San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Receptos, Auspex, Avelas, and More

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Amid the flurry of announcements leading up to next week’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, you might have missed some significant funding deals coming out of San Diego’s life sciences sector. Here are the highlights, along with my wrap-up of other news.

—San Diego’s Auspex Pharmaceuticals said it has raised $35 million in a combination of equity financing and venture debt to advance its deuterium-based drug pipeline, which includes a drug candidate for a movement disorder associated with Huntington’s disease. The company said it raised $20 million in a Series E round of venture funding led by Deerfield Management, which was joined by existing investors, Thomas McNerney & Partners; CMEA Capital; Panorama Capital; BioMed Ventures; and Costa Verde Capital. In a separate financing, Auspex secured a $15million, four-year venture loan from Oxford Finance. Auspex also plans to raise as much as $69 million through an IPO, according to a regulatory filing the company submitted last month.

—San Diego-based Receptos, which raised $73 million in an IPO eight months ago, revealed plans to sell another 3.3 million shares through a secondary public offering that is expected to raise about $102 million. The offering is expected to close next week, according to a statement from the company. Receptos plans to use the proceeds to advance development of RPC1063, an experimental drug in clinical trials for treating relapsing multiple sclerosis and ulcerative colitis.

—San Diego’s Avelas Biosciences closed

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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.