West Coast Biotech Roundup: MappBio, Juno, Zosano, and More

The IPO window is still open, sort of, but life sciences companies are not getting through unscathed. San Francisco-based Tobira Therapeutics and New York’s Microlin Bio postponed their offerings after Lexington, MA-based T2 Biosystems and Switzerland’s Auris Medical slashed the terms of their Nasdaq IPOs this week. Now all eyes are on San Diego-based Otonomy, which like Auris specializes in treatments for ear diseases and disorders, and was expected to go public in the next week or so. According to the IPO investment firm Renaissance Capital, 185 companies have gone public so far this year in the U.S., about 55 percent more than the number at this time last year.

—Cancer immunotherapeutics developer Juno Therapeutics of Seattle said Monday it has raised a $134 million Series B round to bring its total cash raised to $310 million. The round includes ten public mutual funds and healthcare-focused funds, all new to Juno, according to the company, which did not disclose the investors’ names. All “major” prior investors also joined the round. Juno’s top investors in its $176 million Series A included ARCH Venture Partners, the state of Alaska’s Permanent Fund, Venrock’s public-investment fund, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’s personal investment vehicle, known as Bezos Expeditions.

—An experimental drug given in Liberia to two Americans healthcare workers infected with the deadly Ebola virus was produced by Mapp Biopharmaceutical, a small San Diego biotech founded in 2003. With funding provided by U.S. and Canadian bio-defense grants, MappBio worked with LeafBio, a San Diego commercialization partner, and Defyrus, a private bio-defense company in Toronto, Canada, to make ZMapp, a drug cocktail composed of three “humanized” monoclonal antibodies. According to David Kroll in Forbes, ZMapp helps to stimulate an immune response to the Ebola virus. MappBio says the drug was only identified eight months ago and has not been evaluated for safety in humans.

—ProteinSimple, a Santa Clara, CA, startup developing technology and software to analyze proteins, withdrew its IPO filing after Minneapolis, MN-based Bio-Techne (NASDAQ: [[ticker:TECH]]) said it had finalized its $300 million acquisition of the California startup. ProteinSimple, founded in 2000, has about 200 employees and booked

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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.