March 10, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
The fight over clinical stage Seattle-based biotech Acucela Inc. added another chapter Tuesday, when its ousted CEO and a group of disgruntled shareholders filed a lawsuit in Thurston County Superior Court that will force the company to hold a special shareholders’ meeting no later than April 28.
Acucela has been facing a shareholder insurrection since late January, after a spate of investors in the company began pressing for the firm’s management to oust four out of five of the company’s board members.
That latest coup came barely a month after Acucela replaced its CEO, founder Ryo Kubota, to appease upstart shareholders who are looking to overhaul the firm’s directions. In December, Acucela replace Kubota, who owns more than half of the company’s shares, with Brian O’Callaghan, its former president and chief operation officer.
SBI Holdings, Inc., the parent corporation of several Acucela shareholders, said it is now pressing for a new suite of board members in the hopes they will focus more on the biotech’s balance sheet and profitability.
"[The move] is necessary in order to ensure the long term financial viability of the company,” SBI said in a statement. As part of that push, SBI said it wants board members Peter A. Kresel, Glen Y. Sato, Michael T. Schutzler and Brian O’Callaghan out, to be replaced with four nominees of its choosing.
Now, however, Kubota and SBI are saying the changes made were not enough. They want the court to force a new meeting so that the biotech’s future can be decided once and for all--and they’d like their direction to be the one followed.
Acucela pushed back on that claim Tuesday. “We have reached out to SBI in order to explain our views on the validity of their demand,” O’Callaghan said in a statement, “but they have continued to condition any meeting on requiring Acucela to accept the request of holding a special meeting, an action that Acucela believes that it is not legally required to undertake.”
Acucela develops treatments for blindness and other sight-threatening diseases. In 2014, Acucela became a publicly listed company in Japan and raised around $162 million.
BioSpace Temperature Poll
Vertex Pharmaceuticals made news last week when it terminated leases on three properties in Cambridge, Mass, that freed up 313,000 square feet of space in the Genetown area. The company has spent a significant part of 2014 consolidating its operations on the South Boston waterfront, leasing 291,000 square feet of office space at West Kendall Street in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. So we wanted to ask the BioSpace community: Is Boston going to be getting more biotech leases anytime soon, or fewer tenants?
