San Diego’s Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:HEPH]]) said today it’s laying off 20 employees—a third of its workforce—as part of an aggressive cost-cutting plan to preserve capital until 2011. The San Diego layoff tracker has been updated here.
Hollis-Eden specializes in developing small molecule compounds based on adrenal steroid hormones and that are intended to restore cellular signaling pathways disrupted by disease and aging.
Citing current economic and industry conditions, the biotech says it is also freezing salaries and suspending bonuses for all employees, including founding chairman and CEO Richard B. Hollis and other senior executives. The biotech is undertaking the measures to concentrate its remaining resources on advancing development of two drugs currently in clinical trials. One is Triolex (HE3286) for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, ulcerative colitis and rheumatoid arthritis. The other is Apoptone (HE3235) in developed to treat late-state prostate cancer.
In a statement released today, Hollis-Eden says it has no debt and expects “the cost-cutting measures being taken will allow the Company to continue to fund operations for approximately two years without reliance on the equity markets.” The company’s statement included a comment from CEO Hollis that concluded, “While taking these measures is never easy, today’s difficult economic climate and tough market conditions for our industry make such actions unavoidable and necessary.”
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.
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