San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Optimer, Ambit, AnaptysBio, & More

[Clarification 5/17/13, 2:05 pm. See below.] Antibody drugs seemed to be the topic of the week for San Diego’s life sciences community. We have the latest updates from RuiYi, AnaptysBio, and Optimer Pharmaceuticals, along with other developments.

—Ambit Biosciences’ (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMBI]]) stock price fell by 61 cents, or almost 8 percent, in its first day of Nasdaq trading—after the San Diego biotech cut the price of its IPO to $8 a share from an estimated range of $13 to $15 a share. Ambit still managed to raise about $65 million in its debut by increasing the number of shares offered from 4.6 million to 8.1 million. Ambit’s venture investors include OrbiMed Advisors, Aisling Capital, Apposite Healthcare, Forward Ventures, GIMV, GrowthWorks, MedImmune Ventures, and Roche Ventures.

—Senté, a San Diego skin care “cosmeceutical,” said it raised $2.1 million in a Series B round of financing that included new and existing biotechnology investors. Proceeds from the financing will help Senté expand its development capabilities and commercial operations, and extend its product line of medical grade skincare products. In a statement, Senté co-founder and board member Kleanthis Xanthopoulos said, “Our new investors share our vision of creating unique science based dermatological products that will have profound impacts on the skin.”

—San Diego-based RuiYi, a biotech founded in 2007 as Anaphore, laid out what a spokeswoman described as a  “ménage a quatre” (household of four) collaboration to advance its

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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.