Axys: Selective disacquisition

Axys Pharmaceuticals Inc. - then Arris Pharmaceutical Corp. - acquired toolkit company Sequana Therapeutics Inc. in 1997 for $166 million in stock, a price many investors at the time fretted was too high (see BioCentury Extra, Nov. 4, 1997).

Last week AXPH announced that it will sell its positional cloning programs located in San Diego, where Sequana was located, and remove its functional genomics target identification and validation programs to South San Francisco. The San Diego operations will be shuttered by year end...