Orexigen Halts U.S. Work on Weight Loss Drug, Illumina Cuts Price for Sequencing Patient Genomes, Ambit Pulls IPO, & More San Diego Life Sciences News

As if to make up for the previous week, there’s been a lot of news from local life sciences companies over the past week. So let’s get started.

—San Diego’s Orexigen Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OREX]]) said it would halt U.S. development of its experimental diet pill, a combination of naltrexone and bupropion (Contrave) after regulators rebuffed the company’s latest proposal. After the Food and Drug Administration rejected Orexigen’s new drug application in February, Orexigen sought approval to sell Contrave in a niche of patients with low cardiovascular risks until a long-term heart study could be completed. The FDA shot that down too, telling the company a large, long-term study of associated heart risks would be required before the drug could be approved.

—At the Third Annual Consumer Genetics Show in Boston yesterday, Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]) CEO Jay Flatley chopped the price of the San Diego company’s Individual Genome Sequencing (IGS) service in half, from $19,500 to $9,500. Flatley said the company also would subsidize sequencing for some patients with life-threatening diseases. The CEO said Illumina was taking the measures to increase access to genetic information and to accelerate the adoption of individual genome sequencing.

—A San Diego federal judge yesterday lifted a temporary restraining order issued two weeks ago against Indianapolis, IN-based Eli Lilly (NYSE: [[ticker:LLY]]), and denied a request for a preliminary injunction against Lilly that was sought by San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMLN]]). Amylin recently sued Lilly after the pharmaceutical company unveiled plans to use the same sales team to market both Amylin’s diabetes drug, exenatide, and Boehringer Ingelheim’s rival diabetes drug, linagliptin. Both Amylin and Lilly issued statements on the ruling.

—Ambit Biosciences, a San Diego biotech developing small-molecule, anti-cancer compounds, withdrew its plans for an initial public offering. Ambit said market conditions were not sufficiently attractive to continue with its IPO, which was a discretionary financing. The company has raised

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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.