Xconomy Peers into Biotech Future with Vividion’s Diego Miralles

What’s new in San Diego life sciences?

Diego Miralles, who was named just three months ago as the CEO of San Diego-based Vividion Therapeutics, has a lot to say on that topic. Miralles, an immunologist who previously served as the CEO at Adaptive Therapeutics and before that led innovation and West Coast R&D for Johnson & Johnson, describes Vividion as “a company for the ages.”

As Miralles put it, “We want to be the Genentech of small molecule drugs.”

With his global experience in life sciences innovation and his attention focused on the near horizon in drug development, Miralles was the perfect choice to lead an ensemble of local luminaries in a discussion about the future of life sciences in San Diego. It’s an evening event we’re calling San Diego Life Sciences 2022—and Xconomy is convening on Monday, December 11, at The Ilumina Theater at the Alexandria in San Diego.

We’re asking the panelists to come prepared to predict what they think the life sciences landscape will look like in five years. You can find the agenda we just posted here.

If San Diego aims to make a name for itself as a global capital in genomics, what innovations will we see in genome sequencing and precision medicine in five years? Which biotech startups will be big in 2022? What innovations in drugs and diagnostics are in the pipeline now that we’re most likely to see come to market by 2022?

Aside from Miralles, our speakers include:

Richard Heyman, Executive Chairman & Co-founder, Metacrine
John Mendlein, Board Member, aTyr Pharma
Helen Torley, CEO, Halozyme Therapeutics
Joe Panetta, President & CEO, Biocom
Susan Tousi, Senior Vice President, Product Development, Illumina

So, will Vividion be a big player?

As Xconomy’s Alex Lash reported earlier this year, Vividion was founded with a $50 million investment and a team of decorated academic chemists to realize a vision that Ben Cravatt of The Scripps Research Institute had for developing new drugs that change the behavior of proteins.

“We want to drug the part of the proteome that is ‘undruggable’ today,” Miralles said. By using mass spectroscopy techniques developed in Cravatt’s lab, Miralles said, Vividion can identify spots in the proteome that could be targeted with small-molecule drugs. According to Miralles, Vividion is creating a library of compounds, and “there are a lot of big companies that want to do a partnership with Vividion.”

Join us to hear more of what Miralles has to say about Vividion—and find out what the future holds for the life sciences here.

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.