San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Qualcomm, Amylin, Organovo & More

Biotech laboratory pipettes

San Diego’s emerging agricultural biotech cluster has added three new companies, with DSM, ZeaKal, and Algenetix setting down roots here. I’ve got details about them below, along with the rest of the life sciences news over the past week.

—A White House initiative to spend $1 billion over the next decade to map the brain and determine how it functions could provide added funding to neuroscience researchers in San Diego at a time when federal spending on biomedical research is under pressure. Connect CEO Duane Roth told U-T San Diego he expects the project will induce significant local investment in science and entrepreneurial companies. By coincidence, a new RAND Corp. study says the financial burden of caring for people with dementia is outpacing cancer and heart disease in the U.S.

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), the San Diego wireless giant, also has been working at the frontiers of neuroscience. A startup venture backed by Qualcomm called Brain Corp. was founded in 2009 to develop radically different computer systems and software that are based on mathematical models of the way neurons work in the human brain.

—The shutdown rumors began flying soon after Bristol-Myers Squibb closed its $5.3 billion acquisition of San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals last year. Now it’s official. A spokesman for the New Jersey pharmaceutical giant told U-T San Diego’s Brad Fikes BMS plans to shut down its Amylin-related operations in San Diego by the end of 2014. About 420 employees will be affected, with a small number remaining to close the facility by March 2015.

—Last week a new San Diego agricultural biotech called ZeaKal announced itself with a $3.8 million funding deal. This week, an industrial biotech company called Algenetix said it has closed on a $2 million tranche of Series A funding to commercialize technology it has developed to improve oil productivity in microbes. The common thread in both deals is San Diego-based Kapyon Ventures, a new firm commercializing breakthroughs in industrial from global research institutes.

—The Dutch multinational industrial conglomerate, Royal DSM, officially opened a new office in San Diego with plans to expand into 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.