Xconomist of the Week: John Reed on Sanford-Burnham’s Drug Pipeline

week as editor-in-chief of the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Reed also is listed on more than 90 patents, and was a founder or co-founder of four companies, including Idun Pharmaceuticals, an anti-cancer drug developer founded in San Diego by Reed, the Nobel laureate H. Robert Horvitz, Larry Bock, and Larry Fritz. Pfizer acquired Idun for $200 million in 2005. Conatus, a San Diego startup founded mostly by former Idun managers, acquired the Idun business from Pfizer in 2010.

Here’s my account of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity:

Xconomy: How has the core strategy evolved since you first arrived here 20 years ago? So much has changed since you took over from Erkki Ruoslahti, the former CEO.

John Reed: I was here roughly 10 years when I was asked to move into the CEO role, and then we put together a 10-year plan, which we did execute. We did other things in an opportunistic manner, such as starting a site in Florida, which we did not anticipate.

John Reed

When I first came here the institute was doing exclusively cancer research, and the nature of our basic science discovery at that time was such that we would bump into all kinds of things of interest to neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic diseases, inflammatory diseases. So we decided to broaden the scope of therapeutic areas the institute works on. We now have five different research centers, with cancer being only one of them.

Probably more importantly, we saw the change in the investor community in terms of how far one had to take projects in order to gain investor support. When I first came to town, I started my first company based on a few targets and we really had no idea how we were

Pages: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5

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.