San Diego Life Sciences News: Trius, Optimer, aTyr, Ligand, and More

It’s been a week of big deals for San Diego’s life sciences sector. I also got an update on Connect CEO Duane Roth, who remains hospitalized with a head injury.

—Lexington, MA-based Cubist (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CBST]]) agreed to pay over $1.2 billion to buy San Diego’s Trius Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:TSRX]]) and Optimer Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OPTR]]), which moved its headquarters from San Diego to Jersey City, NJ late last year. Optimer has an FDA-approved antibiotic, fidaxomicin (Dificid) for treating C. difficile-related intestinal infections that are problematic at hospitals and nursing homes. Trius is nearing FDA approval for an antibiotic that treats MRSA, another antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection often acquired in hospitals. Cubist agreed to pay $707 million for Trius, and $535 million to buy Optimer.

—Domain Associates, the life sciences venture firm based in San Diego and Princeton, NJ, and Rusnano Mednvest, a subsidiary of the Russian state technology developer Rusnano, joined with other venture investors to sink $55 million in ReVision Optics, a Lake Forest, CA-ophthalmic company. Since Domain and Rusnano formed a partnership last year, they have participated in five U.S. funding deals that totaled $173 million, including investments in San Diego-based Lithera and CoDa Therapeutics.

—San Diego-based aTyr Pharma said it has raised $59 million in a combination of new equity and debt financing. ATyr plans to use the proceeds to stage multiple human proof-of-concept trials of drugs based on a new class of natural proteins called “physiocrines” in treating a variety of auto-immune disorders. Instead of blocking or inhibiting target molecules, physiocrines modulate the body’s natural immune response. ATyr says physicrines offer advantages to existing anti-inflammatory drugs through better selectivity, efficacy, and reduced side effects

—Duane Roth, the Connect CEO and former San Diego pharmaceutical executive, remains in intensive care at the UC San Diego Medical Center more than a week after he sustained a head injury while bicycling in the Cuyamaca Mountains east of San Diego. MRI diagnostic imaging showed no apparent brain damage, but he remains sedated, according to his brother, Ted Roth. While doctors see nothing that would prevent Duane Roth from a good recovery, Ted Roth told

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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.