What was the biggest life sciences news over the past week? It might be that five San Diego companies landed financing deals, grants, and payments. Here are our highlights.
—The U.S. Food and Drug Administration outlined a new strategic initiative intended to address industry criticism that the agency has been thwarting life sciences innovation through its bureaucratic reviews and overall unpredictability. “The number of new products in the development pipeline is not where we’d like it to be,” FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg told reporters last week in releasing a 40-page overview. “Timelines are long, costs are high, and rates of failure are distressingly high.”
—Mountain View, CA’s Complete Genomics said it has agreed to generate the whole genome sequences of 1,000 healthy senior citizens for a study underway at the Scripps Health system in San Diego. The trial dubbed as the Wellderly Study is enrolling people from 80 through 108 years old who are without long-term health complications. Scripps cardiologist Eric Topol, who is overseeing the Wellderly Study, wants to identify factors that have enabled them to live such long, healthy lives.
—It’s clear that the kind of fast and inexpensive genome sequencing to be used in Scripps Wellderly Study is provoking widespread attention. Xconomy is convening an Oct. 24 conference in San Francisco on the implication of fast and cheap genome sequencing and the role computing will play in this big story over the coming decade. In San Diego, Biocom has organized an Oct. 26 event to discuss how life sciences organizations can take advantage of advances in fast and cheap sequencing.
—Cyberonics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYBX]]) said it’s making an investment in ImThera Medical that could eventually total as much as $12 million if ImThera meets certain milestones. ImThera, which initially got $4 million in funding, has been developing an implantable neurostimulation device for treating obstructive sleep apnea. Cyberonics makes a neurostimulation device used to
