How Novartis Got Its Vaccines Groove Back, Intellikine Gets a Drug Development Deal, Ambrx CEO Departs, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

that Schultz is out as founding director of the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation. The Novartis-funded institute, which has 560 employees working in a 260,000 square-foot facility, is one of the major scientific players in the biomedical research cluster atop Torrey Pines Mesa. That was Luke scoop No. 2.

—Speaking of Novartis, the global head of technical operations at Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics detailed his company’s turnaround at Chiron during a recent swing through San Diego. Novartis acquired Chiron in 2006, and the Novartis executive, Matthew Stober, said fear pervaded the old workforce. Employees were  afraid to make decisions and stand up to management, which can hurt an operation.

—The outcome of a vote expected today on the weight-loss drug Qnexa by a panel of expert advisers to the FDA could determine the fate of Qnexa’s developer, Mountain View, CA-based —Vivus (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VVUS]]). But as Luke reported, the panel’s vote on Qnexa also could indicate the committee’s disposition toward rival weight loss drugs under development by Orexigen Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OREX]]) and Arena Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ARNA]]), two San Diego rivals developing their own weight loss drugs. A regulatory review the FDA posted on its website about the Vivus drug Tuesday wasn’t as harsh as some investors anticipated.

—San Diego’s Femta Pharmaceuticals raised $2.2 million in equity and options financing. The two-year-old startup has now raised a total of $7 million to develop targeted antibody drugs that pack more punch.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded San Diego’s AnaptysBio a $1.5 million contract to develop military biosensors that could be used to detect specific biological agents in possible terrorist attacks.

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

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.