San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Intellikine, Somaxon, and More

—Merry Christmas, Troy Wilson! Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical agreed to pay $190 million upfront, plus another $120 million in future milestone payments, to acquire Intellikine, the San Diego biotech that CEO Wilson co-founded in 2007. Takeda wants to combine Intellikine’s portfolio of small molecule drugs in the PI3 kinase pathway, a hot target in cancer biology, with its Cambridge, MA-based Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company.

—San Diego’s Zogenix (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ZGNX]]) said it completed a series of meetings with FDA regulators about its new drug candidate, an extended-release and acetaminophen-free formulation of the painkiller hydrocodone (Zohydro). Zogenix said it hopes to submit a new drug application for its opioid early in the second quarter of 2012.

—San Diego specialty drugmaker Somaxon Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SOMX]]) said it hired an investment banking firm to evaluate the possible sale of the company and other strategies “to maximize shareholder value.” After launching doxepin (Silenor) last year as a treatment for difficult insomnia cases, Somaxon has encountered unexpected competition from generic drugmakers. The alternatives under consideration include selling Somaxon or its doxepin-related assets, forming a partnership, or pursuing other collaborations related to the prescription or over-the-counter rights to the drug.

—San Diego’s Trius Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:TSRX]]) said its lead antibiotic drug candidate, tedizolid phosphate, met the main goal of its pivotal clinical trial. A study of 667 patients showed that the Trius antibiotic was roughly equal to Pfizer’s linezolid (Zyvox) when treating acute skin and skin structure infections.

— In his Intellectual Capital column, Steve Chapple profiled Steve Jurvetson, managing partner of the Menlo Park, CA, venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The 44-year-old Jurvetson led the firm’s investments in San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics and its agricultural spinoff, Agradis, as well as Genomatica, which has been developing ways to use bacteria and sugar to make chemicals. Jurvetson told Chapple, “San Diego’s ground zero for the renaissance that I call Biotech 2.0.”

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.