San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Evoke, Halozyme, Biocept, and More

San Diego Downtown, San Diego Bay

cancer stem cells as a potential treatment of glioblastoma (GBM) and other cancers. The original research was done in the lab of Santosh Kesari, who specializes in neurology and neuro-oncology. Sova Pharmaceuticals founder Gregory Stein is the founding CEO of Curtana.

—San Diego’s Sequenom (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SQNM]]) said it has hired Jefferies to review potential strategic alternatives for its genetic analysis business segment. The company said it does not plan to disclose or comment on developments regarding its review of strategic alternatives until further disclosure is deemed appropriate.

—San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]) named Dr. Richard Klausner as senior vice president and Chief Medical Officer, reporting directly to CEO Jay Flatley. Illumina said Klausner will lead Illumina’s strategies for advancing genomics into clinical medicine and public health.

—Germany’s BASF acquired Verenium, the San Diego specialist in industrial enzymes, for about $62 million. Verenium holds a catalog of enzymes collected around the world, and generates more than $50 million from sales of certain enzymes that are used as industrial to make certain biochemical reactions and processes possible.

—San Diego’s Aethlon Medical said the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has exercised an option to extend work on a dialysis-like device that could be used to reduce the incidence of sepsis, a potentially fatal bloodstream infection. Aethlon said the extension would provide more than $1.5 million to advance the program.

Pages: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

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.