$757M and 5 years lat­er, Cel­gene aban­doned a biotech part­ner, trig­ger­ing lay­offs

Two months af­ter we broke the sto­ry that For­ma Ther­a­peu­tics had axed R&D staff in a ma­jor re­or­ga­ni­za­tion of the com­pa­ny, found­ing CEO Steve Tre­gay is now join­ing the ex­o­dus. He’s be­ing re­placed at the helm by Genen­tech vet and chief strat­e­gy of­fi­cer Frank Lee.

While Tre­gay con­firmed to me in Jan­u­ary that For­ma had cut 61 staffers in what he called a strate­gic turn to­ward the clin­ic with their pipeline drugs, he de­clined to say what had hap­pened to their foun­da­tion deal with Cel­gene. He promised an ac­count­ing lat­er in Q1.

But it was fun­da­men­tal­ly fin­ished, along with the buy­out op­tion that Cel­gene had forged for it­self in 2014.

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