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

they move it to the clinic. Then it’s pretty much in their hands.

Others are more thematic partnerships. For example, the one we have now with Johnson & Johnson in neuroscience, where J&J has a right of first refusal in the areas of Alzheimer’s and neuro-psychiatric diseases. They are funding an initiative where we bring a number of drug discovery opportunities to them every year. They then fund for us to go through the screening and to generate chemical leads and move them to a proof of concept stage, and they then have the option to license those and move them forward either independently or in a collaborative effort with us. And in that context, we are doing multiple projects with them every year in neuro-psychiatric diseases and neuroscience.

X: Are you working with anybody besides J&J?

JR: Well we have a partnership with Takeda in obesity, and we’re joining the Pfizer Centers for Therapeutic Innovation. They have a number of institutions that are eligible to nominate project opportunities. So we’ve got a project that’s being launched now in the area of inflammation and auto-immunity.

That’s probably the main thrust of our commercialization effort. The opportunities around candidate therapeutics really are probably the biggest one.

We have efforts in protein therapeutics as well. Those tend to bubble up in a more spontaneous way out of the laboratories, which then create additional licensing opportunities. We actually have, believe it or not, eight protein or peptide-based drugs in clinical development right now in the hands of different partners. Another 20 protein drugs are in various stages, from concept through proof of concept in animals. That has just bubbled up out of the laboratories without a master plan created around it. So that’s another area that’s ripe for commercialization.

So it’s a great pipeline we’ve developed. It’s one of the things we’ve been very focused on in terms of our strategy.

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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.