SiliconBeat

CV Therapeutics, the Palo Alto maker of the chest-pain treatment drug, Ranexa, said Friday the company’s board turned down an offer to buy it for $16 a share from Japan’s second-largest drug maker, Astellas Pharma.

We posted last month about the first offer Read the rest of this entry »

A month after it announced plans to cut 30 percent of its staff during the first quarter of 2009 “in order to preserve cash”, Maxygen released details today about bonuses being paid to its top officers, including $200,000 for its chief executive Russell Howard.

Eighty percent of the 2008 cash bonus plan was based on company performance while the remaining 20 percent was “discretionary”. Total performance goals were Read the rest of this entry »

Aryx Therapeutics, the Fremont biopharamaceutical whose shares were slammed last July when Procter & Gamble pulled out of a partnership in developing Aryx’s drug to treat chronic constipation and abdominal pain, said today that it had raised $21.6 million through a private placement of about 9.6 million shares, along with the sale of warrants good on a potential 2.9 million additional shares.

The purchase price for the new shares was pegged at Read the rest of this entry »

StemCells (Nasdaq:STEM), the Palo Alot biotech company, said Thursday that preclinical results for its product candidate HuCNS-SC, derived from human neural stem cells, were able to protect the retina from progressive degeneration when transplanted into lab rats.

“The HuCNS-SC cell has proven to have very robust survival, preserving vision in our rat model at time points beyond six months,” said Raymond Lund, a researcher and professor at the Casey Eye Institute at Oregon Health & Science University. “These data are very encouraging and suggest cell-based therapies for retinal degeneration can be a viable treatment approach.”

Shares of StemCells rose as much as 22 cents, or 22 percent, in Thursday trading after its news was released.

In a move to preserve cash, Maxygen said Wednesday it plans to cut its staff by 30 percent in the first quarter next year, a move that will leave it with some 65 employees when it is completed. The Redwood City biotechnology company said it will stage staggered terminations during the quarter beginning in January in both its operational and general-and-administrative departments. The company said it would provide “outplacement support and a severance package for each affected employee.”

Maxygen has also “retained Read the rest of this entry »

Depomed got a new major shareholder earlier this month when Kings Road Investments converted 18,158 shares of the company’s preferred stock it owned into 2.9 million shares of the Menlo Park developer of drug-delivery technology. The stake made the London-based investor Depomed’s third largest shareholder.

But the investors stake didn’t come cheap, despite the fact that Depomed shares have fallen more than 40 percent Read the rest of this entry »

Fluidigm, the South San Francisco biotech company that registered its initial public offering with the SEC back in April, is set to push it out to investors next week, according to Renaissance Capital. At least its investment banker underwriting the offering, Morgan Stanley, is still standing.

The company, which supplies what it calls integrated fluidic circuits — nanoscale devices that enable its life science customers to perform thousands of sophisticated biochemical measurements on samples smaller than the content of a single cell — is offering 5.3 million shares to the public for the first time. It has set a price range for the offering Read the rest of this entry »

Pharsight, the Mountain View supplier of software and services to optimize the drug development process, agreed Tuesday to be acquired by Tripos, a St. Louis provider of technologies to improve molecular level life-science research, for $5.50 a share, or about $57 million in cash, according to a regulatory filing. The price was nearly a third higher than Pharsight’s closing price Monday before the deal was announced.

Pharsight’s biggest shareholder are entities associated with Read the rest of this entry »

When thinking about biotech in the Bay Area, images of Mission Bay in S.F., or Oyster Point in South City, or even that stretch of I-80 around Emeryville come to mind. But not San Jose.

Well, a press release put out by the San Jose Redevelopment Authority Tuesday — which has spent about $19 million seeding business incubator programs, including one called the San Jose BioCenter — put an end to our ignorance. Read the rest of this entry »

Durect, the Cupertino biopharmaceutical whose products are based on its proprietary drug delivery systems, said Tuesday that the remaining $23.6 million worth of some convertible debt that recently matured was exchanged into about 7.5 million shares. As a result, the company says it now has approximately 81.8 million shares of common stock outstanding. “We are pleased that our balance sheet has been strengthened by the elimination of this debt and conversion into common stock,” said Durect Chief Executive James E. Brown in a statement.

That “we” pronoun Brown used might not include the rest of the company’s shareholders Tuesday, Read the rest of this entry »