San Diego’s life sciences community took two steps forward last week, as two new startups stepped into the light with new medical device technologies, and then one step back with the closure of another company founded in 2000. We have all the latest moves for you, plus a lot more.

—San Diego’s Topera Medical, which has maintained a low profile since it was launched three years ago, established a Lexington, MA-headquarters to commercialize technology developed by UC San Diego cardiologist Sanjiv Narayan. Topera, which hired former Boston Scientific executive Edward Kerslake as CEO, has technology designed to map the heart’s abnormal electrical currents, which occur with irregular heartbeats like atrial fibrillation.

—San Diego-based OncoSec, which was created March 1 through a reverse merger with a dormant public company, says it has licensed drug delivery technology from Innovio Pharmaceuticals to improve the efficacy of certain anti-cancer drugs. Inovio’s electroporation technology uses brief pulses of electricity to temporarily increase the permeability of cell walls, making it easier for OncoSec’s conventional chemotherapy drugs to penetrate cancerous tumors.

—San Diego’s Novalar Pharmaceuticals sold its only product, an FDA-approved drug for reversing the numbing effects of dental anesthesia, and will shut down in coming weeks. The French dental medication company Septodont acquired … Next Page »

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The past couple of months have been busy for San Diego’s Genomatica, which is announcing a strategic partnership today with Tate & Lyle (LSE: TATE), a London-based food and industrial products manufacturer with extensive U.S. operations.

Just two weeks ago, Genomatica revealed it had raised $45 million in venture capital, bringing the company’s total financing to $84 million since inception. One of the key points of the recent round is that Genomatica brought in a couple of strategic investors: Bright Capital is the venture arm of RU-COM group, a diversified Russian business group with investments in industrial engineering and construction management in agriculture and other industries; and Waste Management (NYSE: WM), a leading provider of garbage management services in North America. The round also included a new venture investor, VantagePoint Venture Partners of San Bruno, CA, and existing investors Alloy Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and TPG Biotech.

In early February, Genomatica also disclosed a strategic partnership with Waste Management to develop ways of making basic and intermediate industrial chemicals from syngas produced from municipal solid waste.

Now, with the Tate & Lyle strategic partnership, the full scope of Genomatica’s strategy is coming into view. Genomatica CEO Christophe Schilling, said in a recent interview that Tate & Lyle has extensive experience in building and operating “corn wet mills” that are used to make high fructose corn syrup and related industrial starches.

“They have a proven track record in scaling up fermentation processes,” Schilling said. “They also have some direct experience with chemicals that are related to BDO, using a facility in Decatur, IL.”

BDO, the industry shorthand for 1,4-butanediol, is an intermediate industrial chemical used to make spandex, automotive plastics, running shoes, and other products. Major chemical companies use petroleum-based feedstocks to make BDO. But Genomatica showed last year it can make “Bio-BDO,” using genetically engineered microbes and dextrose (from corn syrup) and sucrose (from sugar cane) in 3,000-liter fermentation tanks.

So the strategic partnership with Tate & Lyle represents the … Next Page »

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San Diego-based Genomatica has raised $45 million in a Series C round of venture funding that will allow the company to scale up production of its sustainable chemical technology to 15,000 liters a day, according to an item today in VentureWire.

Genomatica said last summer it had successfully scaled up technology that uses genetically engineered microbes to make 1,4-butanediol (BDO)-an industrial chemical used to make spandex, automotive plastics, and running shoes. At that time, Genomatica said it had successfully demonstrated a fermentation process that used a 3,000-liter broth of genetically engineered bacteria, sugar, and air to produce BDO—which is usually made from petroleum-based raw materials.

Now the company plans to go from 3,000-liter batches to 15,000 liters, although Genomatica has not yet publicly disclosed where it plans to establish its pilot plant.

Last month, Genomatica revealed a strategic partnership with Houston’s Waste Management to develop ways of making other useful chemicals from syngas, a gas mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide used to make a variety of intermediate chemicals like ammonia and methanol.

New investors in the latest round include VantagePoint, Waste Management, and Bright Capital, according to VentureWire. Existing investors Alloy Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and TPG Biotech also participated.

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When I profiled Verdezyne in November, the Carlsbad, CA-based startup didn’t want to disclose the first feedstock chemical it is aiming to displace by using genetically engineered yeast in a fermentation tank instead of a petrochemical refinery. Today Verdezyne is announcing it can use its proprietary sustainable processes to make adipic acid, a primary ingredient needed to make nylon. Verdezyne’s Damien Perriman tells me the process Verdezyne demonstrated in its lab could reduce the production costs of adipic acid by 20 percent or more. He estimates the global market for adipic acid at close to $5.2 billion a year. The announcement comes just in time for the Bio-Based Chemicals Summit that begins today at the Westin San Diego.

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After Carlsbad, CA-based Verdezyne disclosed last month that it plans to raise more than $15 million in venture funding, I arranged to sit down with Damien Perriman, the company’s vice president of business development.

As it turns out, the startup that was founded in 2005 as CODA Genomics has essentially re-engineered itself over the past 18 months. The company overhauled its core business strategy, recruited a new CEO, E. William Radany, along with a new management team, changed its name, and moved its headquarters from Orange County to Carlsbad, CA, about 28 miles north of San Diego. In changing its name to Verdezyne, the company created an identity that is better aligned with its revised focus on the “green design” of biofuels and industrial chemicals.

The company initially was focused on technology spun out from UC Irvine that used specialized computer algorithms to design synthetic DNA. The company offered its services in Computationally Optimized DNA Assembly, or CODA, to help drug discovery teams at pharmaceutical customers like Eli Lilly and Genentech design synthetic genes that could be used to maximize the production of certain proteins for their biotech drug manufacturing processes.

Perriman, who joined Verdezyne in February, tells me, “Our investors made a decision in 2008 that we could make a lot more money by doing the production ourselves.”

With its extensive experience in computational biology and bioinformatics, Verdezyne saw the value in creating high-diversity libraries of genes, so that various genes could be inserted into fast-dividing yeast cells (and other micro-organisms), essentially programming the microbes to produce enzymes it would not otherwise produce. Verdezyne landed a federal grant last month to help build out its genomic library.

“We prefer to work with yeast,” Perriman says, “but we can work with any fungi or bacterial organism.”

The company, which now has 26 employees, has identified three primary markets for its technology.

The first and most obvious target is an … Next Page »

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