Exelixis, Inc. – a genomics company providing targets to its partners and moving to the next level as a drug developer

 

 

Healthcare
Biotechnology & Drugs
NASD: EXEL

  Exelixis, Inc.

  170 Harbor Way
South San Francisco, CA 94083

   

George A. Scangos, Ph.D.
President and
Chief Executive Officer

  Interview conducted by :
Walter Banks, Co-Publisher

  CEOCFOInterviews.com
March 2001

  BIO OF CEO

George A. Scangos, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer, joined Exelixis in October 1996 from Bayer Biotechnology.  At Bayer he held positions of increasing responsibility, from Senior Staff Scientist to Senior Vice President of Research and Development for North America and ultimately as President of Bayer Biotechnology.  As President of Bayer Biotechnology, Dr. Scangos was responsible for 1,100 employees in research & development, business development, process development, manufacturing, engineering, and quality assurance.  Prior to Bayer, Dr. Scangos was on the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University where he now holds an appointment as Adjunct Professor of Biology.  He serves on the Board of Visitors, at the University of California, San Francisco School of Pharmacy, the Board of Overseers at the University of California, Davis Medical School, the Board of Directors at Entelos, Inc., and the Board of Directors of Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Inc.  Dr. Scangos holds a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Massachusetts, and was a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow. 

About Exelixis, Inc.

Exelixis is a leader in the discovery of high-quality novel targets for several major human diseases, and a leader in the discovery and development of new drug therapies specifically for cancer and other proliferative diseases.  Exelixis’ mission is to leverage  its integrated discovery platform to increase the speed and the quality of pharmaceutical and agricultural product discovery and development. 

Through  its expertise in comparative genomics and model system genetics, Exelixis is able to find new drug targets that it believes would be difficult or impossible to uncover using other experimental approaches.   The  research identifies novel genes, that when changed, either decrease or increase the activity in a specific disease pathway.  These genes then represent potential targets that may treat disease, or prevent its initiation or progression.

In many human diseases, including cancer, the remarkable evolutionary conservation of the biochemical pathways strongly supports the use of simple model systems, such as fruit flies, nematode worms, zebrafish, and mice to identify key members of critical  biochemical pathways that can then be targeted for drug discovery.  Exelixis expects to develop new cancer drugs by exploiting the underlying “genetic liabilities” of tumor cells to provide specificity and selectivity in targeting these cells for destruction, while leaving normal cells unharmed.  Exelixis has discovered and is further developing a number of small molecule drug targets in addition to monoclonal antibody drug targets that may selectively kill cancer cells while leaving normal cells unharmed, and may provide alternatives to current cancer therapies. 

While its proprietary programs focus on drug discovery and development, Exelixis believes that its proprietary technologies are valuable to all industries whose products can be enhanced by an understanding of DNA or proteins, including the pharmaceutical, agrochemical, agricultural, diagnostic and biotechnology industries.  Many of these industries have shorter product development cycles and lower risk than the pharmaceutical industry, while at the same time retaining high product margins.  By partnering with leading companies in multiple industries, Exelixis is able to diversify its business risk, while at the same time maximize its revenue stream.  

CEOCFOinterviews - Dr. Scangos, can you give us a brief history of Exelixis?

Dr. Scangos: "Exelixis began operation in 1995, and the purpose of the company was to use genetic approaches in a variety of model organisms to understand the biochemistry involved in human disease and particularly to understand how to intervene in that biochemistry with drugs in order to treat these diseases. Back in 1995, the fact that you could learn anything of human disease by studying the biochemistry of a fly or worm or fish, was a little bit of a controversial idea. However, now that earlier this year the human genome sequence was completed and  compared to the fly and worm sequence, I think it has been striking to everybody, even surprising to us, just how extraordinarily similar those genomes are, and the approach we were taking from the very early days certainly had been validated. In addition, we have had the philosophy from the beginning that we needed to have a very broad, very powerful integrated technology base. The first step in that was not confining ourselves to a single model organism as a lot of companies did, but bringing in all  important  model organisms. Therefore, I think we are now unique in our ability to do experiments in all the important genetic model organisms with real critical mass. While all of these systems are  powerful, none of them  holds  universal answers.  Exploring multiple model systems allows us to use the right tool or the right combination of tools for the right job. We now have a complete suit of genomic tools, biochemistry, bioinfomatics and biology. Therefore I believe we have one of the most powerful integrated technology platforms."

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