chirodoc, Excellent questions and comments. I have not followed this company for as long or as carefully as others here, so I cannot answer these questions.
However, we do know the management of Xoma of the late 80's, early 90's (same as now?) was fairly incompetent and wasted a tremendous amount of sience and technology invented by their bright scientists.
As a sample one can mention the wasted opportunity on chimeric anti-CD20 of which they'll be getting a few pennies from IDEC and Genentech. The scientists at Xoma pushed the project to management, but the latter was too busy with its legendary fight with Centocor on anti-sepsis drugs. This almost broke the two companies not least because neither drug worked.
Centocor had ReoPro following right behind and this saved them (although they were forced to give a huge chunk of it to Lilly; Lilyy was a partner with Centoxin, the anti-sepsis, but had conditional rights to ReoPro in case the first faltered, as it did); Xoma dabbled for a while until stumbling on BPI, as I mentioned before as per a conversation with a former Xoma scientists, after being pushed by a Texas doc (Giroir [sp?]) to pursue it. Yep, you do not get the warm fuzzy feeling one gets with, for example INCY, when thinking of the management of Xoma.
PB |
