Daily Business Report-March 22, 2021
San Diego restaurant and hospitality group acquires historic Lafayette Hotel for $25.8 million
San Diego-based restaurant and hospitality group CH Projects has acquired the historic Lafayette Hotel in North Park for $25,815,000.
“The Lafayette Hotel has great potential given the period architecture, gracious common areas, beautiful pool and vibrant North Park location. The property generated strong interest from several investors, but CH Projects’ vision met the sellers desire to select a buyer that would continue the legacy of this great hotel,” said Victor Krebs of Colliers, who represented the seller, Lafayette Landlord LLC, a San Diego-based investment group.
CH Projects plans to restore and update the rooms and add several dynamic food and beverage venues to the property.
The Lafayette Hotel has 131 rooms, an Olympic-size pool and several restaurants and bars. The property is located at 2223 El Cajon Blvd.
The sale precedes what will be a two-year restoration project that the new owner says will be the property’s “most significant overhaul” since its inception in 1946.
CH Projects is making its first foray into the world of hotels. The restaurant group is well known for its continually expanding portfolio of San Diego drinking and dining venues, including Born & Raised and Ironside Fish & Oyster in Little Italy and Raised by Wolves in Westfield UTC. Its most visible hotel-related project, which has yet to open, is the rooftop venue it created on the 19th floor of the Intercontinental in downtown San Diego.
Designing a rideshare for the sky
SDSU engineer Chris Mi will work with UC San Diego on a NASA funded project to bring futuristic electric air taxis closer to reality
By Padma Nagappan | SDSU
Driving between downtown San Diego and Oceanside can take an hour or more at peak times. For commuters who don’t want to battle rush-hour traffic, hopping in a small, electric rideshare aircraft could become an option in just a few years.
Chunting Chris Mi, who leads the GATE Center for Electric Drive Transportation, is working on designing a lighter, more compact electrical drive that will power these futuristic flying taxis.
The San Diego State University professor and chair of the electrical and computer engineering department will work closely with project lead John Hwang, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego.
“I’m excited because this is something I wanted to work on for a long time, and this is a great opportunity that will open doors for us to do more such collaborative work in the future,” Mi said.
UC San Diego received $5.8 million from NASA to create open source computational design tools that will enable U.S. companies to more quickly develop efficient air taxi designs. It will lead a team of four other universities and two industry partners on this three-year University Leadership Initiative project. SDSU’s role is to focus on the drive that propels the electric vertical takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
La Jolla Community Center completes solar panel project
The La Jolla Community Center has installed new solar panels. The solar project features 29 panels that produce 11,700 watts of electricity. With an annual output of 18,700 kilowatt hours, the panels will provide enough power for all the electricity used by the center each year, with an annual energy cost reduction from $5,400 to $200.
“We started with the completion of a much-needed new roof in 2020 and with additional funding and donations, added the panels during in December of last year,” said Don Hodges, La Jolla Community Center board member and chair of the facilities committee. “We’re delighted that after months of design, permitting, and contractor selection, we could complete this project and during the pandemic.”
Hodges pointed out that the center’s “focus on sustainability is one we are proud of and will be our legacy — one that remains with us in the years ahead.”
Healthpeak Properties announces Callan Ridge life science development
Healthpeak Properties Inc. announced that it will proceed with the densification of its Callan Ridge campus located at 3020-3030 Callan Road in the Torrey Pines area of San Diego. The project will nearly double the current leasable area by replacing an outmoded 90,000-square-foot building with a new Class A two-building campus totaling approximately 185,000 square feet.
Located in the heart of Healthpeak’s 20+ acre Torrey Pines Science Park, Callan Ridge will feature a green roof viewing deck with unparalleled coastal and canyon views, as well as flexible floor plates and building systems designed to support life science uses.
Callan Ridge will be Healthpeak’s second ground-up development start in the Torrey Pines area since 2020, following its leasing success at The Boardwalk, which is now 100 percent committed and anticipated to be delivered for initial occupancy in the 2021 fourth quarter
Defending human-robot teams against adversaries goal of computer science grant
UC San Diego computer science professor Kamalika Chaudhuri is part of a multi-university team that has won a prestigious U.S. Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Award to develop rigorous methods for robust human-machine collaboration against adversaries.
Chaudhuri will receive $750,000 to fund her research on the project titled Cohesive and Robust Human-Bot Cybersecurity Teams, which aims to develop rigorous parameters for Human-Bot Cybersecurity teams with the goal of developing a cohesive team that is not vulnerable to active human and machine learning (ML) adversaries.
“We now know how to develop machine learning methods that are robust to adversaries, yet in many applications, humans work in coordination with machine learning software, and adversaries can still disrupt the process,” said Chaudhuri, whose research interests lie in the foundations of trustworthy machine learning. “This project will investigate in detail how that can happen, and how we can design algorithms and tools to be robust to these adversaries.”
Roche to buy Carlsbad’s GenMark Diagnostics for $1.8 billion
Swiss pharmaceuticals manufacturer Roche will buy Carlsbad-based biotech GenMark Diagnostics in a $1.8 billion deal. GenMark, which develops diagnostic tests that identify multiple diseases from a single patient sample, will continue to operate from its North County headquarters after the acquisition.
DTx Pharma raises $100 million Series B round
DTx Pharma, a San Diego-based biotechnology company creating novel RNA-based therapeutics to treat the genetic drivers of disease, has raised $100 million in Series B financing. The company will use the funds to advance its product pipeline and accelerate clinical efforts across its across ocular, neuromuscular and CNS disease programs.
Three San Diego firms named winners in $6 million XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing competition
ChromaCode, Reliable-LFC and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology were named three of five winning teams in XPRIZE’s $6 million Rapid COVID testing competition. The teams, which developed affordabvle, accurate COVID testing platforms with turnaround times of under 12 hours, will each receie up to $1 million upon meeting upcoming production milestones.
Scientists identify drug candidate that slows growth of melanoma
Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute have identified a drug candidate that blocks the uptake of glutamine, a key food source for many tumors, and slows the growth of melanoma.
The drug is a small molecule that targets a glutamine transporter, SLC1A5, which pumps the nutrient into cancer cells—offering a promising new approach for treating melanoma and other cancers. The study was published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics.
