San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Lithera, CardioCell, and More

the industry needs clarity and certainty, and some highly technical markets tend to function better with tough, trusted regulatory bodies. My favorite line: “An unregulated Wild West free market is great if you’re selling books online or consumer smartphone apps. It’s not such a great thing when you’re talking about credit-default swaps or cancer drugs.”

—San Diego’s CardioCell, a new company spun out last year from Stemedica, said it has begun two clinical trials of a new potential stem-cell therapy for recent heart attack patients. CardioCell said its proprietary stem-cell technology has the potential to be more effective than other treatments for heart attacks. The company is running both a mid-stage study in the United States, and a late-stage trial in the Republic of Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

—Alexandria Real Estate Equities (NYSE: [[ticker:ARE]]), a commercial landlord for life sciences companies in San Diego, San Francisco, Boston, and other U.S. cities, has expanded its venture investment practice to include digital health startups, according to Dow Jones VentureWire. No specific deals were mentioned. At the end of last year, Alexandria listed investments of about $140 million on its balance sheet, according to its financial statement for the quarter ending Dec. 31. Most of that cash is invested in private companies, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of Alexandria’s earnings call.

—San Diego ranked among the top five metropolitan regions receiving venture capital funding for life sciences startups during the last three months of 2013, according to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis of fourth-quarter VC activity based on MoneyTree data . San Diego’s life sciences community ranked fourth in VC investments, and here is the rundown: San Francisco Bay ($550 million); Boston ($382 million); Seattle ($186 million); San Diego Metro ($95 million); and New York Metro ($83 million). The top five regions accounted for 73 percent of the dollars invested in life sciences companies in the fourth quarter of 2013.

—Dr. Laura Esserman, director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at UC San Francisco, became the first recipient of the Duane Roth Award, an honor created by the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center to honor champions of translational oncology. The award also is intended to recognize the contributions of the late Duane Roth, the Connect CEO and San Diego life sciences executive who died in a bicycling accident last summer. The award was announced as part of yesterday’s UCSD Moores Cancer Center Office of Industry Relation’s 10th annual Industry/Academy Translational Oncology Symposium.

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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.