Author: Luke Timmerman

Luke Timmerman wrote:

Twitter and Facebook have taken social networking to a higher level on the web, but I just got a reminder about the power of actually meeting people in person. I’m talking about the kind of interactions that happen when attending a jam-packed professional conference and bumping into a lot of smart people with similar interests. This was one thought that struck me this week on my way home to Seattle from the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.

Like most everybody else there, my calendar was a relentless series of 30 to 45-minute meetings from dawn to dusk, followed by more networking at receptions late into the night. My official plan was to come away with a bunch of exclusive interviews, and help plan coverage priorities through the year.

But when I had a little quiet time on my way to the airport yesterday, I started thinking about what else happened during the trip, besides the planned stuff. And I started tallying up the names of all the people from Seattle biotech who I saw even though I didn’t schedule anything with them. I came up with 24 people I bumped into accidentally and chatted with briefly—and I didn’t have to tweet them or list my status. They are all working on newsworthy things, and a few of these chance meetings gave me a few new story ideas and insights.

So I decided to list the names of the people I met serendipitously, although my sample was admittedly concentrated over four days at San Francisco’s Westin St. Francis. If you have any similar experiences from this meeting, or any other like it, and found some surprisingly valuable connection happened this way, please don’t hesitate to post a comment at the bottom of the story.

Stacie Byars. Director of membership, Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association. Met in hallway at St. Francis after SonoSite talk.

Meenu Chhabra. CEO of Allozyne. Met at the elevators in the Clift.

Tom Clement. Chairman of Pathway Medical. Met at the BioCentury reception.

David Fanning. CEO of Theraclone Sciences. Met at Canaan Partners reception.

Ken Galbraith. Managing director with Ventures West in Vancouver. Met on Powell St in front of St. Francis.

Carol Gallagher. CEO of Calistoga Pharmaceuticals. …Next Page »

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

Hope sprang eternal at this year’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, the annual kickoff event for the biotech industry. A few Seattle biotech companies offered some reasons for people to think a little hope may be justified.

—VentiRx Pharmaceuticals said it raised $25 million to further develop its drugs that stimulate the innate immune system against cancer and allergies. A pair of local investors, Arch Venture Partners and Frazier Healthcare Ventures, chose to re-invest in the Seattle and San Diego-based company, while MedImmune Ventures, a unit of AstraZeneca, led the new round.

—Stephen Friend is at it again. The visionary founder of Sage Bionetworks said he struck a partnership with the world’s largest drugmaker, Pfizer, to support Sage’s effort to spark an open-source-style movement for biology. Pfizer is paying to support research at Sage to find new cancer drug targets and predict which patients are likely to respond to therapies in development. Terms weren’t disclosed.

—Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ: GILD), the world’s largest maker of HIV medications, is deepening its roots in the Seattle area with a $50 million respiratory disease research center looking out over Lake Union. The company hasn’t yet seen U.S. product sales to justify its $365 million acquisition of Corus Pharma in 2006, although it is hoping to get the green light from the FDA next month to start selling Corus’s inhalable antibiotic for cystic fibrosis.

—ZymoGenetics (NASDAQ: ZGEN), the granddaddy of Seattle biotech companies, closed on a financing that netted about $90.9 million. The company plans to use the cash to support R&D, and to boost sales of its lone marketed product, recombinant thrombin (Recothrom) for surgical bleeding.

—Seattle-based Targeted Genetics (NASDAQ: TGEN) said it is allowing itself to be de-listed from the NASDAQ exchange in order to save cash. The longtime gene therapy stalwart is down to the equivalent of six full-time employees.

—The Institute for Systems Biology was found to have the highest scientific impact of any research center in the U.S., and the third highest in a global survey of more than 2,100 research centers, according to an analysis by Spain-based SCImago Research Group. The report looked at total research output, how much each institute collaborates with other centers, the influence of its publications, how often they are cited by other scientists, and other factors.

—SonoSite (NASDAQ: SONO), the Bothell, WA-based developer of portable ultrasound machines, said it plans to spend $100 million to buy back shares of its stock.

—Kineta, the Seattle-based biotech company, raised $942,000 in new capital, according to a regulatory filing. The company is developing anti-viral therapies, as well as drugs for autoimmune diseases.

