San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: IPOs, Illumina, KFx Medical, & More

The surge in U.S. initial public offerings has continued. According to the IPO experts at Renaissance Capital, there have been 44 healthcare IPOs across the country so far this year—the most in any sector. By my tally, at least 10 San Diego companies have filed for IPOs. Details on the latest filings are here, along with the rest of the local life sciences news from the past week.

—Celladon, the San Diego biopharmaceutical developing a gene therapy treatment for heart disease, has registered to go public. In a statement from the company, Celladon says the number of shares to be offered and pricing terms have yet to be decided. Celladon says it has filed its IPO registration statement with the SEC, but the filing has not yet become effective. Dozens of supporting exhibits are available on the SEC website, but not Celladon’s S-1 filing itself.

—San Diego’s Vital Therapies filed for an $86.3 million IPO, according to its SEC filing. The company said it is now conducting three late-stage clinical trials with its technology, an artificial liver. The company said its therapy is designed to help the patient’s own liver regenerate to a healthy state, or to stabilize the patient until transplant. Vital Therapies plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “VTL.” It did not disclose the stock price or volume it expects to trade.

—The flurry of S-1 registrations, which covers IPOs and other types of new stock offerings, also has included some convoluted life sciences deals. Mirati Therapeutics, for example, is a new San Diego biopharmaceutical company developing a line of oral cancer drugs based on kinase inhibitors that target specific mutations found only in cancer cells. In a filing with government regulators, Mirati says its stock began trading on the Nasdaq this summer (under the ticker symbol MRTX) following a stock swap with Montreal-based MethylGene that enabled the Canadian company to consolidate its operations and start over as a subsidiary of Mirati.

—Carlsbad, CA-based KFx Medical said a federal court jury in San Diego awarded KFx $29 million in a patent infringement lawsuit against

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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.