Elevation Partners Grabs $17M, NanoSort Wins Grants, NIH Collaborates with Afraxis on Rare Disease R&D, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

Funding needed to advance innovative technologies came in small dollops for several local life sciences startups last week, although one company got a big serving. Our weekly briefing begins now.

—San Diego’s Elevation Partners, which has been developing a long-lasting aerosol drug for treating chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, took in a $17 million tranche in a Series A financing that was previously disclosed. The company also reported some of its clinical results at the European Respiratory Society meeting in Amsterdam.

—The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a two-year, $297,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant and a nine-month, $198,000 contract to San Diego-based NanoSort to develop devices capable of detecting circulating tumor cells using two new approaches. NanoSort, a development-stage biomedical device company, said it is working to use lab-on-a-chip technologies to drastically reduce the size and cost of high-performance flow cytometers and related equipment for research, diagnostics, and drug discovery.

—San Diego’s Naviscan, which won European clearance earlier this month to market its high-resolution Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanners, raised almost all of a nearly $400,000 round of debt, rights, and securities, according to a recent regulatory filing. The scanner is predominantly used for mammography and guided breast biopsies. Since 2007, Naviscan has raised more than $17.5 million from Mayo Medical Ventures, QuestMark Partners, Sanderling Ventures and Walker Ventures, according to VentureWire.

—Connect, the nonprofit group supporting innovation and entrepreneurship in San Diego, named 24 finalists for its annual Most Innovative Product awards, including six life sciences entries. The San Diego-area finalists selected for innovative products in diagnostics and research are Biocept, Life Technologies, and Targeson. The finalists selected for

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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.