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

Targeted Genetics, the Seattle-based developer of gene therapies that went public back in 1994, said today it has decided to allow its stock (NASDAQ: TGEN) to be delisted from the Nasdaq in order to conserve cash. The company has the equivalent of just six full-time employees, and the company is planning to further reduce costs by switching CEO Susan Robinson and David Poston, the chief financial officer, to part-time status, the company said. Targeted Genetics had $4.5 million in cash on hand heading into this year, the company said. The stock closed trading yesterday at 32 cents.

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

Gilead Sciences spent $365 million to get a toehold in Seattle back in 2006, and so far, it has zero U.S. product sales to show for it. That’s made investors antsy, but it hasn’t deterred the world’s second-most valuable biotech company from continuing to bet big on Seattle as part of its plan to diversify away from its heavy reliance on HIV medications.

That was one of the interesting points I took home last Friday from Bruce Montgomery, the senior vice president and site leader for Gilead Sciences in Seattle. He made his comments during a talk at the Technology Alliance’s Science and Technology Discovery Series.

Foster City, CA-based Gilead (NASDAQ: GILD) has made a $50 million investment in a new 100,000 square-foot lab and office building along Eastlake Avenue in Seattle, Montgomery said. The local branch, which now counts 150 employees, hopes to move in to the new digs by February 26. The company is hoping that the new surroundings, with sweeping views of Lake Union, will inspire the local team to invent big new drugs. That’s because Gilead got about 90 percent of its $5.3 billion in 2008 revenue from antiviral treatments, mainly for HIV. While the HIV franchise has made Gilead a success, the company has spent several years trying to diversify with treatments for serious lung diseases and cardiovascular conditions.

The Seattle team is supposed to create big new treatments for lung diseases like cystic fibrosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. But as of yet, the local team hasn’t delivered a blockbuster product. The heat is definitely on to start producing, at least in the eyes of Wall Street. Gilead stock dropped 15 percent in 2009, while the Amex Biotech Index composed of its large company peers climbed 45 percent.

Bruce Montgomery

“After a long and successful track record of product development, geographic expansion, and acquisitions, Gilead has recently fallen victim to slowing growth and execution missteps,” said Michael King, an analyst with Merriman Curhan Ford, in a note to clients Dec. 30. “Gilead Sciences has long been admired as a paradigm of drug discovery and development, as well as business execution. Having grown to a $45 billion market cap today on the basis of its HIV franchise, the company has recently experienced slowing growth as this franchise matures. In addition, the company has gotten little benefit from its $4 billion worth of acquisitions.”

Montgomery is hoping to give his bosses some good news to satisfy Wall Street next month. The company is seeking FDA approval for aztreonam lysine (Cayston), an inhalable antibiotic that was shot down by the agency back in September 2008. This time, Gilead is hoping it has satisified …Next Page »

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

VentiRx Pharmaceuticals has raised a venti-sized load of new cash. The San Diego and Seattle-based company that’s developing drugs to amplify the body’s innate immune system to fight cancer and allergies has pulled in $25 million through a new round of financing.

The deal is technically described as an extension of a $26.6 million Series A financing that VentiRx received in March 2007, meaning the company has now raised $51.6 million in the total round. The extension, which allows investors to buy VentiRx shares at the same price as they did before, was led by new investor MedImmune Ventures, while existing investors Arch Venture Partners, Frazier Healthcare Ventures, and Domain Associates all participated again. Maggie Flanagan LeFlore of MedImmune Ventures is joining the VentiRx board in connection with the deal.

The big idea at VentiRx, which I described in a detailed feature almost exactly one year ago, is to create conventional small molecule drugs that stimulate Toll-like receptors (TLRs), particularly one called TLR8. The family of TLRs are key components of the body’s innate immune system—the first-line defense that recognizes foreign invaders at their point of entry under the skin, in the mucus linings of the nose, and in the gut. VentiRx has developed one candidate for cancer that’s finishing an early-stage clinical trial, and another candidate for allergies that has passed an initial safety study. The new money is being used to move ahead with a pair of more rigorous, mid-stage clinical trials of both drugs this year which should establish whether they have proven this new concept of fighting cancer and allergies by stimulating TLR8.

