San Diego-based 4-D Neuroimaging, a small company that specializes in magnetoencephelography, or MEG, to detect bio-electric fields in the brain and other organs, has abruptly ceased operations.
A letter posted on the company’s web site explains 4-D Neuroimaging could not secure additional financing it needed to continue operations. Our updated San Diego layoff tracker is here. The company, which reportedly had 38 employees, supplied an advanced diagnostic machine, the Magnes 2500 WH, to hospitals around the world. Equipped with dime-sized superconducting sensors, the machine has been used primarily to pinpoint the site of neural electrical storms in patients diagnosed with focal epilepsy.
“I loved my job at 4-D, there was a wonderful group of people there,” said Rick Orr, who was an employee until he was instructed to clean out his desk Monday. He declined further comment.
“It’s a shame, it’s a good technology,” said Bob Fagaly, a onetime employee and expert in sensing technologies. “The people who started it came out of UCSD.”
The Feb. 16 letter on the company’s web site is addressed to 4-D’s customers, and is signed by CEO Scott Buchanan and board chairman Martin Egli. “Despite all the advancements of MEG as a technology,” it says, “the entire MEG industry has required continuing financial investments to offset its continuing losses. With the recent economic downturn, sustaining this type of investment has become increasingly difficult.”
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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