Amylin Nears Endgame With Icahn, Sciele Pharma Declares Victory in Buyout, Nanogen Files Bankruptcy, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

conference hosted last week by San Diego’s Wireless Life Sciences Alliance, also said it’s critical to get insurance companies to approve reimbursements for innovative medical technologies.

—Biogen Idec told its shareholders that a split advocated by dissident shareholder Carl Icahn would not make the Cambridge, MA, life sciences company more attractive as a buyout target. Icahn has called for breaking the company up and selling off the pieces. Biogen responded by saying a Big Pharma buyout of the company would create administrative redundancies, add costs, and eliminate dual-use opportunities for certain drugs under development.

—Amylin Pharmaceuticals’ board of directors, which has been defending itself from criticism from dissident shareholders Carl Icahn and Eastbourne Capital Management, now has a new dissident to contend with: Howard “Ted” Greene, the company’s co-founder, and a former CEO and board member. Greene recently switched sides in Amylin proxy fight, saying, telling me in an e-mail that, “certain members encumbered with traditional pharmaceutical dogma and our past mistakes should be replaced.” Luke also spoke with one of Icahn’s director nominees, Alex Denner, who insists he’s not looking to do a quick sale of Amylin.

—San Diego’s Fate Therapeutics says it has gained exclusive rights to technology involving blood-forming stem cells from Children’s Hospital Boston and Massachusetts General Hospital. The high-profile biotech is using recent advances in stem cell biology to develop new drugs.

—Canada’s Biovail gave San Diego’s Acadia Pharmaceuticals a vote of confidence when it paid $30 million for rights to a drug Acadia has under development for treating psychosis related to Parkinson’s disease. But the market’s ho-hum valuation of Acadia has CEO Uli Hacksell hoping for a more enthusiastic response when the results of a late-stage trial for the drug become available in four months or so.

—Joel Martin, a partner who left San Diego’s Forward Ventures in October, was named as the new president and CEO of Altair Therapeutics. Founded in 2007, privately held Altair is developing therapeutics for respiratory diseases like asthma and rhinitis (a.k.a stuffy, runny nose).

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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.