Roots of new melanoma drugs run deep in Bay Area

Zelboraf, the melanoma treatment approved Wednesday by the FDA, is a great Bay Area story — developed by Berkeley’s Plexxikon Inc., marketed by South San Francisco’s Genentech Inc. and accelerated by a diagnostic test developed by Pleasanton’s Roche Molecular Diagnostics.
You can’t get much more Bay Area than that.
But Zelboraf isn’t the only new melanoma drug with a Bay Area connection. Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Yervoy, approved by the Food and Drug in March, largely owes its development to research done by Dr. James Allison and colleagues in the mid-1990s at the University of California, Berkeley.