West Coast Biotech Roundup: Gilead, Adicet, Otonomy, Fate & More

Point Reyes Lighthouse

make a decision by Sept. 25. But AbbVie’s patents could still block Amgen’s path to market for years.

—Shares of Redwood City, CA-based OncoMed Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OMED]]) plunged by more than 44 percent Monday, after the company disclosed negative results for tarextumab, its drug candidate for treating pancreatic cancer. The drug is in Phase 2 trials. OncoMed stock, which was trading above $17 a share last week, was trading below $9 a share yesterday.

—NantCell, the Culver City, CA-based arm of Patrick Soon-Shiong’s NantWorks umbrella, raised more than $57 million to fund development of treatments that boost the immune system to fight cancer. Biocom, the San Diego life sciences industry group, also announced this week that Soon-Shiong would be a keynote speaker at its annual global life science partnering conference set for February 24-25 in La Jolla.

—Fate Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:FATE]]) of San Diego said Tuesday it has received the FDA’s green light to start human testing for a cellular immunotherapy that uses blood cells from donors to prevent life-threatening complications in patients with certain blood cancers.

—San Diego-based Sophiris (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SPHS]]) said preliminary results from a mid-stage study of its drug topsalysin in patients with localized prostate cancer were encouraging, with four of the first seven patients in the study responding to treatment. In November, Sophiris reported positive results from a clinical study of topsalysin in treating benign prostate hyperplasia.

Xconomy National Biotech Editor Alex Lash contributed to this report.

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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.