Exelixis Brand Guidelines: A 1994 Fruit-Fly Genomics Start-Up Built Around Cabozantinib

Model-organism genetics as a way to find drug targets.

Exelixis was founded in 1994. English Wikipedia names its scientific founders as Spyridon Artavanis-Tsakonas, then at Yale, and Corey Goodman and Gerry Rubin, then at the University of California, Berkeley; George Scangos joined as chief executive in 1996. The plan, Wikipedia says, was to use model organisms — fruit flies, nematode worms and zebrafish — and functional genomics to find biological pathways and targets for both medicine and agriculture, and the company set up a subsidiary, Exelixis Plant Sciences, for the farming side.

The company explains its name on its own website: Exelixis comes from “exelixi,” the Greek word for evolution, which it calls an apt name for a business that grew from a functional-genomics start-up into a full drug company. The company says its founding scientists set out “to use model system genetics to systematize drug discovery.”

By 2000, according to Wikipedia, Exelixis had moved on to drug discovery itself, with a library of about four million compounds, and it went public that year after withdrawing its first attempt a week earlier. In 2002 it signed a broad alliance with GSK covering cancer, inflammatory disease and vascular conditions, and by then it had narrowed its own work to cancer. Its approach, Wikipedia says, was to inhibit small sets of tyrosine kinases involved in tumour growth rather than a single target, which it describes as controversial at the time.

Cabozantinib, a hard bet and a second drug.

The molecule that came to define the company was XL184, later named cabozantinib. Wikipedia says Exelixis partnered it with Bristol Myers Squibb in 2008 and got the rights back in 2010, the year Scangos left to run Biogen and Michael M. Morrissey, who had joined in 2000, became chief executive; the company then had eight drugs in clinical trials, Wikipedia says. The first approval came in 2012, for medullary thyroid cancer, with a European approval in 2014; that capsule form is sold as Cometriq.

The bet was not straightforward. Wikipedia says the company invested heavily in testing cabozantinib in other cancers, and that when a Phase 3 trial in prostate cancer failed in 2014 it laid off 70 percent of its employees. In 2016 the FDA approved a tablet form for second-line kidney cancer, sold as Cabometyx, followed by first-line kidney cancer in December 2017, Wikipedia says. The company now calls Cabometyx its flagship commercial product.

Exelixis does not sell cabozantinib everywhere itself. Wikipedia says it licensed rights outside the United States, Canada and Japan to Ipsen in March 2016; the company’s website today says Ipsen holds an exclusive licence outside the United States and Japan, and that Takeda holds the Japanese licence.

Other molecules from its labs reached patients through partners. Cobimetinib, partnered with Genentech in 2007, was approved by the FDA in 2015 for certain forms of melanoma and is sold as Cotellic; esaxerenone, from a 2006 collaboration with Daiichi Sankyo, is sold by Daiichi Sankyo in Japan as Minnebro, according to Wikipedia and the company’s website.

How biotech presents itself.

Biotechnology companies sell things that are almost impossible to photograph. A medicine made from a strand of RNA or an engineered antibody has no shape a camera can see, so the sector leans on a small set of stand-in images: rendered molecules, ribbons and double helices, antibodies drawn as glowing Y-shapes, and close-ups of cells under a microscope. These macro images carry most of the visual weight on corporate websites, investor decks and annual reports.

The second familiar picture is the laboratory itself. Scientists at benches with pipettes, racks of sample tubes and gloved hands over a plate reader appear again and again, because they show work in progress rather than a finished product. Alongside them sit patient-advocacy portraits: people living with a rare disease, their families and the groups that represent them, photographed in everyday settings rather than in the clinic.

Architecture does the rest. Glass-fronted lab campuses in clusters such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, Copenhagen and South San Francisco stand in for scale and ambition, and company websites often show their buildings alongside their people. The calendar adds its own stage: the BIO International Convention and the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, held each January in San Francisco, are where pipelines are presented to partners and investors.

Within that common language, names and colours do much of the work of telling companies apart. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, where it is based, what it makes and what has happened to it — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. No product, logo or pack is reproduced, and the palettes are our own unofficial interpretation.

From South San Francisco to Harbor Bay.

In May 2017 Bisnow reported, citing filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, that it would lease office and research buildings on Harbor Bay Parkway in Alameda, across the bay, on a ten-year lease starting around February 2018. In September 2020 the property site Connect CRE reported that Exelixis had relocated its headquarters from South San Francisco to Alameda two years earlier and had signed a 20-year lease for a new build-to-suit building at the Harbor Bay Business Park; in the same interview Dana Aftab, an Exelixis executive vice president, described Harbor Bay as having changed from a sleepy, little-known spot into a busy one since the company arrived in 2017. The company’s website now speaks of an expanded headquarters and laboratories at its “Bay Area campus.”

The company now describes itself as a multi-platform cancer company working on small molecules and biotherapeutics, including bispecific antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates, and says it has evolved over the past three decades from that genomics start-up into its present form. Its next candidate is zanzalintinib, an oral kinase inhibitor. Zacks reported that on 10 September 2026 Exelixis announced the FDA had extended its review of the application for zanzalintinib with Roche’s Tecentriq in metastatic colorectal cancer by three months, to a target date of 3 March 2027, after the company submitted updated data; the drug was not approved at the time of writing. Zacks also reported that final results of the Phase 3 STELLAR-303 study, behind that application, were released in June 2026, and that Exelixis will sponsor a planned Phase 3 study, STELLAR-316, in resected stage II and III colorectal cancer, with Merck supplying its Keytruda Qlex.

On its website the company sums up its focus in four words: “Cancer is our cause.”

For a design guide, Exelixis shows how a name chosen for a genomics platform can carry a company through a change of purpose and a single, long drug programme. Compare Incyte, another US biotechnology company working on cancer medicines, and Roche, whose Genentech unit partnered on cobimetinib. For this guide we use a deep teal, an amber and a pale mint with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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