TEDMED Walking, FDA Clears Pacira Drug, Zogenix Close to NDA, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

Drug approvals and advances in new cancer therapies were the prevailing themes in San Diego’s life sciences news over the past week. Our briefing begins now.

—TEDMED, the exclusive medical and healthcare symposium that died in 2004 and was resurrected in 2009, is now the walking TEDMED. The entertaining show with a mix of big ideas, celebrity presentations, humor, and music that played at the Hotel del Coronado for the past three years said it is moving to Washington DC. Playing at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the nation’s capital will give the $4,000-a-person symposium a bigger stage and a more influential audience, according to Priceline.com founder Jay Walker, who led an investor group that acquired the show in April. About 850 attended last week’s four-day symposium in the San Diego area.

—Federal regulators approved a new pain-killing drug intended to put off the post-surgical need for opioids that was developed by Pacira Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PCRX]]), the Parsippany, NJ-based drug developer with operations in San Diego. The FDA’s approval marked the end to a protracted drug-development saga for the long-acting form of a pain drug called bupivacaine. Pacira plans to begin marketing the drug, branded as Exparel, in January.

—The FDA approved a new diagnostic test that was developed by San Diego-based Gen-Probe (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GPRO]]) to detect strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) that pose a higher risk for cervical cancer and precancerous legions. Gen-Probe said regulators approved its Aptima HPV test to run on TIGRIS, a fully automated, high-throughput molecular diagnostic system. Using a Pap smear sample, the company says its test detects 14 high-risk types of HPV, giving patients and doctors information earlier and more accurately.

—Luke’s BioBeat column focused on several cancer drugs the FDA approved in August, which he suggested could be a turning point in the decades-long battle against cancer. Instead of broad-based anti-cancer drugs, Luke says regulatory approval of vemurafenib (Zelboraf), brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris), and crizotinib (Xalkori) signals the

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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.