Isis Execs Upbeat as AstraZeneca Expands Cancer Drug Collaboration

Executives at Carlsbad-based Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ISIS]]) were upbeat in a conference call this week, after the company reported encouraging news on several fronts.

The company said Monday it had received a $10 million milestone payment from AstraZeneca after the London-based pharmaceutical giant advanced their joint development of a drug for liver cancer and added a second experimental cancer drug to their collaboration.

Isis also said last week that underwriters of its secondary stock offering, which was completed May 14, exercised their options to purchase an additional 617,869 shares of Isis’ common stock. Including the 9 million shares sold previously, Isis said gross proceeds from the offering would be about $182.7 million.

Isis Chairman and CEO Stan Crooke and Brett Monia, the company’s senior vice president of antisense drug discovery, offered some interesting insights into the promise of the company’s antisense technology during a conference call Monday with analysts and investors. (Seeking Alpha’s transcript of the call is here.)

In a partnership signed last year, Isis and AstraZeneca agreed to collaborate in the discovery and development of antisense drugs to treat cancer. Antisense drugs are intended to “silence” the activity of cancer-causing genes by binding to RNA fragments that are used to produce proteins. The two companies first began working on a compound designated STAT3Rx for patients with advanced lymphoma and liver cancer. In a statement yesterday, Isis reported encouraging results from an early study of STAT3Rx at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.

In the conference call, Crooke said

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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.