EXEL

Exelixis, Inc.

A biopharmaceutical company that makes cancer medicines, most notably cabozantinib, sold in the U.S. as CABOMETYX for kidney and liver cancers and as COMETRIQ for a rare thyroid cancer. Founded in 1994 by scientists from Yale and UC Berkeley who began by studying fruit flies and zebrafish to find drug targets, the company is now a fully integrated oncology drugmaker. Its name comes from the Greek word for "evolution," a nod to how the firm itself evolved from a genomics startup into a commercial drug company.