West Coast Biotech Roundup: Gilead, Conatus, Exelixis, and More

as 200 million people could participate in the United Kingdom and South Africa, Venter told The San Diego Union-Tribune. The diagnostic services are being offered under an agreement between Human Longevity and Discovery.

—San Diego’s Conatus Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CNAT]]) said a small mid-stage trial of emricasan, its drug for treating patients with liver damage, successfully met two endpoints. The company said patients dosed with emricasan showed a statistically significant improvement in hepatic venous pressure gradient—a measurement of pressure in the portal vein—and an improvement in a biomarker of excessive cell death that contributes to chronic inflammation.

—Exelixis (NASDAQ: [[ticker:EXEL]]) of South San Francisco, CA, said Thursday it has beefed up its management team in anticipation of two of its drugs coming to market. (Xconomy wrote about those hopes, and a potential turnaround for the company, in June.) It has hired executives to run sales, marketing, and medical affairs.

—Bothell, WA-based OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OGXI]]) delivered bad news Wednesday. The Phase 2 trial of its pancreatic cancer drug apatorsen, combined with two other cancer drugs, failed to show a benefit over the two other drugs alone. The company is also testing apatorsen to treat other cancers.

—Genetic testing company Invitae (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NVTA]]) of San Francisco signed a lease for new headquarters in the city, as first reported by the San Francisco Business Times. The company went public in February and raised just north of $100 million.

—Amgen (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMGN]]) of Thousand Oaks, CA, and Allergan (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OGXI]]) said Wednesday their jointly produced biosimilar ABP 215—a copy of Roche’s cancer drug bevacizumab (Avastin)—showed good results in a late-stage test for advanced lung cancer. Only one biosimilar is approved in the U.S. so far, but several large drug makers, and a small handful of smaller ones, are aiming for the market in the next few years, as Xconomy reported last week.

Xconomy National Biotech Editor Alex Lash contributed to this report.

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

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.