Oceanside’s cash-strapped International Stem Cell Corp. said today it has received a total of $150,000 for working capital from two investors. In exchange for the $150,000, International Stem Cell Corp. has given the investors 150,000 equity units. These units unpack in a complicated way that give investors benefits if the company’s stock rises.
Archive for July, 2008
International Stem Cell Raises $150,000
By: Bradley Fikes — July 31st, 2008SBIR Program Under Attack?
By: Bradley Fikes — July 31st, 2008Is big biotech ganging up on small biotech? That’s what a coalition of groups, including the National Science Foundation, allege. The groups say federal legislation endorsed by the Biotechnology Industry Organization and venture capital firms would take money away from small biotech and high-tech firms, by allowing big companies to qualify for funding.
A Senate panel is scheduled to consider the legislation on Wednesday of next week.
Mixed signals on national economy
By: Chris Bagley — July 31st, 2008The Commerce Department’s numbers for gross domestic product (GDP) this morning lend themselves to mixed interpretations. The economy shrank at a 0.2 percent annual rate during the last three months of 2007, according to downwardly revised numbers from the department. A revision shows it having grown at a 0.9 percent rate in the first three months of ‘08. Preliminary numbers show it having grown at a 1.9 percent rate from April through June, slower than the 2.3 percent rate forecast by economists in a survey by Bloomberg News.
Okay, so GDP growth has been weak, but is it weak enough yet to use the dreaded “r” word?
Case-Shiller Roundup
By: Zach Fox — July 29th, 2008Case-Shiller Home Price Index came out today. It’s arguably the best measure of home prices. It showed another large drop in San Diego County real estate prices. Unfortunately, there are only so many numbers I can cram into the story.
If you love graphs and numbers as much as I do, keep reading.
Economic index falls … again
By: Chris Bagley — July 29th, 2008A monthly index from USD economics Prof. Alan Gin fell for the 26th month out of the last 27, the university said this morning in a press release. The index has six components. Four of them (building permits, unemployment claims, stock prices of locally based companies and the overall state of the national economy) are already old news.
Foreclosure central
By: Chris Bagley — July 29th, 2008For a peek into foreclosures on home prices, take a look at a few of the 100+ houses that were bought through Stonewood Consulting, a Murrieta mortgage brokerage that went belly-up in January 2007.
Virtually all the houses have fallen into foreclosure, and maybe about half of them have been repurchased — typically at about half the price that Stonewood’s clients paid. This house in Murrieta (23965-pepperleaf way) sold for $500,000 in November 2005. A Stonewood client bought it for $640,000 four months later, with a down payment of just 5 percent. The house foreclosed in February 2008 and new buyers bought it for $315,000 in May. Their down payment? 30 percent.
Patent Exam Restrictions Supported
By: Bradley Fikes — July 29th, 2008A coalition of consumer and public interest groups filed a friend of the court brief today in favor of a new rule they say would restrict overly broad patents. The brief (PDF) was filed in the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C.
The groups say current rules followed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office give an unfair advantage to those applying for an overly broad patent, by allowing unlimited continuations that let applicants string out the process, exhausting the patent examiner into compliance.
In Search Of . . . Science-Minded Students
By: Bradley Fikes — July 28th, 2008Biocom, the local life sciences trade group, has formed a non-profit spinoff to increase science literacy in Southern California.
The Biocom Institute has received two $30,000 donations, said Joe Panetta, Biocom’s president and chief executive. One came from the San Diego Foundation, and the other from Pfizer and the Pfizer Foundation.
The shaky state of science education comes up at some point in most interviews I’ve done with biotech or medical device executives. They worry about global competitiveness against better-educated workers overseas, or more prosaically, basic deficiencies in science knowledge and an interest in science-based careers.
That deficiency could threaten San Diego County’s key strength as a leader in innovation. San Diego is where emtrepreneurs build small companies that become big companies. That requires talented employees who can deal with setbacks and see opportunities. Basic science literacy is just the ground floor. And if these employees can’t be educated locally, San Diego will have to import them, competing against other biotech centers.
There are other efforts to encourage science literacy locally, such as the San Diego Science Alliance, as well as High Tech High, and the Science Education Association of San Diego.
Unnatural Amino Acid Provokes Transferable Immune Response
By: Bradley Fikes — July 28th, 2008Incorporating an unnatural amino acid into a protein triggers an immune response that transfers to the unmodified protein, say researchers at The Scripps Research Institute.
The approach could lead to new ways of waking up the immune system to attack an invading organism and disease targets in the person’s own body such as cancer cells, the scientists say.
A paper on the research, performed in mice, is being published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
From the press release, quoting one of the study’s authors, Jan Grunewald:
“There are a great many foreign or self-proteins that are associated with disease but are hardly recognized by the immune system,” said Jan Grünewald. “When these proteins become active in certain disease states like cancer and malaria, you need to break this tolerance if you want to develop a workable vaccine. Our approach breaks tolerance in a novel way—with the unnatural amino acid pNO2Phe.”
Biocom Open House
By: Bradley Fikes — July 28th, 2008
Biocom Open House
Here’s a quick walk through Biocom’s open house on Thursday, at its headquarters. The theme was larger-than-life, and you can see it with the overgrown flowers, hot dog and even a human tomato (killer tomato?) you can see in the beginning and at variou places during this video clip. Click to activate.
More to come . . .