“We view this as the last financing we’ll need before liquidity at VentiRx, whether it comes through an acquisition, an IPO, or a Big Pharma partnership,” says Michael Kamdar, the company’s executive vice president and chief business officer.

Michael Kamdar

VentiRx hasn’t come out publicly with hard data to support its scientific approach, but the findings will be available this year, Kamdar says. The company was able to secure the new round of funding after seeing signs that its cancer drug appears to stimulate an effect known as antibody dependent cellular cytotoxicity, which means it could help improve upon with antibody drugs for cancer like rituximab (Rituxan) or cetuximab (Erbitux), Kamdar says.

He noted that AstraZeneca, the parent company of MedImmune Ventures, has a longstanding interest in TLR biology, and has internal programs that look at different TLRs, such as TLR7 and TLR9, but not the same target as VentiRx, Kamdar says. Flanagan LeFlore added …Next Page »

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

ZymoGenetics, the Seattle-based biotech company, said today its underwriters have exercised their options to buy all the shares they were granted, bringing its net proceeds from the latest offering to $90.9 million. Investors and underwriters bought a total of 16.1 million shares at $6 apiece, ZymoGenetics said. The money will be used to support R&D, and to help market the company’s lone approved drug, recombinant thrombin (Recothrom).

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

Sage Bionetworks, the Seattle-based nonprofit seeking to spark a movement toward open-source style sharing of biological data, is announcing today it has secured a partnership with Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company.

Financial terms, and the length of the collaboration, aren’t being disclosed. But the deal will bring in enough cash for Sage to add some new faces to its 15-person staff inside the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The plan is to build computational models that can be used to help discover new targets for cancer drugs, and which may help predict which patients are likely to benefit in clinical trials.

“It’s something real,” says Stephen Friend, the president and founder of Sage, when asked about the deal’s significance.

Sage’s vision is to build models that connect the dots between abnormalities in genes, the proteins that arise from genetic code, and the clinical symptoms of disease that are more easily observed in patients. These “network biology” models will be used to help identify new targets for cancer drugs, and help Pfizer determine which experimental cancer drugs in its pipeline are likely to work, or cause toxic side effects, for patients in clinical trials.

The partnership with Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) is the latest external vote of confidence in the fledgling nonprofit that Friend started last March. Friend left his high-profile job as senior vice president of cancer research at Merck, after securing $5 million in commitments from anonymous donors behind Sage. In an August profile in Xconomy, Friend talked about how Merck donated $150 million worth of intellectual property to start the effort. Since then, Sage has disclosed that it has gained additional support from Quintiles, the giant contract research firm, the Canary Fund, which supports early diagnostic testing for cancer, and the Cure Huntington’s Disease Initiative.

Stephen Friend

For those who missed the earlier stories, here’s some background on what Sage is about. As I wrote back in October, Sage wants biologists to drop their traditional attitudes about keeping raw experimental data hidden, and instead pool the data in the public domain. This kind of collaborative is needed, Friend has said, because biologists are starting to see how vast networks of genes get perturbed in complex diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and rheumatoid arthritis. All of this data is too complex for any individual or team of scientists to manage-even at a place as wealthy as Friend’s former employer.

Yet researchers scattered around the world are capturing huge volumes of genomic data on their computers, hoping it will someday be fodder for discovery. If Sage can convince scientists to contribute to the database, and get them collaborating through social media like Twitter and Facebook have done, then Sage hopes biologists might be able to speed up the pace of discovery of more effective drugs, just like open-source computing can create better software.

Since this cuts against so many deeply ingrained cultural traditions, Friend has encountered …Next Page »

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

SonoSite (NASDAQ: SONO), the Bothell, WA-based developer of portable ultrasound machines, said today it is planning to use $100 million of cash to buy back some of its outstanding stock through an auction process starting next week. Shareholders will have an opportunity to tender their shares at prices between $26.10 and $30 a share, the company said. JP Morgan Securities is managing the offering.

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals CEO John Maraganore had a snappy greeting ready for our first conversation of 2010.

“Happy RNA Decade,” Maraganore said.

