San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Cadence, Mast, Illumina, and More

select a few promising startup management teams, and invest $100,000 in each company in exchange for a 10 percent share of the company’s common stock. Russian billionaire Yuri Milner also will invest in the startups, which also can tap as much as $20,000 in debt from Silicon Valley Bank.

—AT&T said it has hired Eric Topol, a San Diego cardiologist, digital healthcare leader, and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, to serve as the wireless carrier’s chief medical advisor. Topol, who will continue in his various roles at Scripps Health and The Scripps Research Institute, will help AT&T move its digital healthcare technologies into the market.

—MD Revolution, a San Diego healthtech startup, said it closed a $7 million Series B round of equity financing that came entirely from individual investors. The round brings MD Revolution’s total venture funding to about $8 million since the company was founded three years ago. MD Revolution has developed online technology to help people improve their health and cardiovascular fitness.

—San Diego’s Sorrento Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SRNE]]) said it has expanded its rights to a formulation of the anticancer drug paclitaxel that is intended to increase cellular absorption. Sorrento said it added exclusive rights to polymeric micellar paclitaxel in Australia, Canada, and Mexico from South Korea’s Samyang Biopharmaceuticals. The company already has exclusive rights to the drug in the United States and 27 countries of the European Union.

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

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.