human health and well being. The institute is providing space for as many as 15 startups. HTL Life plans to provide as much as $250,000 in seed funding to each company admitted to the accelerator.
—Gilead’s (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GILD]]) chief scientist told the Financial Times that the Foster City, CA-based biotech is on the hunt for acquisitions while it goes prospecting for a drug as successful as its hepatitis C drug. Norbert Bischofberger, Gilead’s executive vice president of research and development, said the pharma is looking particularly for target companies that have drugs that are already proven to work in early-stage trials.
—Pfizer and BioAtla, based in San Diego and Beijing, have agreed to work together to develop and market new antibody therapies based on Pfizer’s antibody-drug conjugate payloads and BioAtla’s conditionally active biologics technology. Under their licensing agreement, Pfizer gets an exclusive option to commercialize BioAtla CAB antibodies targeting CTLA4, a validated immuno-oncology target in humans. BioAtla could earn as much as $1 billion under terms of the deal.
—Novato, CA-based Raptor Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:RPTP]]) said Thursday it plans to push ahead in a pivotal study of its drug for Huntington’s Disease, even though results from a Phase 2/3 trial had no statistical significance. Raptor said the results were clinically meaningful because
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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.
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