Q&A: Behind Ignyta’s New Strategy on Cancer Drugs and Diagnostics

Ignyta, NexDx, Jonathan Lim

Not many biotech startups can reinvent themselves, but San Diego’s Ignyta has executed a series of strategic changes over the past eight months that have set the company on a new course.

Ignyta, founded in August 2011 by Jonathan Lim and Gary Firestein, set out to develop new diagnostic tests for rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases, based on epigenetic discoveries from Firestein’s lab at UC San Diego. Firestein is a prominent rheumatologist and the dean of translational medicine at UCSD, and Lim, who is Ignyta’s principal investor, chairman, and CEO, was enthusiastic about the promise of using DNA methylation to develop an early and reliable diagnostic for rheumatoid arthritis when we talked just a year ago.

But the company took its first step in a new direction less than six months later, when Ignyta acquired Actagene Oncology, a San Diego company founded in February. Actagene CEO Patrick O’Connor joined Ignyta as chief scientific officer, along with several other prominent drug hunters.

In a statement at the time, Lim said, “This transaction reshapes us into a seamless Rx/Dx company pursuing a significant growth area of patient stratification and targeted drug discovery and development for cancer patients.” In other words, Ignyta became a cancer company.

Since then, Ignyta has announced that it has licensed exclusive global development and marketing rights for a pair of anti-cancer drug candidates from Nerviano Medical Sciences, a former Pfizer/Pharmacia cancer drug R&D center in Italy. The company also completed a reverse merger with a dormant public company, and raised $54 million through two private placements.

In a recent e-mail exchange, I asked Zach Hornby, Ignyta’s chief financial officer and vice president of corporate development, to explain the company’s new strategy. Following is our exchange, which has been lightly condensed and edited.

Xconomy: Why did Ignyta shift its strategic focus to cancer?

Zach Hornby: We felt that the unmet needs for patients were higher in precision cancer Rx [drugs] than in autoimmune Dx [diagnostics]. We believed that the potential returns for our investors would also be higher in an Rx/Dx model in oncology, rather than a pure Dx model in autoimmunity.

We had the opportunity to

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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.