San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Evoke Pharma, Isis, Otonomy, & More

San Diego Bay, Downtown San Diego

There was a spate of significant developments following the Labor Day holiday, as San Diego’s life sciences companies continued to take advantage of favorable market conditions. Here’s my rundown from a pretty newsy week.

—Otonomy, the San Diego startup founded by Avalon Ventures partner Jay Lichter to advance new treatments for Meniere’s disease and other ear disorders, raised $45.9 million in a Series C round of financing. Otonomy CEO David Weber said the capital is needed to advance two drug candidates, OTO-104 and OTO-201, to late-stage trials, advance a third drug program to clinical trials and for general corporate purposes. Otonomy said OrbiMed Advisors led the investment, which was joined by two new investors, Aperture Venture Partners and Osage University Partners, as well as existing investors Avalon Ventures, Domain Associates, Novo Ventures, RiverVest Venture Partners and TPG Biotech.

—Let the corporate integrating begin. ITC Nexus, a Warburg Pincus portfolio company based in Piscataway, NJ, said it has acquired San Diego’s Accumetrics. No financial terms were disclosed in the deal, which combines ITC’s hemostasis management and point-of-care testing business with Accumetrics’ diagnostic device for assessing how well a patient is responding to antiplatelet therapies. Accumetrics had raised over $74 million in VC funding from Arnerich Massena & Associates, BBT Fund, Essex Woodlands Health Ventures, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, PTV Sciences, and RiverVest Partners. The combined company will assume a new name, Accriva Diagnostics, which will be based in San Diego.

—San Diego-based Evoke Pharma, which is developing a nasal spray for treating diabetic gastroparesis, set the price range for 2.1 million shares being offered in its IPO at between $12 and $14 per share, according to a recent regulatory filing. The company now plans to raise at least $33.8 million in the offering. At the mid-range price of $13 a share, the IPO would give Evoke Pharma an initial market valuation of roughly $75 million. The company plans to trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol EVOK. Shareholders include Domain Associates (30.9 percent), Latterell Venture Partners (30.9 percent), CEO David Gonyer (13.8 percent), and co-founder Cam Garner (10.2 percent).

—San Diego’s Fate Therapeutics, a stem cell biotech company, priced the 4.6 million shares being offered through its IPO between $14 and $16 per share, according to

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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.