For the sake of his Cambridge, MA-based company (NASDAQ: ALNY), Maraganore is wagering that this will be the decade in which scientific seeds of RNA-based therapies start to fulfill their potential. The decade-long vision is that RNA interference, microRNA therapies, RNA activation, and other treatments like them will emerge as new classes of therapy that can hit specific molecular targets, and regulate disease processes that targeted antibody drugs or conventional small-molecule chemicals can’t. And, oh yes, Alnylam is seeking to be one of the trailblazers of RNA, if not the dominant player.

While Maraganore was clearly in the mood to think big, and long-term, about RNA-based technology when we talked, he knows that the biotech investment world that gathers today at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco is more interested in what Alnylam is going to do this quarter, and this year, rather than the rest of the decade. So we talked about both the short term and long term.

To keep things in perspective, it’s been a little more than a decade since the discovery of RNA interference, which can turn off specific genes. That discovery has given birth to new ideas on how to turn on desirable genes (RNA activation), ways to turn off whole biological networks (microRNA), and ways to regulate long-non coding RNA. While those technologies have excited researchers in the lab and produced reams of scientific papers, no RNAi drug has yet navigated the long, difficult journey to become an FDA-approved product.

But this will be the decade that sort of progress materializes, Maraganore predicts.

“This feels a lot to me like the ’90s,” Maraganore says. “Most people would agree looking back that the ’90s were the antibody decade. I would say this is going to be the RNA decade.”

It’s a bold statement, given that history says new pharmaceutical technologies tend to boom, then bust, before they finally reach their potential and boom again. The technique to engineer …Next Page »

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

Tandem Diabetes Care, a San Diego-based company developing insulin pumps for diabetics, has raised a whopping $52.3 million round of equity financing that began last May, according to a regulatory filing.

The company is led by CEO Kim Blickenstaff, the co-founder and former CEO of Biosite, a diagnostic company that was acquired by Inverness Medical Innovations for $1.8 billion in June 2007. The filing doesn’t say who invested, although it has some prominent people on its nine-member board, including Amylin Pharmaceuticals founder Howard “Ted” Greene; and venture capitalists from Delhi Ventures, HLM Venture Partners, TPG Biotech, and Domain Associates.

Tandem didn’t respond to a request for comment Saturday, so if I hear anything from them I’ll be sure to update this story. But it’s really not too hard to see what the company is trying to accomplish from looking at its website. The company says it is “deep in product development” of new kinds of insulin pumps that will enable diabetics to remain active. This is a big business opportunity as the incidence of diabetes, a lifelong condition in which people struggle to maintain normal blood sugar levels, keeps on climbing. An estimated 23.6 million people in the U.S.-about one out of every 13 people—have the disease, according to the American Diabetes Association.

Tandem says it is seeking a better way to manage the disease with wearble insulin pumps, which essentially make it so patients can get fast-acting insulin continuously throughout the day using a catheter, instead of giving themselves periodic injections.

“Tandem Diabetes Care is a company with experience; not in age, but through the wisdom that has been shared with us by more than 1,000 clinicians and current pump users,” the company says on its website. “Experience also comes from our on-staff insulin pump users and the former executives of leading life science companies who are committed to creating and offering products that provide people with freedom, style, and peace of mind. We also believe that “one size does not fit all” when it comes to pump therapy—therefore, we hope to offer consumers an array of product choices that fit their individual needs.”

Tandem is entering a market with a number of established competitors. Current insulin pump models are made by Minneapolis-based Medtronic, Bedford, MA-based Insulet, Switzerland-based Roche, New Brunswick, NJ-based Johnson & Johnson, South Korea-based Sooil, and Japan-based Nipro, according to reviews on diabetesnet.com.

Besides Blickenstaff, Tandem’s board includes Dick Allen, a prominent startup investor; Greene, the co-founder of Amylin; John Livingston, a former executive with MiniMed; Tandem founder Paul DiPerna; Jesse Treu of Domain Associates; Ned Brown of TPG Biotech; Doug Roeder of Delphi Ventures; and Ed Cahill of HLM Venture Parnters.

