San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Accelrys, Celladon’s IPO, and More

Biotech laboratory pipettes

A buyout offer for Accelrys, a new stem cell center of excellence, and an IPO. Not bad for one week of life sciences news. But wait, there’s more…

—French software developer Dassault Systèmes agreed to pay $750 million in cash to buy San Diego’s Accelrys (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ACCL]]), a smaller American rival that specializes in scientific and product lifecycle management software. The board at Accelrys has approved the deal, which extends Dassault Systèmes’ lineup in product lifecycle management software, 3D modeling, and basic scientific research and discovery. The French giant also gets about 2,000 Accelrys customers, including Sanofi, Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca, Du Pont, Shell, BASF, P&G, Unilever, and L’Oréal.

—Shares of San Diego-based Celladon (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CLDN]]) opened well above its $8-per-share IPO price yesterday, but slid from a midday high of $9.90 to close at $8.18 as more than 1.7 million shares changed hands on its first day of regular trading. Celladon, which is developing a gene therapy for patients with systolic heart failure, raised about $44 million in its IPO, which was postponed as the market for biotech IPOs stalled a bit in November. The pre-revenue company has raised about $120 million from venture investors Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Pfizer Ventures, Lundbeckfond Ventures, Novartis Venture Funds, Johnson & Johnson Development, GBS Venture partners, Venrock, and H&Q Healthcare.

—San Diego’s Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute landed a $275 million pledge from an anonymous donor, to be paid over the next 10 years. The donation coincided with

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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.