Early Histogen Study Offers Hope for Retreating Hairlines, Cadence Pharmaceuticals and Vertex Raise Lots of Cash, Unmanned Predator Begins New Air Patrol, & More San Diego BizTech News

It was the best of times and worst of times for the life sciences in San Diego last week. Stalwarts Cadence Pharmaceuticals and Vertex Pharmaceuticals raised cash to expand their businesses, while La Jolla Pharmaceutical and 4-D Neuroimaging basically went in the opposite direction. Biofuels also were back in the news, along with the unmanned Predator surveillance aircraft, so read on!

—San Diego-based Histogen CEO Gail Naughton was the “mane” attraction when she presented preliminary results of a hair re-growth study last week at the 4th Annual Stem Cell Summit in New York. In early results from a five-month trial, Naughton says the biotech’s injectable ReGenica compound stimulated new hair growth in men after 12 weeks.

—Cadence Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CADX]]) said last week it’s raising $86.6 million in a private sale of 12 million shares, which will be used to build its sales force and to market its new drug candidate, Acetavance. The San Diego biotech is working on an application for FDA approval of the drug, which is a form of the painkiller acetaminophen (the main ingredient in Tylenol) developed for intravenous use in hospitals.

—Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VRTX]]), which has 200 employees in San Diego and 1,300 at its headquarters in Cambridge, MA, is raising $320 million in a secondary offering of stock. The biotech is in the final, extremely expensive phase of developing new drug candidates for treating hepatitis C and cystic fibrosis.

—In a subsequent interview, Vertex chief financial officer Ian Smith told Luke the offering also marks a shift to “blue-blood” investment firms that prefer

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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.