Daily Business Report: Wednesday, May 19, 2021
USD alumni-owned startup raises $2.5 million
for real estate investment platform
Farshad Yousefi, a University of San Diego alumnus, alway dreamed of investing in real estate. However, he quickly discovered that it’s financially challenging to get into property investment, especially as a recent college graduate with student debt.
Through an extensive survey, Yousefi and his partner, Masoud Jalali, found that there are many others like them — people under the age of 25 with a strong desire to invest but who don’t due to expensive barriers to entry.
In a bid to make real estate investment easier and more accessible, Yousefi and Jalali launched Fintor, a platform that allows users to invest in “shares” of real estate similarly as one would invest in the stock market. And they’re catching the attention of major investors. Their platform just raised $2.5 million in seed money to continue building out the app and was featured in TechCrunch.
Yousefi and Jalali founded the company in 2020 with the goal of purchasing homes via an LLC, and turning each into shares through an SEC-approved broker dealer. Individuals can then buy shares of the homes via Fintor’s platform. Its next step is to sign agreements with individual real estate investors or bigger real estate development firms to list their properties on the platform and give people the opportunity to buy shares.
PHOTO: Fintor co-founders Farshad Yousefi, left, and Masoud Jalali
Argonaut enhances manufacturing capabilities
with major investment in facility expansion
Argonaut Manufacturing Services, a contract manufacturing organization (CMO) serving the life sciences, molecular diagnostics, and biopharma industries, announced that it is expanding its cGMP facilities in Carlsbad. This will bring Argonaut’s manufacturing space to over 90,000 square feet and enable Argonaut to accommodate the changing dynamics of its business and the Life Science industry.
Celebrating its fifth anniversary, Argonaut’s focus is on bringing contract manufacturing services to the broader life science, molecular diagnostics, and drug product industries’ innovators and creators. The new facility will be equipped with upgrades in additional automation to Argonaut’s existing formulation, fill and finish infrastructure. It will also be home to their new Lyophilization Center dedicated to solving the ambient stability needs of Point of Care tests globally.
San Diego region allocates $7 million
to expand broadband along State Route 67
The SANDAG Board of Directors allocated the remaining funds needed to incorporate the installation of fiber to support the planned Caltrans State Route 67 Pavement Rehabilitation project.
SANDAG, Caltrans, and the County of San Diego have partnered in recent weeks to identify $7 million in funding needed for the project, which will fill a critical gap in the region’s fiber network.
This collaborative effort will enable the expansion of reliable and affordable broadband for the communities along the SR 67 corridor. In addition to increasing access to broadband, the project will also establish the necessary infrastructure to implement transportation operation and safety improvements along this corridor in the future, by providing communication links to emergency management centers.
Last week, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors allocated $1.4 million toward this effort.
USD to get new golf training facility
designed by golfing icon Phil Nickelson
University of San Diego Athletic Director Bill McGillis announced a $2 million gift for the establishment of a new golf training facility — the Purcell Family Short-Game Practice Facility, designed by San Diego native and golfing icon Phil Mickelson.
“We are so grateful for the extraordinary generosity of Paul and Mindy and the entire Purcell family,” said McGillis. “This is a truly transformational gift that will catapult our golf program to a new level, positively impact the experience of USD scholar-athletes and also change the lives of young people in our community.
Highlights of the planned 1.4-acre facility include:
• A one-acre natural turf short-game area, consisting of a 7,500-square-foot putting green, a 1,000-square-foot practice bunker and a 40,000-square-foot fairway and rough area designed to practice every possible golf shot.
• 1,800 square feet of synthetic turf tee area, consisting of two types of hitting surfaces.
• Innovative “Phil Mickelson” wedge control targets, consisting of four synthetic turf targets, providing distance control practice for every yardage from 30 yards to 85 yards.
• “Phil Mickelson” synthetic turf putting pads, consisting of three 15’x15’ square putting surfaces at 2%, 3,% and 4% slope each.
Carlsbad and SDG&E consider Shoppes
at Carlsbad as new location for service center
As the Encina Power Station and the iconic smokestack are being decommissioned, new efforts are focused on how the City of Carlsbad, NRG Energy, and San Diego Gas & Electric will move forward. During the City Council’s April 20 meeting, the council unanimously approved appropriating $100,000 for city staff to work with those stakeholders, plus Brookfield Properties, to analyze relocating SDG&E’s North Coast Service Center to The Shoppes at Carlsbad.
