San Diego’s Otonomy, a two-year-old startup developing novel drug therapies for Meniere’s disease and other disorders of the inner ear, today named David A. Weber as president, CEO, and board member. Avalon Ventures managing director Jay Lichter, who co-founded Otonomy and served as CEO until now, is returning to his role as investor and director.
Weber was the founding CEO of MacuSight, a venture-backed startup in Union City, CA, developing treatments for ocular disorders, and he is a director at On Demand Therapeutics, a Menlo Park, CA, venture developing implantable drug delivery technology for use in opthalmology. Otonomy will remain in San Diego, Lichter told me by e-mail this morning.
Otonomy, which raised $38.5 million in August, has raised a total of $48.5 million since it was founded in 2008.”Otonomy is moving aggressively to complete IND enabling activities for our second product, OTO-201, and the proceeds from our recently completed Series B financing provide us with the resources to advance a third program into clinical development,” Weber said in a statement from the company. Investors include San Diego’s Avalon Ventures, Novo Ventures, RiverVest Venture Partners, TPG Biotech, and Domain Associates.
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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