San Diego vaccine developer Vical (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VICL]] has joined the roster of small biotechs that have been forced to cut costs to conserve cash.
The microcap biotech says it’s laying off 29 employees, or about 20 percent of its workforce, and closing an unidentified research facility sooner than planned. The company says it expects to reduce spending by about $4 million a year by making the cuts.
Vical says it will have about 120 employees after the reorganization. The company, which has about $40 million on hand, says the move is intended to reduce its burn rate and focus the company’s drug development efforts on its most advanced vaccine development programs.
Vical says those programs include its experimental treatment for metastatic melanoma, Allovectin-7, and its potential vaccine for cytomegalovirus, a herpes-type virus.
The restructuring is expected to cost Vical about $800,000 related to the layoffs in fourth quarter and $500,000 stemming from the facility closure in the first quarter of 2009. The company said it will provide additional details on the effects of its restructuring in February.
Our overview on San Diego layoffs is here.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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