Arena Signs Deal With Eisai for Lorcaserin, Qualcomm CEO Identifies Two Opportunities in Mobile Health, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

The long Fourth of July holiday weekend made for a short week of life sciences news in San Diego. Even if I made short work of this week’s roundup, though, let’s hope you long remain interested.

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs, who was instrumental in bringing the World Economic Forum’s mobile health summit to San Diego last week, said he sees wellness and chronic care management as the two biggest opportunities in wireless health. The Qualcomm CEO said mobile devices can help cut the costs of chronic care management, which accounts for most of the healthcare budget, by monitoring patients’ vital signs and reminding them to take their pills.

—Santarus, the San Diego biotech that specializes in treating gastrointestinal disorders, cut 37 percent of its workforce, or about 120 jobs, after a competitor began selling a generic version of omeprazole sodium bicarbonate (Zegerid) for treating heartburn and gastroesophageal disease. Santarus (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SNTS]]) still has a proprietary drug for treating Type 2 diabetes, and has at least two other drug candidates in late stage clinical trials.

—San Diego’s Arena Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ARNA]]) said it signed an agreement with Japan’s Eisai Pharmaceuticals to sell its lorcaserin weight loss drug in the United States. Arena, which gets $50 million upfront and could get as much as $160 million in additional milestone payments, plans to manufacture the drug for Eisai—and will take between 31.5 percent and 36.5 percent of Eisai’s estimated annual U.S. sales.

—George Scangos, who was named last week as CEO of Biogen Idec, told analysts the Weston, MA-based biotech powerhouse (which maintains operations in San Diego) has got to improve its R&D productivity. As Ryan reported, Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BIIB]]) hasn’t brought a new drug to market since the 2004 launch of natalizumab (Tysabri), the company’s treatment for multiple sclerosis.

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.