Sanofi Buys TargeGen, Biogen Idec Hires CEO, Orexigen Obesity Drug Shows Promise Against Diabetes, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

It’s been barbell time for life sciences news in San Diego, with much of the developments happening yesterday and at the end of last week. Still, it shouldn’t require too much heavy lifting; your workout starts now.

—Sanofi-Aventis, the French pharma giant, is acquiring San Diego-based TargeGen in a structured deal that could be worth as much as $560 million if the lean biotech with just 11 employees can hit a series of clinical development goals. TargeGen has been working with Chinese clinical research organization WuXi Pharmatech to develop a drug that targets JAK2, a marker on cells found to be proliferating out of control in patients with blood disorders known as myeloproliferative diseases.

—San Diego’s Orexigen Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OREX[[) says results of its latest clinical trial support its contention that its drug candidate for obesity also offers promise for treating diabetes by helping overweight patients better control their blood sugar.

—San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMLN]]) confirmed that it has trimmed 60 jobs, or about 4 percent of its workforce, in R&D and other specific areas of the company. An Amylin spokeswoman told Luke that the company will look to both internal and external sources to find new ways of bringing innovative medicines to patients.

—Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BIIB]]), the Cambridge, MA-based pharmaceutical that also has significant operations in San Diego, named George Scangos as its new chief executive. The company has been without a CEO since June 8 when long-time chief executive James Mullen retired after a long battle with dissident shareholder Carl Icahn.

—Biotech startup Zacharon Pharmaceuticals raised an additional $500,000 in a combination of

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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.