San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Regulus, Ocera, Lithera, and More

its legal status as a public company. MediStem stopped issuing regular financial reports in 2009, saying it was focusing its resources on ERC-124, a universal donor stem cell product. In a statement, MediStem says endometrial regenerative cells possess specialized abilities to stimulate new blood vessel growth and can differentiate into lung, liver, heart, brain, bone, and other types of tissue.

—Following recent agreements with Janssen Pharmaceuticals and Bristol-Myers Squibb, The Scripps Research Institute announced a partnership with Sigma-Aldrich (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SIAL]]) that gives the St. Louis, MO-based life sciences conglomerate faster access to discoveries for the synthesis and analysis of potential drugs. Under the agreement, the institute gets funding to expand its basic research and development of novel reagents from laboratories led by professors Phil Baran, Jin-Quan Yu, Benjamin Cravatt, Carlos Barbas, Phillip Dawson, and Nobel Laureate K. Barry Sharpless. Sigma-Aldrich is a leading supplier of laboratory reagents, diagnostics, and other supplies for the scientific community.

—Sapphire Energy, the San Diego industrial biotech developing technology to produce crude oil from algae, said it is expanding its partnership with The Linde Group of Munich, Germany, to commercialize its production of “green crude.” In addition to expanding the hydrothermal treatment process Sapphire developed, they will jointly license and market the technology into an expanded list of industries, including algae, municipal solid waste, and farm waste. Their five-year agreement extends development of Sapphire Energy’s first commercial scale, algae-to-energy production facility.

—San Diego’s Abide Therapeutics said it has identified an enzyme in the serine hydrolase family as a therapeutic target to slow and potentially reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Abide has created a proprietary platform that specifically targets serine hydrolases with selective small molecules. The Cure Alzheimer’s Fund has provided a grant to Abide and the UC San Diego School of Medicine to validate the new target, monoacylglycerol lipase (MAGL) for both Down syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease. Down syndrome is caused by chromosome 21 trisomy, which contains genes involved in Alzheimer’s disease.

—San Diego’s La Jolla Pharmaceutical said the FDA has granted orphan drug status for its drug, galectin-3, for treating a genetic neurological disorder called Niemann-Pick type C disease. It is the second orphan designation for drugs under development at the company. “We remain dedicated to developing novel treatments to help those suffering with unmet debilitating and fatal diseases,” CEO George Tidmarsh” said in a statement.

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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.