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

It’s mid-January, and in biotech that means only one thing—it’s time for the annual industry pilgrimage known as the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. I’m here as always, attending the meeting in San Francisco’s Union Square that draws most of this fragmented industry’s major investors, biotech executives, and pharma dealmakers in one place for a frenzy of networking.

The mood is undoubtedly going to be brighter than it was last year, probably because last year could hardly have been worse. I vividly remember one CEO telling me last January that his nightmare scenario was that things would get so depressed that a biotech company could cure cancer, and investors wouldn’t care. Not only was the fear misplaced, the Amex Biotech Index of major biotech company stocks actually climbed 45 percent in 2009.

I’m not planning to spend a lot of my time assessing the mood, since it’s so often an unreliable predictor of what’s to come anyway. Biotechies by their nature (last year’s CEO notwithstanding) have to be optimistic to think they can succeed in such a risky business, so they’ll typically say a bunch of optimistic things. So this year, like last year, I’m going to concentrate my energy on in person meetings with a lot of biotech players from Boston, San Diego, and Seattle—all three geographic clusters where I cover and oversee the local life sciences beat for Xconomy. Since I live in far-away Seattle and do a lot of my reporting by phone, this is a great time for me to schedule a lot of interviews with innovative companies, big and small, in a very efficient way. My goal is to dig up all kinds of original material that you won’t find from any other source, and keep the scoops and insights flowing throughout the year.

I have a full slate of meetings on my calendar between now and mid-day Thursday, but if you’re a reader here in San Francisco and would like to just say hello and chat a few minutes, don’t hesitate to shoot me a note. The best way to catch my attention is to shoot me a message on my BlackBerry at [email protected]. Have a great conference.

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

[Correction: 1/11/10, 9:15 am Pacific, with distinction between IL-6 and IL-6 receptor.] Genentech, the U.S.-based unit of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, said the FDA has granted clearance to start selling a new drug for rheumatoid arthritis. The treatment, tocilizumab (Actemra), is the first approved antibody engineered to block the receptor for an inflammatory protein called IL-6, that is overactive in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Bothell, WA-based Alder Biopharmaceuticals is attempting to block the IL-6 protein with a “fast-follower” antibody called ALD518, which is being co-developed with Bristol-Myers Squibb.

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

Kineta, a Seattle-based company developing treatments for viral infections and autoimmune diseases, has raised $942,000 in the form of equity, debt, and options from 25 investors, according to a regulatory filing. The company pulled in a bigger sum in November, garnering about half of a $13 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, in which it will seek to develop new adjuvant compounds that boost the effectiveness of vaccines. “This is evidence that our business model is working,” says Meg O’Connor, Kineta’s director of investor relations.

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

Synta Pharmaceuticals, the Lexington, MA-based developer of cancer drugs, said today it has raised $25 million in a stock offering. The company (NASDAQ: SNTA) sold 5.5 million shares at $4.50 apiece—about a 17.6 percent discount from yesterday’s closing price of $5.46. Lazard Capital Markets led the offering and RBC Capital Markets served as a co-manager. The company had $51.7 million in cash and investments at the end of September, according to its most recent financial report.

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

The Institute for Systems Biology, a Seattle-based research center known for its entrepreneurial activity, was ranked No. 1 among all U.S. research institutions and No. 3 worldwide in terms of the impact of its scientific publications, according to an analysis by Spain-based SCImago Research Group.

The impact ranking was based on an institution’s total research output, how much it collaborates with other centers, the influence of its publications, how often they are cited by other scientists, and other factors. The full report examined the publication records of more than 2,100 research institutes around the world from 2003 to 2007.

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the U.K. was ranked No. 1 worldwide in terms of the scientific impact, followed by the Institut National de Physique Nucleaire in France, and the Institute for Systems Biology—all of whom have impact ratings more than triple the worldwide average. Seattle’s other research institutions were well-represented in the report, too, with both The University of Washington School of Medicine and the rest of the University of Washington campus in the top 20 worldwide in terms of research output, and with scientific impact ratings that were more than double the worldwide average. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s impact rating was also more than double the worldwide average.

“It’s great to see that an independent analysis of outcomes demonstrates that we were on track 10 years ago,” Institute president Leroy Hood said in a statement.

