West Coast Biotech Roundup: BioMarin, Tocagen, Medivation, Twelve

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For the ancient Greeks, the rising of the dog star Sirius brought on the sweltering heat of summer, and August came to be associated with languid days of heat, drought, and fire.

That might sound like the weather that has descended on the West Coast. But in the ancient texts, the dog days of summer are over by late August—and we’re just getting started. In Southern California, the hot desert winds come down from the mountain passes like runaway freight trains in the fall. Anything can happen. Stocks explode upward after days of monster losses. Google spins out its life sciences group. And I step in as master of ceremonies for our roundup of West Coast life sciences news. So here are this week’s revelations…

—Late last week Alphabet president Sergey Brin announced in a blog post that the Google X life sciences group would be the first to get more autonomy under Google’s new Alphabet holding-company strategy. The as-yet-unnamed life sciences group will still be headed by Andy Conrad, who has been overseeing projects like the Baseline health study and a “smart” contact lens while part of the Google X skunkworks.

—BioMarin (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BMRN]]) sold its late-stage breast cancer drug talazoparib to Medivation (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MDVN]]) for $410 million upfront and $160 million more in possible milestones. The deal gives San Francisco’s Medivation a near-term possibility for a second commercial product, and it gives Novato, CA-based BioMarin cash as it prepares for a possible approval of its drug drisapersen for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The FDA is due to decide whether to approve drisapersen or not in late December.

—Medical device giant Medtronic (NYSE: [[ticker:MDT]]) bought Twelve, a Redwood City, CA-based startup working on a transcatheter mitral valve replacement. Twelve is so named because it’s the 12th company spun out of Bay Area medical device incubator The Foundry. Medtronic agreed to pay as much as $458 million.

—After co-founding Inception Sciences in San Diego and establishing the Blueline Bioscience incubator in Toronto, San Francisco’s Versant Ventures has created Highline Therapeutics in New York to spin new drug companies. Versant’s Carlo Rizzuto told

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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.