San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Health IT, Illumina, & More

Image licensed by Depositphotos.com/Christian Delbert.

San Diego’s digital health community was following a three-day hearing on health IT held in Washington D.C. The House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations said it was focused on potential regulations and taxes on smartphones, tablets, mobile apps and other health-related IT. My roundup of the rest of San Diego’s life sciences news is below.

—Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]) had some good news and some bad news on the patent front. The San Diego maker of gene sequencing equipment said a U.S. District Court in San Diego had granted its request for a summary dismissal of a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Life Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LIFE]]) in 2009. But a federal jury in Tacoma, WA, found that Illumina’s BeadChip array technology infringed a Syntrix Biosystems patent, and the judge in that case ordered Illumina to pay about $96 million in damages. Illumina said it plans to contest the jury’s findings.

—A new analysis from the San Diego-based West Health Institute estimated that making medical equipment and devices seamlessly communicate and share information could save more than $30 billion a year in healthcare costs and improve patient care and safety. The institute’s chief medical and chief science officer, Joseph Smith, was among the healthcare experts who raised concerns about FDA regulation of mobile health apps at a Congressional hearing Wednesday.

—Connect officially inducted Ron Taylor as the 11the member of the San Diego nonprofit group’s Entrepreneur Hall of Fame. Taylor oversaw development of the Pyxis Medstation as the founding chairman and CEO of Pyxis, a medical equipment business now operated by San Diego-based CareFusion (NYSE: [[ticker:CFN]]). At a luncheon ceremony Thursday, Venture investor and Pyxis co-founder Tim Wollaeger said, “Pyxis was not successful for the first three years, from 1987 to 1990. If it had been written off, nobody would have noticed. But Ron listened to the marketplace, and modified his strategy until it worked.”

—After touring a new proton therapy center in Seattle, run by the private company ProCure and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, Xconomy’s Luke Timmerman questioned the merits of the advanced cancer treatment in his BioBeat column. He cited

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

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.