San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Vical, Sequenom, Sophiris, and More

drug intended to treat benign prostate enlargement, had intended to sell 5 million shares of its stock at $13 per share. But the company was forced to flip the terms of its IPO to instead offer 13 million shares at $5 a share—and lost over 10 percent in first-day trading. Why was there resistance? In a phone call earlier this week, John McCamant of the Berkeley, CA-based Medical Technology Stock Letter attributed the biotech’s difficulties to indifference on Wall Street. “They’re all in the Hamptons,” McCamant told me. Sophiris closed yesterday at $4.77 a share.

—San Diego-based Fate Therapeutics, which is developing therapies based on adult stem cell modulators, registered to become a public company through an IPO. In a regulatory filing, the company outlined its plans to raise as much as $69 million, although Fate said the number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have not been determined.

—In his BioBeat column, Luke updated his list of the life sciences Twitterati—the people who contribute in a meaningful way to the Twitter stream of consciousness that he follows for news, gossip, and insights in healthcare, biotechnology, medical devices, and related fields.

— San Diego-based Sequenom (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SQNM]]), which specializes in molecular diagnostics and genetic analysis, said it would lay off 75 employees, or nearly 13 percent of its workforce, as part of a cost-cutting plan. The layoffs are part of a cost-cutting reorganization the company is undertaking after incurring

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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.