After Strikeout, San Diego’s MEI Pharma Looks to Rebuild Confidence

Sometimes, innovation companies operate in stealth mode to keep the technology they’re developing out of the limelight.

And sometimes, companies maintain a low profile until they’re ready to present their best case to shareholders, potential investors, and others. Such is the case with San Diego’s MEI Pharma (Nasdaq: [[ticker:MEIP]]), a cancer drug development company originally known as Marshall Edwards that moved to San Diego two years ago in a bid to reboot its reputation.

“We wanted to get away from Marshall Edwards, which was kind of a long, sordid story,” says MEI spokesman Pete De Spain. “There was too much baggage.”

Marshall Edwards acquired its unwanted luggage in 2010, after the company halted a late-stage clinical trial of phenoxodiol, an experimental drug advanced as a potential treatment for recurrent ovarian cancer. The company ended the trial after recruiting 142 of a planned 340 patients. An interim analysis showed that phenoxodiol had no significant effect in either stopping the cancer or improving patient survival.

MEI Pharma CEO Daniel Gold, Marshall Edwards, Cancer
Daniel Gold

“The design of the study in and of itself made it difficult for women to decide whether or not to participate in the study,” said Daniel Gold, the former CEO of San Diego-based Favrille, who joined Marshall Edwards as CEO in 2010.

Marshall Edwards was founded in Sydney, Australia, in 2000 by Novogen, an Australian biotech company with a library of isoflavonoid compounds with cancer-fighting characteristics. Novogen continued to hold a majority stake and operated Marshall Edwards as a public subsidiary after Marshall Edwards went public on the Nasdaq market in 2003.

The failure of phenoxodiol, however, prompted a reassessment.

Novogen spun out Marshall Edwards, distributing its

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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.