Exelixis

Exelixis, Inc. is a genomics-based drug discovery company located in Alameda, California, and the producer of Cometriq, a treatment approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for medullary thyroid cancer with clinical activity in several other types of metastatic cancer. History Exelixis was founded in 1994; the scientific founders were Spyridon Artavanis–Tsakonas, at Yale at that time, and Corey Goodman and Gerry Rubin who were then at the University of California, Berkeley. George Scangos joined the company as CEO in 1996. The business plan was to use model organisms (fruit flies, nematodes, and zebrafish) and functional genomics to identify pathways and biological targets that could be exploited in the fields of agriculture and medicine. It eventually set up a subsidiary, Exelixis Plant Sciences, for the agricultural work. By 2000 it had left the radical exploratory phase behind and became focused on drug discovery and had a chemical library of 4 million compounds. The company went public that year, after withdrawing its offering the week before; it raised $118 million in a down market.