After Raising $60M, Kura Oncology Renews Work on Shelved Cancer Drug

drug in a wide variety of cancers, with mostly disappointing results in colorectal, lung (both non-small cell and small cell), brain, pancreatic, and urothelial cancers.

According to Wilson, about 10 percent of AML patients responded completely to tipifarnib in J&J’s mid-stage clinical trials. The drug also showed promise in patients with peripheral T-cell lymphoma.

But the results for a few patients was not enough to warrant FDA approval, and in 2005, the FDA rejected J&J’s new drug application for tipifarnib, saying “you need to know which patients will respond,” according to Wilson.

Kura has licensed tipfarnib from J&J’s Janssen Pharmaceutica for development and commercialization. The company also raised $60 million through a private placement of its common stock to a group of institutional investors, led by EcoR1 Capital. Fidelity Management & Research, ARCH Venture Partners, Boxer Capital of Tavistock Life Sciences, Partner Fund Management and other healthcare investors also participated.

In conjunction with the private financing, Kura acquired a defunct public company in a reverse merger that will enable Kura to register its stock on the Over-the-Counter Markets within the next couple months.

In addition to holding a doctorate in biorganic chemistry, Wilson has a law degree and experience in corporate financing and securities. But he said the idea for a private stock placement followed by a reverse merger with a public shell corporation was suggested by the investors, who preferred to make their investment in a public company.

Over time, Wilson said the company would likely move from the OTC Markets to the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange, which have more rigorous listing requirements.

In forming Kura, Wilson said he has pulled together many senior managers from Intellikine and elsewhere, including the chief scientific officer, Yi Liu; senior vice president of chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences; Pingda Ren, and chief medical officer, Antonio Gualberto.

“We’ve got the cash and we’ve got the people,” Wilson said. “Now we have to execute.”

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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.