Celladon Enjoys Early Success With Gene Therapy Trial, FDA Gives Digirad Green Light for a Nuclear Camera, Aragon Pharmaceuticals Gets $22M & More San Diego Biotech News

We saw a healthy mix of life sciences news over the past week, with a generous serving of device news, some venture funding, a dash of clinical trial results, and voila! Enjoy!

—San Diego’s Celladon said an experimental gene therapy treatment met its primary goal of showing the treatment was more effective than a placebo in a trial that enrolled 39 heart patients. The experiment tested a single-shot infusion of Mydicar, Celladon’s gene therapy drug.

—San Diego’s Aragon Pharmaceuticals said it raised $22 million in venture funding to advance its lead drug treatment for prostate cancer into an initial clinical trial. The startup is testing a new approach to treating cancers by targeting certain hormones.

—The slicing and dicing of venture capital data from the first three months of 2010 continued this week, with a new MoneyTree report saying life sciences is holding its position as the largest single industry getting venture capital funding nationwide. The report, “Holding the Lead,” says VC firms invested $1.3 billion in 160 deals nationwide—representing 28 percent of all dollars invested and 23 percent of the deals. The report was prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters.

—San Diego’s Digirad (NASDAQ: [[ticker:DRAD]]) said the FDA gave the Poway, CA, company approval to market Ergo, a nuclear imaging camera system for hospitals that’s smaller and more portable than existing hospital systems.

—Luke profiled San Diego-based NuVasive (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NUVA]]), which has developed a new approach for repairing damaged or aging vertebrae. NuVasive’s technology enables surgeons to go into the body through a patient’s side, rather that through the front or back, giving doctors easier access to the spine.

—The Flax Council of Canada is investing about $5.5 million through a partnership with San Diego’s Cibus Global to develop a crop strain of flax that is resistant to glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used weed killer Roundup. Cibus says it intends to develop a strain that’s acceptable to Europeans opposed to genetically modified crops.


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.