Lorcaserin Weight-Loss Trials Weigh Heavily on Arena, Ramius Raises Offer to Buy Cypress Bio, Santarus Adds to Its Drug Portfolio, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

The game is afoot for Ramius Value and Opportunity Advisors, the private equity group in New York pursuing San Diego’s Cypress Bioscience, as it made a direct appeal to Cypress shareholders to support its unsolicited buyout offer. At Xconomy, we’re issuing a direct appeal to get your life sciences news here.

—The stage has been set for a crucial review today of lorcaserin, the weight-loss drug that San Diego’s Arena Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ARNA) has spent a dozen years and almost $1 billion developing. As Luke reported, Food and Drug Administration scientists reviewing Arena’s clinical trial data found “noteworthy” safety issues and said lorcaserin barely met the agency’s performance criteria. An independent FDA advisory panel is set to review locaserin data today.

—Ramius Value and Opportunity Advisors appealed directly to shareholders of San Diego’s Cypress Bioscience (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYPB]]) yesterday when it raised its unsolicited buyout offer by 25 cents to $4.25 a share. That increased the private equity firm’s offer for all 38.6 million outstanding shares of Cypress to $164 million from almost $160 million. Cypress said it would review the increased offer and respond in 10 business days.

—Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) says it is cutting 1,000 jobs from its estimated global workforce of roughly 12,000 people. Genzyme, which operates a diagnostics manufacturing and a gene therapy facilities in San Diego, says the cuts will happen over the next 15 months.

—San Diego-based CareFusion (NYSE: [[ticker:CFN]]) said it has formed a partnership with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois in a program to track infection rates in 23 hospitals, using a CareFusion data mining system called Med Mined. CareFusion says almost

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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.