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

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commercialize Lovidia by early 2014.

—In a separate announcement, Elcelyx said its long-acting formulation of the generic diabetes drug metformin is meeting its main goal of significantly reducing fasting blood plasma glucose among patients during the first four weeks of treatment of a mid-stage trial. Final results are expected in late October. Elcelyx said its delayed-release formulation drug candidate, dubbed NewMet, reduces nausea and vomiting that some Type 2 diabetic patients experience while on metformin.

—San Diego’s Allylix, an industrial biotechnology company, said it was named one of 15 companies to win a Defense Energy Technology Challenge by developing a renewable, high-quality, and cost-effective high density fuel comparable to JP-10, the Pentagon’s existing petroleum-based fuel standard. Allylix has developed technology to genetically engineer yeast to produce a wide range of terpene-based products. A spokeswoman for Allylix said its sustainably produced terpenes can be used directly as high density fuels or as additives to other hydrocarbons to improve the performance characteristics of a given fuel. The third annual Defense Energy Technology Challenge was managed by the Clean Technology and Sustainable Industries Organization in partnership with the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force.

—San Diego-based Halozyme Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:HALO]]) said the European Commission has given Roche, one of its key pharmaceutical partners, marketing authorization for

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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.