After replacing its CEO last month, San Diego-based Metabasis Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MBRX]]) says it is laying off 38 employees, or about 43 percent of its workforce. (An update to the San Diego layoff tracker is here.)
“Given the tough market conditions, we have decided to refine our research and development focus and increase our efforts to monetize certain of our assets and/or form strategic collaborations,” CEO Mark Erion said in a statement released by Metabasis. Erion continues to serve as the company’s chief scientific officer after he was named Dec. 15 to replace Paul Laikind as president and CEO. The company closed a Michigan facility in November.
As part of its restructuring, Metabasis plans to focus on its drug candidates for the treatment of hyperlipidemia and type 2 diabetes. Erion says he is optimistic the diabetes drug, MB07803, will result in a strategic collaboration later this year. The company also hopes to establish a collaboration to continue work on its glucagon antagonist program, which aims to develop new drugs that help lower blood glucose in patients with type 2 diabetes.
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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