Reports + Research
San Diego’s Important Drug Discoveries Are Changing the Therapeutic Landscape
Bradley Fikes at the San Diego Union-Tribune looks at San Diego’s history of drug discovery and development and what that means for the region’s innovation economy today. He says, “the region’s emphasis on entrepreneurship comes with a rare concentration of research expertise in La Jolla.” San Diego ranks third in biotech nationwide.
Intermountain Healthcare Opens Call for Precision Genomics Research Proposals
The Utah-based and innovation-centric Intermountain Healthcare recently announced a call for brief research proposals in precision genomics. Ideally, the proposed research would leverage Intermountain’s access to samples as well as its high-throughput next-generation sequencing capabilities. Intermountain will match $100,000 for collaborative proposals to be used to cover costs of procuring, preparing, and sequencing samples at Intermountain. The submission deadline is August 1.
Life Sciences Companies Dominate San Diego’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards
Of the five award areas, four life sciences CEOs were named Entrepreneur Of The Year 2018 San Diego. The awards were presented last week to CEOs from Neurocrine, Edico Genome, Halozyme Therapeutics, and Novasyte in this regional competition that’s part of EY’s global Entrepreneur of the Year awards. EvoNexus CEO Rory Moore was also presented an award for his outstanding contributions and support for entrepreneurship in San Diego.
Nature Ranks Scripps Research, Salk, and UCSD in Top Ten Nationally for Science Research
The Nature Index identifies the top institutions who were the largest contributors to papers published in 82 leading journals in the past year. The Nature Index publishes searchable and sortable tables for rankings among the different sciences as well as rankings for nationally versus globally. Among standalone institutions, The Scripps Research Institute ranked first nationally in life sciences and chemistry, and the Salk Institute ranked third nationally in life sciences. UC San Diego was ranked fifth nationally in life sciences among academic institutions. Ionis Pharmaceuticals was ranked number one in San Diego County for corporate science research.
New Alliance Formed to Support Women Founders of STEM Companies
The Alliance of Ad Astra Ventures and Athena promises to accelerate new company formation by providing a “12-week journey” to women entrepreneurs in STEM fields. Ad Astra Ventures is a female-focused accelerator, and Athena is a member-based organization that advances women working in STEM. The journey will include joint programming and mentoring developed by the two organizations to help women founders build high growth, scalable, and investible companies.
Read + Listen
BOM! Book of the Month
From a recent talk I attended on biomimicry by Jacques Chirazi (check out his TEDx talk and the Global Design Challenge on climate change), it’s very clear that we must evaluate our life and business around circular versus linear development and use. A book he recommended is Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.
POW! Podcast of the Week
99% Invisible is one of my favorite podcasts, so I had to check out if they had an episode on biomimicry. Of course they do. It’s called Biomimicry: How Designers Are Learning from the Natural World.
Events
It’s Happening Here
June 14
BioDuro is holding a symposium on Innovative Approaches to Accelerating Drug Discovery and Development on Thursday, June 14.
June 21
LaunchBio will present the discussion of How AI Will Change Funding Opportunities for Biotech Entrepreneurs
June 25-29
San Diego Startup Week will take place June 25-29. The weeklong series of events with six different innovation and entrepreneur tracks will take place at San Diego Concourse at Civic Center.
June 28
BVS La Jolla Biotech Event: Women Breaking Boundaries of Sci will take place Thursday, June 28 from 4:30 to 8:30 p.m.
