San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Tandem, Sorrento, Volcano, & More

[Updated 11/14/13 3:40 pm to show that Celladon postponed its IPO.] Another San Diego life sciences company completed its IPO, and at least one more local IPO (Biocept) is waiting in the wings for its moment in the spotlight. (San Diego’s Celladon has postponed its IPO.) We have details, along with the rest of the news.

—San Diego-based Sorrento Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SRNE]]) is taking another step in a turnaround saga that began four years ago when the biotherapeutics company merged with an inactive public company, Florida-based QuikByte Software. In a statement today, Sorrento says it is acquiring San Diego’s Concortis Biosystems in a stock deal valued at roughly $12 million. The buyout gives Sorrento proprietary linkers and toxins for creating antibody-drug conjugates. As part of its transformation, Sorrento has completed a $35 million financing in recent months, acquired the late stage cancer drug Cynviloq (a new formulation of Abraxan) and acquired resiniferatoxin, an early stage, non-opiate painkiller.

—Shares of San Diego’s Tandem Diabetes Care (NASDAQ: [[ticker:TNDM]]) began trading sharply higher on the Nasdaq exchange this morning, after the medical device maker became the seventh life sciences company in the region to go public this year. Tandem Diabetes Care, which makes a next-generation insulin pump, increased the size of its initial public stock offering yesterday, from 7.1 million shares to 8 million shares, and sold at $15 a share—at the high end of its expected range. Early trading today was above $19 a share.

—Engaged Capital, a Newport Beach investment firm headed by former Relational Investors partner Glenn Welling, has acquired a 5.1 percent stake in San Diego medical device company Volcano (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VOLC]]), according to a regulatory filing—and encouraging buyout speculation. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Welling said Volcano “is a very attractive acquisition candidate for the large medical device players within the cardiac space.” Potential buyers include Abbott and Medtronic. Welling said his firm has been talking with Volcano about ways to increase the stock’s value. Volcano makes products that help improve cardiac procedures.

—I got a chance to talk with Arena Pharmaceuticals CEO Jack Lief a few days after the San Diego diabetes drug developer said it had expanded its drug commercialization agreement with the Japanese drug giant Eisai. The revised deal enables Arena to work more broadly with Esai to evaluate other potential uses of lorcaserin, Arena’s weight-loss drug, such as helping smokers to quit.

—San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]) named Francis deSouza as president, a new executive position. DeSouza, who was previously the president of products and services at Symantec, will lead Illumina’s business units and “core functions that envision, develop, and produce the company’s products.” He will report to Illumina CEO Jay Flatley, and also be responsible for directing the company’s strategy, planning, and operations.

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.