Apricus Bio Wins Third FDA Clearance, Aethlon to Test Blood Filtering Device, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

There wasn’t a lot of news out of San Diego’s life sciences community over the past week, unless you count the executives at public companies who plan to give presentations at various financial conferences in coming weeks. We’ve got the best of the rest, and our briefing begins now.

—San Diego’s Apricus Biosciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker:APRI]]) says its NexMed subsidiary won FDA clearance for its third over-the-counter topical cream, a reformulated version of diphenhydramine hydrochloride and zinc acetate used to treat itching from insect bites, poison ivy, and other skin irritations. As with the company’s first two drug approvals, NexMed reformulated an existing treatment with a proprietary compound that helps increase skin absorption.

—Luke has recruited an incredible cast of life sciences futurists and genomics experts to discuss “Computing in the Age of the $1,000 Genome,” including Hugh Martin, the CEO of Pacific Biosciences, and Complete Genomics CEO Cliff Reid. Helping Luke moderate will be a few other all-stars, author and Wired magazine executive editor Thomas Goetz, and David Ewing Duncan, the author and Fortune.com columnist. Xconomy is holding the afternoon event on Oct. 24 at the Byers Auditorium on UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus. While that might seem a bit far to go, Luke says Illumina CIO Scott Kahn attended a similar event he held last February in Seattle.

—San Diego-based Aethlon Medical said it has arranged a series of tests at the Sarcoma Oncology Center in Santa Monica, CA, to study the effectiveness of its Hemopurifier blood filtration device in removing exosomes from the blood of advanced-stage cancer patients. The company says exosomes released by cancer have emerged as a novel therapeutic target in cancer, as they have been implicated in cancer survival, growth, and metastasis.

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.