NeurogesX hires Stephen Peroutka as chief medical officer

NeurogesX Inc. hired Stephen Peroutka, M.D., as chief medical officer. He replaces Jeffrey Tobias, M.D., who quit Oct. 16 but who still works as a consultant for up to $7,200 per month.
Peroutka has already started part time work at the San Mateo company (NASDAQ: NGSX) as a consultant, but will come on board full time Nov. 9.

Bay Area Science Festival kicks off Saturday, continues through Nov. 6

Aiming to get kids — and even adults — excited about science, the Bay Area Science Festival kicks off Saturday with the first of more than 100 events.
Geology, biology, music, hawk banding, genetics — and that’s just day one. In all, there are more than 100 free events, including lectures, exhibitions, concerts and a science pub crawl from San Jose to Santa Rosa, through Nov. 6.
Backers of the Bay Area Science Festival — ranging from the University of California, San Francisco, and the life sciences industry trade group BayBio to Chevron and the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation — hope the festival is just the beginning of building excitement about the sciences. Many of those supporters already have been busy trying to beef up the region’s efforts around so-called STEM education, or science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Peter Maag exits as Novartis Diagnostics president, interim named

Peter Maag, the Emeryville-based president and global head of Novartis Diagnostics for two years, is no longer with the company.
Carsten Schroeder, who has been Novartis Diagnostics’ vice president of commercial operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, was named as Maag’s replacement.

Fast 100: Discovery, deals boost Five Prime's bottom line

Five Prime Therapeutics Inc. is an anomaly.
A drug-development company without any drugs on the market, South San Francisco-based Five Prime has increased revenue in each of the past three years, reaching $23.7 million last year while hitting a three-year compound growth rate of more than 52 percent.
What’s more, Five Prime expects a double-digit percentage point jump in revenue in 2011.

Medivation pins hopes on prostate cancer drug

Medivation Inc. is getting another shot with another pill.
The San Francisco-based drug developer, which lost nearly 80 percent of its value after a highly touted Alzheimer’s disease treatment in March 2010 failed a late-stage clinical trial, will receive make-or-break data on an experimental prostate cancer treatment sometime over the next nine weeks.

Drug deal gives Biogen a stake in Portola Pharmaceuticals

Biogen Idec will license a family of drugs that could treat lupus or rheumatoid arthritis from Portola Pharmaceuticals Inc. for $36 million cash and $9 million in Portola equity.
The agreement could be worth up to $508.5 million more in development and milestone payments.
The deal links two of the biggest biotech dealmakers of the past several years, South San Francisco’s Portola and Biogen Idec’s George Scangos. Portola has negotiated deals with Novartis AG and Merck & Co. (though Merck returned the anti-clotting drug earlier this year), while Scangos cut a number of licensing deals — albeit on the other side of the fence — as CEO of South San Francisco’s Exelixis Inc.

Biotech's new normal: Innovation but no VC money, risk

If there’s a new normal in biotech — and some would argue that we’re still trying to find that base — it involves fewer people, a lot less cash, less risk taking and labs full of enthusiasm.
A few events this week in the Bay Area are pretty illustrative: the BIO Investor Forum, Peter Thiel’s new fund for off-the-grid researchers and Thursday’s QB3-Deloitte Award for Innovation.

Johnson & Johnson to fund awards for UC bio startups

An arm of Johnson & Johnson will fund University of California projects with a high potential to get to market.
The amount of money from J&J’s Corporate Office of Science and Technology was not disclosed by the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, or QB3.
The money will combine with cash from the Rogers Family Foundation of Oakland to support QB3’s Bridging-the-Gap program. The JJSI-QB3 Awards, a component of the program, will be given annually over the next three years.

Gilead, Bristol-Myers Squibb ink deal for HIV-fighting booster

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. will develop a new HIV treatment combining its protease inhibitor Reyataz and Gilead Sciences Inc.’s new boosting agent cobicistat, according to a deal announced Wednesday.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, except that Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) will pay a royalty based on annual net sales of the product.
Foster City-based Gilead (NASDAQ: GILD) already has been studying Reyataz, or atazanavir, and cobicistat, a booster that increases the levels of certain HIV-fighting medicines, in Phase II and Phase III studies.

Stem cell agency CIRM, NIH to work together in pilot project

California’s stem cell research funding agency and the National Institutes of Health signed a memorandum of understanding for a pilot project to help medical researchers prevent, diagnosis and treat a wide range of diseases.
The two groups also are looking at ways that researchers funded by the San Francisco-based agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and those supported by the NIH can collaborate in earlier translational or basic biology projects.

Bayer cancer drug does well in trial, Onyx stands to reap royalty

Two weeks after settling a lawsuit with Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc., Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals and Onyx said Wednesday that a late-stage trial of the cancer drug at the center of the suit met its main goal.
Details of the results of the 760-patient study of Bayer’s regorafenib in metastatic colorectal cancer were thin, but South San Francisco-based Onyx (NASDAQ: ONXX) will receive a 20 percent royalty on potential sales.

Peter Thiel launches Breakout Labs for startups with 'audacious ideas'

Startup guru Peter Thiel is spreading the love, announcing Tuesday that his foundation will offer $50,000 to $350,000 grants to help science and technology entrepreneurs blocked from traditional fund-raising paths.
Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and early Facebook investor, unveiled the concept — called Breakout Labs — at a speech Tuesday to the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. The fund will have a website where advanced technology entrepreneurs can apply.
Ten or 20 high-tech, biotech, nanotech or other types of "convergence" projects could be funded next year, said Lindy Fishburne, executive director of Breakout Labs. In return, the Thiel Foundation will take a “modest” royalty on the startups’ products and a “small percentage” in warrants, Fishburne said, to fund fresh rounds of grants.

UCSF nabs $6M for seven-stage AIDS prevention project

UC San Francisco’s UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies has won $6 million in federal funding over four years to lead a seven-state effort to help HIV-AIDS patients get diagnosed and receive continuing care.
The funds come from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration and its Special Projects of National Significance Program, UCSF said Tuesday. The grant is for $1.5 annually for four years.
The effort’s main goals are to improve access to care, optimize health outcomes and reduce HIV-related health disparities, UCSF said, mirroring some of the primary objectives of the national AIDS strategy. It targets individuals who haven't been tested or don't know their HIV status.

Gilead strikes deal with GlobeImmune on hepatitis B vaccine

Gilead Sciences Inc. will back GlobeImmune Inc.’s hepatitis B vaccine program through Phase Ia trials and then take full responsibility of the program.
Foster city-based Gilead (NASDAQ:GILD) will pay privately held GlobeImmune of Louisville, Colo., an undisclosed upfront payment plus additional milestone payments and, potentially, royalties.

On strength of Phase III data, Exelixis looks for cabozantinib submission in first-half 2012

After a strong Phase III trial of its cancer drug cabozantinib, Exelixis Inc. expects to file for approval of the drug in a type of thyroid cancer in the first half of next year.
The South San Francisco company (NASDAQ: EXEL) said cabozantinib registered progression-free survival — or the length of time it takes for a disease to worsen — a median of 11.2 months. Patients in a placebo arm had media progression-free survival of 4.0 months.