Nestlé Acquires Prometheus, Trius Raises $30M in Private Placement, Canaan’s Bloch Discusses Advanced BioHealing Deal, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

We’ve been seeing some big life sciences deals in recent weeks, the latest being Nestlé’s acquisition of San Diego’s Prometheus Labs. Here’s our wrap-up of the past week.

—Switzerland’s Nestlé Health Science agreed to acquire San Diego’s Prometheus Laboratories in what one analyst estimated as a $1.1 billion deal. The Nestlé subsidiary has been on a buying spree, acquiring CM&D Pharma, which is focused on cancer and inflammatory bowel diseases, in February; and Vitaflo, which develops treatments of inherited metabolic diseases, last August. San Diego’s Prometheus, which has been in registration for an IPO since late 2007, also is a specialty pharma and diagnostics company focused on cancer and gastrointestinal disorders.

—San Diego-based Trius Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:TSRX]]), which is developing a new generation of antibiotics for treating multi-drug resistant infections, surprised me yesterday by disclosing plans to raise $30.2 million through a private stock placement. I recently talked with Trius CEO Jeff Stein about the company’s travails in raising capital through an IPO last year, and how government R&D contracts are supporting the biotech’s early stage drug development.

—La Jolla Pharmaceutical has been an icon of San Diego’s biotech community, but preliminary data from a preclinical study of a compound the company has been studying for repairing scar tissue could spell the end of the company’s 21-year run. In a statement Monday, the biotech says its LJP1485 compound will not show a statistically significant improvement compared to a placebo. CEO Dierdre Gillespie told me in an e-mail yesterday that it will still be a few days before another update is available. The biotech has raised $428.1 million without producing any commercial therapies, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

—San Diego-based ResMed ( NYSE: [[ticker:RMD]]), which provides technology for treating

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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.