Arena Pharmaceuticals’ Board Asks CEO Jack Lief to Retire

San Diego-based Arena Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ARNA]]) said that Jack Lief, who has served as Arena’s president and CEO since 1997, has retired from the company and left Arena’s board of directors—effective today—at the request of the company’s board.

Lief co-founded Arena 18 years ago with Dominic Behan, a scientist now serving as Arena’s executive vice president and chief scientific officer, and together oversaw the successfully development of lorcaserin (Belviq) as a weight-loss drug for obese individuals.

Lief (who was 69 in March) also has served as Arena’s chief financial officer since July, when Robert Hoffman left Arena for an unnamed biopharmaceutical after serving as the company’s CFO for the past 18 years.

former Arena Pharmaceuticals CEO Jack Lief (credit: Arena Pharmaceuticals)
Jack Lief

Harry Hixson, who joined Arena’s board in 2004, was named as interim CEO and interim principal financial officer. The company has initiated a search for a new chief executive officer, according to the statement.

In a regulatory filing, Arena disclosed that Lief would receive a cash severance payment of about $1.8 million, continuation of Arena’s health insurance coverage for 18 months, and an acceleration of his stock options and restricted, performance-based stock that would have vested over the next 18 months.

Hixon, 77, served as the board chairman at San Diego-based Sequenom (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SQNM]]) from 2003 to March 2015, and was the CEO of San Diego-based Sequenom from 2009 to June 2014. He previously served as the CEO at BrainCells and Elitra Pharmaceuticals, and held various management positions at Amgen.

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.