Lilly’s San Diego Biotechnology Center of Silence

Eli Lilly and Co. executives were downright chatty about the company’s biotechnology strategy last week when they convened a meeting with Wall Street analysts. “We see more and more that biotech is a key to sustaining pharmaceutical innovation for the future,” Lilly’s vice president of biotech discovery research, Tom Bumol, said in a statement the company released Dec. 11. Summing up Lilly’s “transformative” strategy for the analysts’ meeting, Bumol added, “Over the past decade, we have built a new integrated biotechnology infrastructure, from discovery through development, and including delivery, devices, and manufacturing.”

But in San Diego, where Indianapolis-based Lilly is busy developing what it calls a “Biotechnology Center of Excellence,” the world’s 10th largest pharmaceutical company is as silent as a sphinx.

After acquiring San Diego’s SGX Pharmaceuticals in August for $64 million, Lilly has been busy consolidating SGX with AME, or Applied Molecular Evolution, a San Diego biotech Lilly acquired in 2004 for roughly $400 million. Lilly has been operating AME as a subsidiary here ever since. The company also has a lucrative partnership with San Diego’s Amylin for Byetta, its drug for type 2 diabetes.

Signs of Lilly’s activity are everywhere. The company has notified state officials of plans to lay off a total of 66 SGX employees.  That’s more than half of the 120 employees SGX had when Lilly took over.

Meanwhile, in September, several weeks after closing the SGX deal, Lilly signed

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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.