Sciele Pharma Cancels Victory Pharma Buyout, Life Science Startups Raise Capital, Sorrento Therapeutics Engineers Reverse Merger, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

We saw a couple of San Diego’s life sciences companies successfully raise capital in the past week. But a couple of others experienced problems that would have been difficult to anticipate.

—Sciele Pharma, an Atlanta, GA, unit of Japan’s Shionogi & Co. left San Diego’s Victory Pharma at the altar last week, after announcing in May that it would acquire Victory Pharma for $150 million. Sciele said only that the cancellation was due to an unforseen development after the agreement was signed. However, Denise found that an FDA advisory committee’s call for banning drugs that combine acetaminophen and narcotics could affect two of the pain relievers marketed by Victory Pharma.

—San Diego’s Sorrento Therapeutics, which raised $2.3 million in June, announced it has arranged a reverse merger with QuikByte Software, a Florida company with registered securities but is no longer in business. Once the merger is completed, Sorrento Therapeutics will take over the dormant shell company to become a publicly traded company. QuikByte will officially be renamed and relocate its headquarters to San Diego. The deal, which is expected to close by the end of September, is subject to QuikByte getting an aggregate investment of $2 million. Sorrento Therapeutics specializes in new methods for developing fully human monoclonal antibodies. Antonius Schuh will continue to head the startup as CEO.

—Telegraph Hill Partners, a San Francisco private equity firm, has put $5 million in venture funding into Poway, CA-based Nexus Biosystems, a four-year-old biotech. Nexus specializes in making automated sample storage and retrieval systems for use by biotech laboratories in storing biological samples.

—TorreyPines Therapeutics is trying again today to muster enough shareholder votes to approve a liquidation plan for the San Diego biotech. The company had to continue its special shareholder meeting last week after failing to get a simple majority of shareholder votes to approve a measure to dissolve the company.

—Carlsbad, CA-based biomedical diagnostics startup Helixis has raised $5.5 million out of a planned secondary round of $6.5 million in venture capital funding. The company plans to commercialize advanced molecular diagnostic technology developed by two prominent Caltech scientists.

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.