San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: RQx Pharma, Elcelyx, Lux, & More

Not a heavy week for local life sciences news. Here’s a quick wrap.

—San Diego’s RQx Pharmaceuticals said it signed a drug discovery partnership with Genentech, the Roche subsidiary based in South San Francisco, CA, that could result eventually in $111 million in milestone payments. RQx was founded two years ago with about $3.5 million in venture funding by a sole investor, San Diego-based Avalon Ventures, to advance a promising discovery involving the antibiotic arylomycin.

—San Diego’s Elcelyx Therapeutics raised $20 million in a Series C venture round led by the GSM Fund, a fund created by Eastbourne Capital portfolio manager Rick Barry solely to invest in Elcelyx. Morgenthaler Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Technology Partners also joined in the round. Alain Baron, who was an entrepreneur in residence at Morgenthaler, founded Elcelyx in 2010 to develop compounds that boost the signal along the appetite-control pathway that tells your brain your gut is full.

—The Chicago commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle ranked the San Diego area as the second-largest life sciences cluster in the United States, after the greater Boston area, in its recently released 2012 life sciences cluster report. It was a big jump for San Diego, which ranked seventh in the firm’s 2011 report.

—In his BioBeat column, Luke conducted an informal readership poll to get a sense of how the life sciences industry views the high prices some pharmas have put on new drugs approved by the FDA over the last year. The results are pending.

—Lux Capital, a venture firm that invests in energy, technology, and healthcare, said it closed its third fund with commitments totaling $245 million. Lux, which is based in New York, has a special limited partner in San Diego (Xconomist Larry Bock) and has opened a second office in Palo Alto.

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.