Profile

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 for medullary thyroid cancer with clinical activity in several other types of metastatic cancer. 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 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.