San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Lithera, CardioCell, and More

ResMed founder Peter Farrell was characteristically outspoken, funny, and acerbic as he talked about the origins of Carlsbad-based ResMed at a luncheon in his honor. I have the details, along with the rest of San Diego’s life sciences news over the past week.

—Lithera, a San Diego biotech developing an injectable drug for reducing belly fat, said it closed a Series C round of financing after raising $35.6 million, far more than the company’s initial goal of $20 million to $25 million. Lithera plans to use the proceeds to advance its lead product candidate, an injectable version of salmeterol xinafoate. The FDA already has approved salmeterol as an aerosol inhalant for treating asthma.

—Bob Klein, the Portola Valley lawyer and real estate developer who led the 2004 initiative that approved California’s $3 billion bond issue for stem cell research, said he wants to raise another $5 billion to extend the program. Klein outlined his proposal in San Diego yesterday in a presentation at the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, according to a report by Brad Fikes in U-T San Diego. Klein told a symposium of cancer researchers he would work to get an initiative on the ballot to extend funding for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state stem cell agency. Funding under the program voters approved in 2004 is expected to run out in 2017.

—Connect, the San Diego nonprofit program that supports technology innovation and entrepreneurship, inducted ResMed (NYSE: [[ticker:RMD]]) founder Peter Farrell into its Entrepreneurial Hall of Fame. Connect honored Farrell for “his lifelong dedication to research innovation in the fields of sleep and respiratory,” and his impact on the San Diego community. The Carlsbad-based company Farrell started in 1989 for about $1 million specializes in medical technology for treating sleep-disordered breathing—and today has a market valuation of more than $6.5 billion. My favorite quote about Farrell came from Pyxis founder Ron Taylor, who said, “Peter doesn’t use brakes. He accelerates through everything. We call him the wild man.”

— In his BioBeat column, my colleague Luke Timmerman said the molecular diagnostics industry needs a tough, science-minded, credible regulator … who can comb through complex data sets and say with confidence what’s real, what’s clinically meaningful,” and what isn’t. Luke argues that

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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.