The Institute for Systems Biology was founded in 2000 by Hood, Alan Aderem, and Reudi Aebersold, in order to foster cross-disciplinary research that looks at whole biological systems, rather than single genes or proteins in isolation. While the Institute has worked hard to establish its chops with scientific peers, it also seeks to apply its work in the broader business world. The Institute co-founded the Accelerator for launching new biotech companies in 2003, and has most recently given birth to a new company called Integrated Diagnostics that seeks to detect cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases much earlier through looking for biomarkers that can be found in a pinprick of blood.

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

The New Year kicked off with a lot of exclusive biotech news and features, and next week will be even busier when I’m attending next week’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.

—Alder Biopharmaceuticals was one of the Seattle biotech companies that emerged in 2009, but few people realize what humble beginnings it had six years ago when all the founders lost their jobs in a downsizing at Celltech. We published the story of how they bootstrapped the Bothell, WA-based company for its first 20 months, putting it on a course to snag a $1 billion partnership with Bristol-Myers Squibb.

—Seattle-based ZymoGenetics (NASDAQ: ZGEN) saw its stock double in 2009, and this week it decided to seize on that growing interest to hit up investors for more cash. The company ended up netting $79 million after expenses from an underwritten stock offering. It plans to use the money for R&D, and to inject some life into its lone marketed product, recombinant thrombin for surgical bleeding.

—Bothell,WA-based Halosource, the developer of a cheap and simple technology for purifying water in developing countries, said it has raised $10 million in a new equity financing. The company has gotten some momentum with more than 4 million people using its technology in India, and it plans to use the money to expand further in other countries.

—Antibody drugs that target diseased cells and spare healthy ones have been one of the big successes in biotech, but Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN) says it’s not really the cutting edge anymore. The Bothell, WA-based company’s CEO, Clay Siegall, says it is “unlikely” it will introduce any more plain antibodies into clinical trials, and that the future will belong to antibodies that are “empowered” to be more potent.

—We had a number of insightful guest editorials. Stephen Friend, the founder and CEO of Sage Bionetworks, offered his view of five biotechnologies that will fade away this decade. Bob Nelsen of Arch Venture Partners chimed in with his top five innovations to watch during the ’10s (or whatever we’re calling this decade). And Stewart Lyman looked back at the year that was in Seattle biotech.

—Stratos Genomics, the Seattle-based developer of a faster and cheaper DNA sequencing technology, has received three months of access to a microfabrication laboratory at the Washington Technology Center on the University of Washington campus. This was part of a stimulus program for small technology businesses in Washington state.

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

GI Dynamics, the Lexington, MA-based maker of a device for treating obesity and diabetes, said today that the device giant Medtronic (NYSE: MDT) has made a strategic investment in the company. The amount wasn’t disclosed in a statement, although GI Dynamics submitted a regulatory filing that says it just raised $15 million from a single investor. The GI Dynamics technology, called EndoBarrier, is like a sleeve that lines the gut and creates a barrier that controls how food is absorbed into the small intestine. Last month, the company received clearance to market the product in Europe.

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

Predictive Biosciences, a Lexington, MA-based developer of diagnostics, said today it has acquired Cleveland, OH-based OncoDiagnostic Laboratory. By acquiring the company, founded in 1985, Predictive has obtained a certified pathology lab that serves urologists, gastroenterologists, dermatologists and other specialty physicians around the country. The facility will provide a commercial base of operation for Predictive, which is seeking to commercialize a non-invasive, urine-based diagnostic test for bladder cancer during 2010.

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

ZymoGenetics, the Seattle-based biotech company, said today it has raised about $79 million after expenses from an underwritten stock offering. The company (NASDAQ: ZGEN) sold 14 million shares at $6 apiece, and also offered its underwriters a 30-day option to buy another 2.1 million shares. Leerink Swann was the sole book-running manager of the offering, while Wedbush Morgan Securities, William Blair & Co., Canaccord Adams, and McAdams Wright Ragen served as co-managers. The price represents an 11 percent discount for investors from yesterday’s close of $6.77 a share. ZymoGenetics had about $103 million of cash and investments on hand as of the end of September, its most recent financial report.

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