatitis C viral particles from the bloodstream.

—San Diego’s Elcelyx Therapeutics drew wide attention at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association in Chicago last weekend by releasing primary data for a mid-stage clinical trial of NewMet, a new delayed-release version of the generic drug metformin. Elcelyx said the study showed that metformin works primarily in the lower gut. If borne out in further studies, the results would dispel the

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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.