Currently, the city does not own any of the property on-site but has an agreement with SDG&E to manage Cannon Park. Deputy City Manager Gary Barberio says “the agreement must be a mutually acceptable site but is subject to SDG&E specifics and be cost neutral to ratepayers.”
Illumina appoints Susan Tousi as chief commercial
officer and Alex Aravanis as chief technology officer
Illumina Inc. announced that it is appointing Susan Tousi as chief commercial officer and Alex Aravanis as chief technology officer, head of research and product development.
Tousi has more than 25 years of technical and general management leadership at scale and has led Illumina’s global product development since 2012. Under her leadership, Illumina delivered an expansive portfolio of breakthrough, industry-leading products across sequencing platforms, microarrays, library prep and informatics,
Prior to Illumina, Tousi was corporate vice president and general manager for Eastman Kodak’s Consumer Inkjet Systems, and before that, spent 10 years at Hewlett-Packard in technical and management roles.
For nearly 20 years Aravanis has led innovation spanning basic research and technology development to late-stage clinical development. He first joined Illumina in 2013 and led research to create the first distributed comprehensive genomic profiling assay for liquid biopsy and tumor tissue, the first exome-wide targeted RNA assays for tumor tissue, massively parallel single cell sequencing, and other sequencing platform technologies.
Study further supports targeting lipid
kinases as potential therapy for cancer
Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute have taken a deep dive into a previously overlooked family of proteins and discovered that they are essential to maintaining the energy that cells need to grow and survive.
The proteins, known as lipid kinases, produce messengers that help balance cellular metabolism and promote overall health. The findings, published in Developmental Cell, provide further support to pursue lipid kinases as promising therapeutic targets for diseases that demand excess energy, such as cancer.
“Cancer cells are hungry—they grow faster than most cell types and need energy to support their aggressive attempts to metastasize,” says Brooke Emerling, assistant professor in the Cell and Molecular Biology of Cancer Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys and corresponding author of the study.
Archna Ravi, a postdoctoral researcher in Emerling’s lab, is first author of the paper.
Salk scientists reveal role of genetic switch
in pigmentation and melanoma
Despite only accounting for about 1 percent of skin cancers, melanoma causes the majority of skin cancer-related deaths. While treatments for this serious disease do exist, these drugs can vary in effectiveness depending on the individual.
A Salk study published on May 18, 2021, in the journal Cell Reports reveals new insights about a protein called CRTC3, a genetic switch that could potentially be targeted to develop new treatments for melanoma by keeping the switch turned off. “We’ve been able to correlate the activity of this genetic switch to melanin production and cancer,” says Salk study corresponding author Marc Montminy, a professor in the Clayton Foundation Laboratories for Peptide Biology.
Melanoma develops when pigment-producing cells that give skin its color, called melanocytes, mutate and begin to multiply uncontrollably. These mutations can cause proteins, like CRTC3, to prompt the cell to make an abnormal amount of pigment or to migrate and be more invasive.
SANDAG’s Bike Anywhere Week is launched
San Diego County Supervisor Chair Nathan Fletcher and San Diego Gas & Electric joined with the Pedal Ahead community electric bicycle program to celebrate the launch of SANDAG’s Bike Anywhere Week (May 16-22) with a special e-bike demonstration and showcase promoting ridership and workforce development in the burgeoning San Diego County bicycling industry.
Launched in September 2020, the Pedal Ahead program is designed to provide electric bicycles for socially conscious residents of the 4th Supervisorial District. Since its inception, Pedal Aheade-bike riders have logged over 87,000 miles, burned nearly 5.5 million calories and reduced GHGs by nearly 35,000kg through e-bike use. Pedal Ahead is deploying 400 electric bicycles under a unique “loan-to-own” program, with participants required to ride an average of five miles per day over the course of the two-year period, show proof of insurance that covers the liability, loss, theft and damage to their e-bike, and use a GPS technology app to track and report mileage and trip patterns to the non-profit Rider Safety Visibility for an e-bike study.
“The Pedal Ahead electric bicycle program is changing lives, and our community,” said Fletcher. “The workforce development program is giving young adults knowledge and skills that will help them connect to opportunities in our growing bicycle industry. The program is good for the environment and is a catalyst for an industry that will lead to great careers for our participants.”
