West Coast Biotech Roundup: Seragon, Ambrx, Pregenen, and More

Big Sur and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary

Our nominee for the just-created “Bio Man with the Midas Touch” award goes to Richard Heyman, who co-founded San Diego’s Seragon Pharmaceuticals 11 months ago. Roche’s Genentech unit agreed yesterday to pay over $1.7 billion for Seragon, which has an early-stage drug targeting metastatic breast cancer. Heyman was previously the CEO of San Diego’s Aragon Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired last year by Johnson & Johnson in a deal valued at $1 billion. During his talks with J&J, Heyman negotiated a provision that exempted Aragon’s estrogen-driven cancer technology from the deal—enabling him to quickly restart Seragon with other Aragon executives.

—South San Francisco-based Genentech, the headquarters for Roche’s U.S. pharmaceutical operations, agreed to pay $725 million upfront, and potentially $1 billion more in milestone payments, to acquire San Diego’s Seragon Pharmaceuticals and its breast cancer drug program. Seragon was spun out just 11 months ago by Aragon Pharmaceuticals to clear the way for Aragon’s own deal—a $1 billion acquisition by Johnson & Johnson. The Seragon buyout was a coup for the Column Group, Topspin Partners, Aisling Capital, OrbiMed Advisors, and venBio, the San Francisco firm that has had a remarkable run of noteworthy deals over the past year. Seragon has been advancing so-called selective estrogen receptor degraders, or SERDS, which are supposed to both bind to estrogen receptors and then degrade them, eroding their signaling abilities.

—In other Genentech-related news, ex-Genentecher Stephen Kelsey decided to trek coast to coast and leave San Francisco-based Medivation (NASDAQ: [[ticker:JNJ]]) to become the new CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Onkaido Therapeutics, the first startup incubated by messenger RNA drug specialist Moderna Therapeutics. Kelsey spent seven years as the executive vice president of Genentech’s oncology portfolio before moving to Menlo Park, CA-based Geron (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GERN]]) and later Medivation. He’ll now take on Onkaido, which was formed around 15 prospective mRNA programs created within Moderna and is wholly owned by the company.

—San Diego’s Ambrx, a biotech developing bio-conjugates to treat solid tumors and other diseases, withdrew its IPO, citing current market conditions. Ambrx had planned to raise as much as $86 million. The 11-year-old biotech has collaboration agreements with at least six major pharmaceutical companies to develop antibody-drug conjugates.

—Menlo Park, CA-based Avalanche Biotechnologies, a clinical-stage biotech developing gene therapies for treating ophthalmic diseases, hopes to raise as much as $86.2 million in an IPO, according 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.