San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Illumina, Vital Therapies, and More

San Diego Bay, Downtown San Diego

Jones with the award during a CommNexus “Headliners” event on digital health innovation. In his new job at Scripps, Jones said, “I’m moving to a role where I think we’ll see the next phase in the history of wireless health, which is in validation of the technology.”

—After pricing its IPO at $12 a share last week, shares of San Diego’s Vital Therapies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VTL]]) oscillated around $12 a share on the Nasdaq market. Vital Therapies raised a total of $54 million in the initial offering, and has earmarked proceeds to advance development of the company’s artificial liver technology, which is intended to operate much like a dialysis machine for patients with severe liver disease.

—Solana Beach, CA-based Evoke Pharma said it has begun enrolling 200 patients in a late-stage clinical trial of its lead drug candidate among women with diabetic gastroparesis, a condition that slows stomach emptying, causing nausea, heartburn, and swings in blood sugar levels. Evoke has been developing a formulation of metoclopramide that can be delivered as a nasal spray. The company says the drug gets into the bloodstream faster by using a nasal delivery rather than a pill taken orally.

—San Diego-based Accelrys (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ACCL]]), which provides software to manage scientific innovation, introduced two new mobile applications that support scientific collaboration and life sciences workflows. The company, which agreed to a $750 million buyout offer from Dassault Systemes in January, said the new offerings are available in the Apple App Store.

—Xconomy has hired Alex Lash, a longtime biotech reporter based in San Francisco, as our new National Biotech Editor. Alex was previously the biopharma editor of Start-Up, part of a prestigious family of publications at Elsevier that also includes The Pink Sheet and In Vivo. Xconomy also named longtime contributor Elise Craig as Xconomy San Francisco Editor. Our previous Xconomy San Francisco Editor, the inimitable Wade Roush, will remain in the Bay Area, but he has been unleashed for a more wide-ranging role as Xconomy Editor at Large.

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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.