San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Fate, Ligand, BioNano, and More

The fate of Fate Therapeutics’ IPO has stirred speculation that the IPO window for life sciences companies may be closing. Forward Ventures’ Standish Fleming also offered some thoughts on biotech IPOs, and we have the rest of San Diego’s life sciences news here.

—San Diego’s Fate Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:FATE]]) made its debut as a public company Tuesday, after pricing its IPO at $6 a share, at the low end of its revised range of $6 to $8 a share. The biopharma is focused on developing drugs that enhance the therapeutic potential of adult stem cells to treat orphan diseases, such as certain blood cancers and lysosomal storage disorders. Fate said a month ago it planned to sell 4.6 million shares at $14 to $16 a share, but the new stock offering got a cold reception on Wall Street—and Fierce Biotech Editor John Carroll declared it had flopped. Fate had to lower its price by 57 percent and increase the number of shares offered by 31 percent. Fate closed in regular trading yesterday at $6.90 a share.

—San Diego’s BioNano Genomics raised $10 million in venture financing from Domain Associates, Battelle Ventures, and Gund Investment Corp. to advance commercialization of its long-strand gene sequencing technology. BioNano Genomics said its Irys System provides deeper insights into structural variations of the native genome.

—The Algae Biomass Organization, a non-profit industry group based in Minnesota, ended its annual Algae Biomass Summit yesterday in Orlando, FL, and announced that its 2014 summit will be held in San Diego. CleanTech San Diego board member Glenn Mosier tweeted the news.

—Phil Baran, a 36-year-old professor of organic chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute and a co-founder of

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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.