Healthcare Venture Investment Deals Climbing Back, Halozyme Sells Its Diagnostics Business, Dry Lab Biotechs Cluster in Carmel Valley, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

We took a long Columbus Day weekend here at Xconomy, but it didn’t shorten our roundup of life sciences news much. Here’s your latest update.

—Healthcare venture capital deals continue to climb back from their first-quarter plunge during the three months that ended September 30, according to the latest report from CB Insights, a New York firm that tracks investments in private companies. Venture firms invested $1.75 billion in 184 healthcare deals during the quarter, which sounds good, but it’s below the $1.9 billion that went into 192 healthcare companies during the same quarter of 2009.

—San Diego-based Synthetic Genomics and the nonprofit J. Craig Venter Institute are forming a new company called Synthetic Genomics Vaccines that will use the latest advances in synthetic biology and genomic sequencing to develop next-generation vaccines. The Venter Institute is contributing science and scientists, but no money.

—Albuquerque, NM-based Exagen Diagnostics is buying the San Diego-based diagnostics business of Cypress Bioscience (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYPB]]) for as much as $8 million in upfront and milestone payments. Cypress also hopes to get additional future payments in the form of royalties on product sales.

—San Diego’s VentiRx, which also has operations in Seattle, said its lead drug candidate for nasal allergies helped to relieve common allergy symptoms in a clinical trial of 80 patients who were exposed to allergens in a scientifically controlled environment. The VentiRx drug is intended  to be the first once-weekly nasal spray for allergies.

—Luke found the geography of biotech has

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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.