San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Santarus, Cytori, IPOs, and More

This was a big week for life sciences news in San Diego. A very big week. So without further ado:

—Salix Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SLXP]]) of Raleigh, NC, said it’s buying San Diego-based Santarus (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SNTS]]) in a deal valued at $2.6 billion. Santarus, founded in 1996, has built up a diverse portfolio of drugs for treating ulcerative colitis, diabetes, and other ailments through acquisition rather than internal drug development. Santarus has ranked as San Diego’s largest drug company since Bristol-Myers Squibb acquired Amylin in mid-2012 for $5.3 billion. As usual, the lingering question for San Diego’s life sciences community is whether Salix will retain any Santarus operations here.

—The billionaire banker and philanthropist T. Denny Sanford committed $100 million to establish the Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center at UC San Diego to accelerate development of drugs and cell therapies arising from human stem cell research. In a statement, UC San Diego said the new Sanford Center is intended to integrate stem cell R&D with new therapeutic treatments at four locations—the UC San Diego Jacobs Medical Center and a nearby proposed clinical space (both scheduled to open in 2016); the UC San Diego Center for Advanced Laboratory Medicine; and the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine.

—San Diego’s Cytori Therapeutics said it received $12 million as the first installment in 30-year exclusive licensing agreement with Beijing-based Lorem Vascular that is expected to eventually be worth as much as $531 million. The agreement enables Lorem to commercialize Cytori Cell Therapy for the cardiovascular, renal, and diabetes markets in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia. Cytori Cell Therapy is based on the company’s Celution System, technology that uses stem cells derived a patient’s own fat cells in treating a range of injuries and conditions. Lorem Vascular plans to offer the therapy immediately in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia, and introduce it in China and Malaysia following regulatory approvals expected next year.

—Celladon, a San Diego biopharmaceutical developing new drugs for treating heart disease, is ready to begin trading on the Nasdaq market under the ticker symbol CLDN. The 13-year-old company plans to raise $75 million in a pending IPO that

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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.