Optimer Raises $77.6M, Former Sequenom Patent Agent Pleads Guilty, IPO Lineup Includes San Diego’s Ambit and IASO Pharma, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

With San Diego’s Optimer and Conatus Pharmaceuticals successfully raising capital, and Sanderling Ventures reportedly planning to raise a new fund, it would be easy to think that the capital markets are opening a little for the life sciences sector. You decide.

—San Diego’s Optimer Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OPTR]]) completed a secondary public offering of 7.8 million shares, including all 900,000 shares granted to underwriters for overallotments. Optimer sold 6.9 million shares for $11.25 a piece in the offering announced last Thursday. The company raised aggregate gross proceeds of $77.6 million before expenses. Optimer has been developing a new antibiotic treatment for C. difficile, a potentially deadly intestinal infection.

—A former patent agent for San Diego-based Sequenom (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SQNM]]) and his brother pleaded guilty to federal charges of passing inside information about the genetic test maker to two Florida men who collected $646,000 from illegal stock trading, according to the FBI. Aaron Scalia of San Diego and his older brother Stephen Scalia of Baltimore, MD, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit securities fraud as part of an agreement with prosecutors.

—San Diego-based Conatus Pharmaceuticals closed on $20 million in an equity funding round led by AgeChem Venture Fund of Montreal. Conatus plans to use the proceeds to advance development of a new drug for treating hepatitis C.

—The San Diego-based West Wireless Health Institute named Ed Cantwell as a senior vice president, responsible for creating low-cost technology for delivering wireless health care in hospitals and other medical facilities. Cantwell was previously director of 3M’s wireless business and the founding chairman and CEO of Texas-based InnerWireless.

—San Diego’s Sanderling Ventures intends to raise a seventh fund, according to a report from PE Hub. The venture firm, which specializes in funding life sciences startups, raised $421 million for its previous fund in 2004.

—The number of IPOs in registration for U.S. exchanges increased to 121 at the end of 2010, according to a report from Ernst & Young. Among the 22 California companies waiting to go public are two San Diego life science companies: Ambit Biosciences and IASO Pharma.

—San Diego-based Genomatica signed a strategic agreement with Houston’s Waste Management to develop technology that can turn syngas into commercial chemical products. Landfills produce syngas, which is mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen, as waste is broken down by exposure to high heat, pressure, and bacteria. Genomatica plans to create proprietary organisms and manufacturing processes that use syngas as the raw material for making certain industrial chemicals.

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.